Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, and a faithful and outspoken Christian, recently published an essay entitled “Why ‘Capitalism’ Isn’t Working.” Torba writes with the fury of a prophet and the grief of a father who sees his sons priced out of marriage, homeownership, and meaningful work. His description of the present crisis is, in the main, unimpeachable and worth the read.
The proposed therapy, however, is not merely inadequate; it is a continuation of the very disease it claims to cure.
Torba does not hide his central prescription: “The answer is not to abandon enterprise or ownership, but rather to chain them firmly to the nation they are meant to serve. This requires economic patriotism enacted into law through trade policies that make it more profitable to build and hire at home than to exploit cheap labor abroad. It demands a full moratorium on all worker visa programs until every young American who wants a job can find one that pays a family sustaining wage.”
Notice the language: chain, enacted into law, make it more profitable, moratorium. That is not the vocabulary of liberty under God. The magistrate is not authorized to chain anyone to anything. He is to establish justice by adjudicating cases based on God’s Law. He is not authorized to decide what wage is “family-sustaining.” He is not authorized to forbid a Christian businessman from hiring a willing worker from India or Mexico at a wage both freely agree upon. The magistrate is nowhere authorized to override such agreements on the grounds that the wage is insufficiently patriotic or insufficiently remunerative by some external standard.
This is the heart of the matter. Torba believes the civil magistrate possesses legitimate jurisdiction to (1) determine what constitutes a “family-sustaining wage,” (2) prohibit voluntary labor contracts between citizens and willing foreigners, and (3) use coercive legislation to render certain economic outcomes more profitable than others. None of these powers are granted to the magistrate in Scripture.
Torba further insists: “A healthy economy is not an accident. It is built with intention and defended with conviction.”
He is correct that economies do not flourish by accident, but he wrongly locates the requisite intention in the coercive apparatus of the state rather than in covenant faithfulness to the Law-Word of God. Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26 do not promise overflowing barns, thriving families, and national strength to nations that craft sophisticated industrial policy or successfully “chain enterprise to the nation.” They promise covenantal blessing exclusively to the people who hear and obey all the statutes and judgments of Yahweh. Economic flourishing is the fruit of obedience, not the fruit of positive law, immigration policies, or central planning.
Torba laments that “the invisible hand has robbed us blind.”
Yet what has actually robbed us blind is not the invisible hand of the market but the very visible hand of the statists: fiat currency protected by legal-tender laws, central banking that systematically transfers wealth from savers to debtors (Proverbs 11:1; Amos 8:5–6), perpetual property taxation that converts owners into tenants of the state, occupational licensing cartels, zoning restrictions that strangle small enterprise, and a welfare apparatus that penalizes marriage while subsidizing fatherlessness. These are not failures of freedom; they are the predictable consequences of sustained, multigenerational rebellion against God’s Law.
The globalist parasites have gained extraordinary leverage precisely because we first erected the man-made apparatus of legislation, bureaucracy, and international treaty that they now feed upon. Eliminate those unbiblical structures and the rootless cosmopolitan elites would suddenly discover they have no host. A righteous people living under God’s Law are simply not hospitable to parasites. The globalist order thrives only where God’s Law has been abandoned; it withers wherever God’s Law is honored.
On the question of immigration and labor competition, Torba’s solution is preemptive state exclusion. Scripture offers a markedly different paradigm. The sojourner who dwells among the covenant people is to be loved as the native (Leviticus 19:33–34; Deuteronomy 10:19) while remaining fully subject to the same law as the native (Leviticus 24:22; Numbers 15:15–16). When theft, violence, or open idolatry occurs — whether committed by citizen or stranger — the magistrate’s sword must fall with perfect impartiality. Biblical justice requires neither visa moratoria nor economic protectionism; it requires only the faithful execution of God’s sanctions after the fact. That alone is sufficient to maintain righteousness between native and sojourner alike.
It seems as if Torba frames his proposal as the only alternative to the statist socialism we have now, yet the irony remains: his program is socialism — merely exchanged for a version with a stronger national identity and a narrower circle of beneficiaries. It still clothes the omnicompetent state in the robes of savior, still trusts positive law to redeem what only covenant faithfulness to Christ’s Law-Word can redeem, and still locates hope in the coercive power of man rather than in the crown rights of King Jesus over markets, families, and nations.
Torba goes on to movingly describes the spiritual devastation wrought by the current order: “The spiritual cost is even greater than the economic one. A young man without meaningful work is a man without a purpose… This idleness, this forced dependency, is a poison that erodes the soul. It leads to despair, to addiction, to the breakdown of the family itself.”
Every Christian man should feel the weight of those words in his bones. He is right.
But notice what Torba never proposes: that the young man be allowed to keep the full fruit of his labor. Biblical law is unequivocal — civil taxation is voluntary (i.e., the magistrate is not authorized to punish you for failure to pay taxes). The state has no claim on a man’s land, income, or inheritance.
Torba is not calling for the state to stop stealing. He is calling for the state to keep stealing — only with better motives, better managers, and a stronger national identity. He would simply replace the rootless cosmopolitan elite with National Socialist bureaucrats who, he trusts, will spend the young man’s money more wisely than the current regime does. That is not liberation; it is a change of taskmasters. Torba’s vision requires an army of bureaucrats to decide what is “patriotic.”
The theonomic answer is far more radical and infinitely more hopeful: let the young man keep what he earns. Remove the fist of the state from his paycheck, his land, and his business. Let him take dominion without asking permission from licensing boards or paying tribute to overlords (globalist elites or local nationalists). Then, and only then, will he have the material and spiritual freedom to work six days, rest the seventh, marry young, fill his quiver, build wealth, and leave an inheritance to his children’s children — exactly as God’s Law intends.
Anything less is just a prettier cage.
The blessings we all long for — wages sufficient for a man to support a family on one income, housing within reach of a young couple, children raised in stable covenant homes, and men free to exercise dominion without perpetual permission from the state — will never be achieved by clever legislation, no matter how patriotic the rhetoric. They are the promised fruit of covenant faithfulness alone.
Andrew Torba has diagnosed the present crisis with clarity. May the same Spirit who opened his eyes to the desolation now open them to the only remedy that ever has, or ever will, heal a nation: repentance toward God and unqualified submission to the Law-Word of King Jesus in every sphere of life — economic life included.
