As the voters of the United States recommence the process of electing the next President, it is important to recall our core values. Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans may legitimately differ on how best to implement those values, but clarifying what values remain our bedrock is the first step toward assuring that these policy disputes remain constructive. One of those bedrock values is, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, "providing for the general welfare." In biblical terms it is "loving your neighbor as yourself."
During my second year in college, I decided to take the introductory course in economics. After all, learning how we allocate resources, create products, and encourage creativity and productivity all seemed like important tools for being an informed citizen. The Intro to Economics course was wildly popular, offered not in a classroom but a university theater in order to accommodate the standing-room-only numbers of students who enrolled. This class, clearly, held the keys not only to information, but to influence and power.
At the first lecture, the professor taught us about supply and demand, an economic model for determining the price of a good in the market. Equilibrium (the price charged for a product) rests at the intersection of Supply provided by producers (at a particular price) with the quantity of Demand (at a particular price) by consumers. When those two meet at a single point, their market equilibrium is found. That price marks the most efficient level for the production and distribution of a product.
Note that "demand" here does not equate to human need, but to the ability (and willingness) to pay for a product. No money -- no demand.
"Wait a minute," I objected. "You mean that if someone is starving on the street, penniless, then according to this model they have no demand to measure?" Right, I was told. Demand measures ability and willingness to pay, not need. You can starve to death with no measurable "demand," no impact on the market whatsoever.
At that moment, I realized that market economics measures efficient production and distribution of resources, but nothing more. Like Darwinian evolution, it possesses no moral compass; it simply describes what is, not what ought to be. And -- again like Darwinian evolution -- its mechanism doesn't integrate values such as compassion, minimizing suffering, protecting the weak, expressing a commitment to love or justice. Supply and demand measures efficiency -- an important concern to be sure, but by itself, incomplete. Just as our society makes decisions that integrate values other than Darwinian survival (we are committed to foster the flourishing of the individual, to intervene to heal the sick, to educate and empower the disabled and the underprivileged), so too our economic priorities must integrate but cannot be limited to market efficiency. There are other important values we also must advance. Supply and demand, by itself, does not evaluate when there might be concerns that override efficiency in particular cases -- feeding impoverished school children, for instance, making sure that indigent elderly have shelter, providing inoculations where needed, internalizing the cost of industrial waste dumped into our air and seas.
Such a commitment to human flourishing even at the occasional expense of efficiency is as consensual as our founding fathers and as sacred as Scripture: It was Thomas Jefferson, after all, who reminds us that "we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." God-given concern for life, liberty and happiness are the proper goals of American democracy. Market efficiency is often a tool that advances those goals, but the goals are more encompassing than efficiency and sometimes require us to modify our commitment to the free market in support of more ultimate goals.
The Bible itself provides ample examples of laws that modify the unbridled rights of property owners: we are commanded to leave the corners of our fields unharvested, and to harvest our crops but once. Any remaining produce becomes the property of the poor, and they are legally entitled to access to that yield. Mandatory funds are established so the poor can sustain themselves, and the rich were obligated to provide food, clothing and sustenance for the widow, the orphan and the poor. Ancient Israel provided community education for all (male) children. One legal standard applied to rich and poor alike, with all contributing their fair share in tax revenue. Fields are to lie fallow every seventh (Sabbatical) and 50th (Jubilee) years to renew their bounty. While the market forces of supply and demand were the baseline for ancient Israel's economic activity, both Bible and Talmud delineate a prohibition of excessive profits, which were held to be sinful and impermissible.
Biblical Israel aspired to attain a vision in which all people were recognized as reflections of God's image -- each person of equal worth and dignity. That theological commitment, as it does in the USA's Declaration of Independence and in the world's Scriptures, mandates concern for the individual that sometimes supersedes the mechanism of market efficiency.
Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals should legitimately dispute which policies best advance that bedrock commitment. Such debates can help the nation better understand the challenges ahead and how most effectively to address them. But the underlying commitment must remain bipartisan supreme.
An economy that ignores supply and demand may find itself lacking the resources to sustain itself. We properly work with market economics as the starting point for our economic activity.
But an extremism that elevates supply and demand to its solitary and highest priority rejects a more encompassing Biblical commitment to care for the widow and the orphan, to provide food and clothing for the poor, to educate and nurture all its children, to live harmoniously with creation. Such a idolatrous dogmatism must be rejected, both in the name of our Founding Fathers and in the name of the world's wisdom traditions.
William O'Brien: Memo to Presidential Candidates: Redistribution of Wealth Is a Divine Commandment
While I agree with the majority of the article, the author ignores the clear distinction between the needy in the Bible and the "needy" in America.
I remember a coworker who earned little money. In order to purchase a new sound system he skipped several meals. A poor household may possess flashy clothes and a new Cadillac but they are still needy. All of their income goes to these few luxuries to boost morale and self-image. Also how much is spent on cigarettes and beer and pot?
We may not like the spending habits of certain people, but then as you correctly pointed out they have little else to spend their few bucks and saving their money would not better their material condition. The thousand dollars wasted on cigarettes would to go to where? College tuition or vocational training?
How then do you define needing assistance?
That is why Jesus said, "You will always have the poor with you."
So each of us does what we can. I don't believe in forcing others to give. We encourage them to give.
Solution:
-Government funded workhouses to house, feed, and train the poor while keeping them productive.
-Stricter rules on who can have children and when (instability, poverty, or lack of education = no kids for you)
-Government funded healthcare for all children whose parents cannot afford it
-Government funded boarding schools for children with unstable homes
I may seem intolerant, but the truth isn't always politically correct. The best solution to problems might not always be the most popular for everyone.
2) Life is complicated and your scenarios oversimplify it.
3) In certain instances technology has replaced both skilled and unskilled jobs. But where is this technology developed and where is it being manufactured?
4) It is hard to finde "new work" even with the proper education.
5) Yes, poverty generally breeds large families. This is an observation made by Adam Smith. Have you ever looked into the reasons? Consider this: (A) when dreams are destroyed the future is held in the hands of young babes. Children are a symbol of hope for the poor. and (B) it is an unspoken social protest making the poor ubiquitous. The point is made that though we (the working poor) live within society's margins we are everywhere. We make up the crushing crowds of your great cities.
6)Your notions hark back to the social work movement of the 1800s. For instance Charles Loring Brace founded the Orphan Train Movement in which New York City street urchins were whisked away to work under hardship as proverbial indentured servants to farm families in the Midwest. Some of these children failed to thrive and did not survive the hardships.
And so you are back to square one reviving old methods for regulating the poor.
2) HP won't let me write a book in their comment section. I obviously don't have the time or the space for account for everything.
3) The issue is that development and manufacturing technologies tend to increasingly rely on technology. The workforce needed to perform these functions require increasingly complex technical training.
5) Or because they're Catholic (it happens), or they are too irresponsible or ignorant of the proper way to use birth control. Kids happen, then crushed dreams. Not the other way around.
6) I agree, but I'm not advocating that anyone be treated inhumanely. I like the idea of orphanages, but not the same kind that exist in 3rd world countries or those that existed prior to people realizing that they were really bad for kids. Just because something failed once doesn't mean it wouldn't be able to work if done differently.
I believe this is why the bible does not call our governing and/or secular institutions to charity. Saying "i pay my taxes" does not satisfy God's call to protect the weak and care for the needy.
We should not burden our polities with responsibilities we are personally given. Feeding the poor is a goal. Improving the souls of both giver and receiver are also goals. Only 1 of these can be satisfied by overburdening Ceasar's system to do God's work.
This is why I do not believe that the market should be anything other than a brutal, a-moral, hyper-efficient market. The proceeds of such are greater than any other system and thus generate more potential for human flourishing. If we then choose to invest those proceeds in Xbox's and Nike's while millions starve, then shame on us. Would we have done any better with less?
(1) Private charities depend on government support which enables them to reach greater number of needy people. Without this support many of these private institutions would collapse while others would drastically shrink their outreach.
(2) The surplus from markets is plowed back as speculative demand inflating the value of equity (i.e., investment capital). A momentum is built up that accelerates and we have a paper chase where profits are pursued through the production of negotiable instruments that in turn are inflated to make more profits. This ends in a massive market correction (the bursting of the bubble) and massive immiseration as we have seen played out in this last financial panic called the Great Recession.
You cannot have both laissez-faire Capitalism combined with private charities and effectively address the problems of food stress, malnutrition, unemployment, social angst, petty crime, chemical dependency, unwanted pregnancies, clinical depression, and other mood disorders.
1) Doesn't all support the government may grant originate among the people before entering the official coffers via taxation or nationalization? If the government were taking less from the people wouldn't there be less need among those who have some resource and a corresponding increase in their capability to aid someone else? I believe that centralizing the accumulation of wealth for government redistribution is inherently flawed, fraud prone, and an extremely enticing target for abuse and theft. Lots of small, distributed, local accumulation and redistribution efforts (think church or soup kitchen, not federal welfare) avoid these penalties. They both operate more efficiently, because the administrators are part of the community and can better detect and prevent fraud, and present much less valuable targets thus attracting less capable abusers and leaving the entire little system in better shape. I think a real system like this could meet the majority of localized need, leaving only large, region disabling disasters for the government to help with.
I've got doubts about completely unfettered laissez-faire. The one class of regulation I think I'm willing to tolerate is the limiting of the sizes of things. I don't know if size is measured in yards, dollars, people or market share. I do feel a need to prevent anything from presenting a systemic failure risk if it fails. For destructive creation to function I think we are compelled to accept the needed evil of systemic-failure-risk avoidance via capping individual organizational 'success' to a level that if they make later mistakes the system doesn't fail. It makes me squirm uncomfortably to say so but I don't have a better alternative.
And the people say ...
?
-G
What about the gleaning rituals and procedures for harvesting crops sampled in Deuteronomy 24:19-22 that ensures that the leftovers go to the needy in the community, and what God's intention and purposes were for instituting such a ritual?
What about the messages of prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos, whose messages of social justice predate and often exceed those made by Jesus in the Christian Scriptures?
If there is going to be a discussion of social justice in Biblical literature, we must be provided with examples and explanations of why those passages exist in the first place. Great article, lacking in support...
Is the gathering of the field's gleaning an effective way of protecting families from food stress? How would it be applied in urban areas. Note that the majority of the U.S. population, for instance, does not reside on farms or in rural areas.
Your other comments concerning the need to explore the background in which these messages for social or distributive justice were made is relevant to Bible study and is worth exploring.
-Thomas Jefferson
And, this gem:
“Why should either two men live at the discretion of three, or three at the discretion of two? Both propositions are absurd from a reasonable point of view. If being a slave and owning a slave are both wrong relations, what different does it make whether there are a million slave owners and one slave, or one slave owner and a million slaves? Do robbery and murder cease to be what they are if done by ninety-nine percent of the population?†- Auberon Herbert
kai
Actually, it is the poor that have been subsidized the most, it is the reason that they have negative effective federal tax rates…they get paid to be American. Our top tax expenditures go to the poor and middle class and the rich tend to highest effective tax rate and bear the biggest percentage of federal tax liabilities
But tell you what, the best way to solve this problem is to limit the government from being a wealth-transfer agent. In which case, they can take form group of Americans and give to another…that way the rich cannot take from the poor and the poor cannot take from the rich.
Kai
“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves¬, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves¬, and became richer.
Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766â€
"It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please. Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. [The Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect." ~ TJefferson
You mischaracterize the use of ‘providing for the general welfare.’ As must progressives do. Nowhere in the constitution is it expected that one group of people be forced to work as slaves to take care of another group of people…and that is what forcing tax-and-transfer programs are. You are forcing one group of people to work (as slaves) to provide for another group of people. In this case the rich and middle class must work a certain amount every year to pay to subsidize other people.
Our founding fathers summed it up best.
In 1794, for example, James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, rose on the House floor to object to a bill appropriating $15,000 for the relief of French refugees who had fled to Baltimore and Philadelphia from an insurrection in San Domingo. He could not, he said, "undertake to lay [his] finger on that article of the Federal Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." The bill failed.
"To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, 'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.'"--Thomas Jefferson
I experience it every time I pay my taxes.
Kai