There has been a lot in print lately about correcting income
inequality, as if it’s an established human right for everyone to have
identical incomes. However, before we conclude that there is something
righteous about establishing income equality, let’s first re-examine a few
things, namely Marxism – the proactive attempt to attain this goal and, with
it, a “worker’s paradise.”
Marxism has been tried, and it has never produced any
semblance of any kind of paradise. Instead, in each place where Marxism has
created its “paradise,” it has required walls, threats, work camps, murder and
Gulags to convince its populace that they were living in a virtual paradise,
despite their strenuous attempts to flee it! One Soviet Christian, Alexandr Ogordinokov,
wrote about the “paradise” to which he had been sent:
- Concentration camps are scattered over the vast expanse of Russia, behind tall fences of barbed wire and high-voltage cables…you are buried in the tomb-like twilight of solitary punishment cells; the oppressive silence of faceless days turns time itself into an instrument of torture…Hunger gnaws at your belly, and cold numbs your flesh and desperation courses through your blood. (Marvin Olasky, Prodigal Press, xxiii)
This description could describe any communist death camp,
whether in Cuba, Cambodia, China,
or Vietnam.
But why? Is there something endemic to
income equality that produces horrors? Perhaps – Here are some possibilities:
1. Income
equality requires massive government control to ensure that income is equal –
something that requires repression and coercion.
2. Income
equality has never been identified by any of the major world religions as a human
right or even a goal. Although the Bible places a lot of emphasis on caring for
the poor – a responsibility that many churches gladly undertake – there is no
biblical mandate to establish income equality. Instead, all major religions are
reluctant to undermine individual initiative in this manner.
3. If
income equality cannot be demonstrated as a right – and it clearly undermines
initiative and creates a destructive sense of entitlement – it then becomes
difficult to rationally justify it. Therefore, if reason fails to justify
income equality, then coercion becomes inevitable with its Gulags and
barbed-wire fences.
4. Moral
relativism – and this has been so closely associated with progressive Marxism –
also undermines rationality and therefore must rely upon coercion. If all
morals are simply relative to the person or culture, there is no objective
moral truth or moral good upon which to base income equality. Therefore, such a
program is inherently incoherent and indefensible.
5. Christianity
also tries to address the problem of human suffering. However, it identifies
sin as the problem – an analysis that goes far deeper and more universally than
the Marxist economic analysis. Consequently, the ideal of income equality to
produce a better world represents a different, competing, and anti-Christian
hope for a better world. Such a hope does not issue forth from the major world
religions but from progressive atheism.
6. In
order to promote such a hope, unsupported by reason or history, the “progressives”
must defensively damn every other hope as evil and regressive. Therefore, in
order to implement their hope for a better world, they must suppress or remove
alternative thinking. Here are just several examples of this contempt and intolerance
endemic to an insupportable hope:
·
Karl Marx: "In simple truth, I harbour hate
'gainst all the Gods." His dissertation stated that we should
"recognize as the highest divinity, the human self-consciousness
itself!"
·
Nikolai Lenin: "Every religious idea, every
idea of god, even every flirtation with the idea of God, is unutterable
vileness."
·
Nikita Khrushchev: "We, Communists ... are
atheists ... Public education, the dissemination of scientific knowledge, and
the study of the laws of nature, leave no place for belief in God ... We
consider that belief in God contradicts our Communist outlook." "We
remain the atheists that we have always been; we are doing all we can to liberate
those people who are still under the spell of this religious opiate."
For them, capitalism is an evil, an impediment to the
attainment of income equality. It therefore must be eliminated.
But is capitalism really an evil? As a farmer, I decided
that I had enough tomatoes to sell on the roadside to make a little extra
money. Was this an evil? Actually, by providing more tomatoes to the market, my
tomato stand would tend to lower the overall price and contribute additional
wealth to the community. Nothing evil about that! I didn’t take any food out of
anyone’s mouth. Instead, I contributed food.
If I had even more tomatoes to sell to justify hiring a picker, would this have been evil? Certainly, the hired help and his family wouldn’t have thought so, and I can’t think of anyone else who would have objected, apart from a Marxist.
If I had even more tomatoes to sell to justify hiring a picker, would this have been evil? Certainly, the hired help and his family wouldn’t have thought so, and I can’t think of anyone else who would have objected, apart from a Marxist.
This is not to say that capitalism cannot be used for evil.
Any institution can be! The UN and even Congress have been used for evil, but I
wouldn’t suggest that we therefore dismantle them! Nor am I advocating for
unbridled capitalism. Every institution requires its checks and balances. All
are inherently corruptible!
This brings us back to the question of evil and a realistic
hope in the face of this evil. The reason that our best-conceived institutions turn
evil is because we are evil and
require a Savior. Our Bible presents us with the only adequate hope to address
the evil:
- We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:20-21)
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