IS CAPITALISM THEFT

 

 

In 1776, Adam Smith explained the economic success of Great Britain:

• That security which the laws of Great Britain give to every man that he shall enjoy the fruits of his own labour, is alone sufficient to make any country flourish.… The natural effort of every individual is to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, … capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity.… In Great Britain industry is perfectly secure; and though it is far from being perfectly free, it is as free or freer than in any other part of Europe.

In How the West was Won, Rodney Stark demonstrated how poor policy makes for poor growth: 

• ...taxes were so confiscatory in France that, as Smith pointed out, the French farmer “was afraid to have a good team of horses or oxen, but endeavors to cultivate with the meanest and most wretched instruments of husbandry that he can,” so that he will appear poor to the tax collector. Writing to a friend back in France during a visit to England, Voltaire expressed his surprise that the British farmer “is not afraid to increase the number of his cattle, or to cover his roof with tile, lest his taxes be raised next year.

Society grows when the shackles are removed and free enterprise is enabled, while justice ensures the safety of property and wealth against seizure. In many nations, corruption continues stifle investment and growth, if the investor knows that his business can be taken away if it is successful. Stark writes that because of these factors, the USA became the world’s manufacturing dynamo:

• By 1900 the United States was producing more than a third (35.3 percent) of all the world’s manufacturing output, compared with 14.7 percent produced by Great Britain and 15.9 percent by Germany. By 1929 the United States dwarfed the world as a manufacturing power, producing 42.2 percent of all goods, compared with Germany’s 11.6 percent and Britain’s 9.4.

America boomed because of the laws and values it had inherited:

• The early American colonies came under English common law. Therefore, individuals had an unlimited right to property that they had legally obtained, and not even the state could abridge that right without adequate compensation. Eventually that became the basis of American property law as well. Thus, the state could not seize iron foundries as had taken place in China, although it could purchase them should that seem desirable—as the socialist government of Britain did when it nationalized most basic industries right after World War II (until government control of these industries proved so unprofitable that they were transformed back into private companies).

All such “reforms” are unsustainable because they kill human initiative and dreams of a better life. However, many now erroneously equate capitalism with theft, but is it theft? If I invest in fallow land to grow tomatoes, hire two workers to plant and harvest, do I now become a thief? Have I abused my help? How?

 

DID JESUS BELIEVE IN INCOME EQUALITY?

I couldn’t find one instance where Jesus affirms income equality (IE). Perhaps the parable that comes closest to supporting IE is the parable about an owner who repeatedly goes to the market to hire workers for his vineyard and pays each the same amount, irrespective of how long they had worked. When those who had worked the longest complained, the owner answered:

·       “’Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ So the last will be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:13-16; ESV)

Jesus never suggested that His ideal is IE. Instead, there are a number of reasons that this teaching shouldn’t be taken as a repudiation of capitalism in favor of IE:

1.    Jesus affirmed, as He did in all of His parables, the legitimacy of the employer/employee relationship.

2.    Jesus also affirmed the legitimacy of the owner/employer having disproportionate wealth.

3.    He affirmed the fact that ultimately there will be some who are first and some last. Not all will have the same thing.

4.    Above all else, the owner gave out of generosity and not because he owed it to his employees or to the government.

In other parables, Jesus affirmed the legitimacy of capitalism even more directly. Another parable featured the owner of a vineyard who had leased it out to tenants. However, the tenants, perhaps advocates of IE refused to pay the landlord the profits due to him. However, Jesus sided with the landlord (Matthew 21:33-41; Mark 12:1-9; Luke 20:9-16).

Jesus used the father of the Prodigal Son as a positive role model. However, he had numerous “hired servants” (Luke 15:17) and evidently great wealth. Even in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, who ended up in a place of torment, there is no indication that his wealth had been the problem, but rather that he refused to share what he had (Luke 16:19-31).

In fact, it is important to note that Jesus never criticized but endorsed the Mosaic Law. Instead, He often criticized those who departed from it (Matthew 15:1-8; John 5:44-47). However, the Law had nothing to say against being rich and having employees, even servants. In fact, God had blessed many – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, David, and Solomon – with great wealth. While the Law did mention equality, it was never a matter of IE.

Jesus’ teachings were in tandem with the Mosaic. He too endorsed the principle that the hard worker should be able to reap his rewards.

Jesus told a parable about a wealthy landowner who was leaving in a long journey. He therefore entrusted with money so that they would use it to make a profit for him. Most did so and were commended by the landowner upon his return. However, one servant simply buried it and returned to his master the very amount that had been entrusted to him.

The master did not commend him but berated him:

·       “‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.’” (Matthew 25:26-29)

Not only did Jesus affirm the master/servant relationship, He also affirmed the fact that the master was using the servant to make a profit. Even “worse,” Jesus affirmed that the little that the “slothful servant” had should be taken from him and given to those who had much more – hardly an advocacy for IE.

Of course, Jesus wasn’t advocating unrestrained capitalism. The Mosaic Law contained numerous safeguards and provisions for the poor. However, the Law didn’t suppress individual initiative, the essential element of capitalism.

However, many, even “Christians,” are not aware of Jesus’ teachings and, therefore, tend to understand Him in a way that affirms their own modern, progressive values. One New York Times columnist cited a fringe figure, Brian McLaren, as proof that the Church is not following its Founder:

·       “Our religions often stand for the very opposite of what their founders stood for…”

·       “No wonder more and more of us who are Christians by birth, by choice, or both find ourselves shaking our heads and asking, ‘What happened to Christianity?’” McLaren writes. “We feel as if our founder has been kidnapped and held hostage by extremists. His captors parade him in front of cameras to say, under duress, things he obviously doesn’t believe. As their blank-faced puppet, he often comes across as anti-poor, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant and anti-science. That’s not the Jesus we met in the Gospels!”

McLaren claims that the Church has misunderstood Jesus. What is the basis of his charge? Certainly not Scripture! Rather, it seems that the Church is wrong because it fails to understand Jesus in a way consistent with McLaren’s progressivism.

And what of McLaren’s charge that the Church is not following Jesus’ teaching about feeding the poor? Jesus never petitioned the ruling classes to establish entitlement programs to feed the poor. However, He did appeal to individuals to give generously.

Admittedly, we fail in many regards. However, it is not because, as McLaren alleges, the Bible-believing church has willingly distorted His teachings.

IS CAPITALISM EVIL?

According to Elizabeth Warren, capitalism necessarily means exploitation:

·       “There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” 

Warren suggests that the creator of capital doesn't really have a right to his capital, because the capitalist had taken advantage of the labor of others. 

However, creating wealth can also be an act of love. What if I decide to work 14 hours a day and sow 50 acres with tomatoes instead of my usual 30. I will have to hire two unemployed neighbors, and the extra tomatoes going to the market will lower the price for everyone! Doesn't sound too evil, does it?

Let's now add another aspect of capitalism. It empowers. It motivates and marshals our energies into something wholesome - creating things that others want and need. 

In contrast, when the government assumes responsibility for our welfare, we are disempowered. We no longer need to work or to be enterprising. We become devalued, even within our nuclear families. The bread-winner is no longer essential, when the State provides. The children are no longer essential to provide for their parents, after the State assumes responsibility for them.

The community also becomes irrelevant and therefore disempowered once their care-giving role has been usurped by the State.

What is the alternative to capitalism - the freedom to pursue capital? The elimination of this freedom! But how? Through costly government control! For what purpose? Empowerment or dis-empowerment?

Is capitalism an evil? Does it foster greed, materialism, exploitation, and avarice or is it one of many ways that our baser instincts can find expression? 

In "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," Max Weber argued that capitalism is not the cause of these evils but one of many ways that our evils can be expressed:

·       The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all.

In light of this, socialism and communism do not eliminate our dark impulses but merely channel them in different ways.

Let's return to Warren:

·       "But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” 

Indeed, we are our brother's keeper. We have been given and so we must give, but how? Through government coercion? The Bible insists that giving should be done freely and not through coercion:

·       “The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.” (2 Corinthians 9:6-8)

When giving is coerced, it is not cheerful. It might not even be helpful.

Income Inequality: An Evil?

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.

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)