When it comes to the gap between rich and poor, the biggest problem we have is not a matter of free markets or the failure of wealth to trickle down.  That is happening well and the free market has been the key factor in pulling millions of people out of poverty over the last two centuries.  It may not seem fast enough, but if you look at the whole of poverty in human history with people at subsistence living for millennia, the change is almost miraculous. Especially these last years in China and India.  Now these changes do not mean we’re done, and Christians are not utopians, but the expansion of opportunities for work and capital are the best answer we’ve got to extreme poverty.  The problem of poverty makes me more sure that if governments would get out of the way, I think the middle and low orders of society could do a lot more, more efficiently, and more quickly.

The problem we have today, creating the gap between rich and poor, is not the free market, but government messing with it.  In particular, issues of money supply and fiat currency.  In Canada, the bank of Canada buying bonds and the masses of loans by banks at low interest have increased our practical money supply immensely.  That devalues the wealth of the poor and lower middle class disproportionately.  On the other side, the rich are not only consumers, but asset holders.  As the value of currency goes down because the supply goes up, their assets increase in value.  A strong increase in asset values, of course, also frees them to borrow against those assets, and so they get cheap money supplied by those low interest rates.  That means cheap available capital.  The extremely wealthy, as it happens, are the people who know what to do with cheap money – and so they make it grow and get richer.  That’s a significant factor in the increasing gap today.

Our rich/poor gap is not a distribution problem – that is a false narrative that is detached from how an economy actually works. There is not a fixed amount of wealth that is just divided up unequally – that’s a Marxist myth that leads human souls only to envy, violence and theft.  In contrast, wealth is created when people are free to use their talents and abilities to create things out of the raw materials of the earth.  The free market gives every person equally a chance to trade their created wealth for things they require.  Trade, of that kind, is part of the natural order created by God – broken with the fall, certainly – but still by His design. People were designed to work and create, and then we are set by design in community, which together gives us the ability to specialize our labour and then trade with each other for what we need. The miracle of it, of course, is that a free market of that kind enables us both to mutually benefit – I decide for myself what I need and what I value, and you do too, and trade will only happen when we both feel we’re benefiting in the exchange.  That ‘invisible hand‘ is by God’s design.

Christians through history have been critical of government messing with the economy because it causes poverty and creates false values for things people need. Juan de Mariana is my favorite: as an elderly priest he challenged the King of Spain when he began to alter currency; the first chapter in his book is called “Does The King Own His Subject’s Goods?”  Of course he answered no, and as a servant of Christ ultimately got himself pitched in jail.

The best way to answer the problem of the gap between rich and poor is to get the government out and away from the economy.  We need the Separation of Business and State as sure as the Separation of Church and State.  The free market is a self-regulating natural order that allows a massive amount of complexity to occur with a bias towards the mutual benefit of participants.  It also forces necessary changes in human society:  People practicing a trade that is no longer valued by others in society will be forced to change.  In the big picture, that is a good thing – their labour will go towards something that is valued and everyone thereby benefits.  And the free market regulates the wealthy too.  It’s in a person’s rational self interest to increase their wealth – and the way to do that is to use wealth. The great thing about the free market (if we could ever have one!) is that it incentivizes rich people to use their money by way of investing. That’s where real spill-over happens – when new business ventures are supported and there is an increase in the possibilities for employment and the creation of new wealth.

The role of government around a free market should be to protect individual freedoms, by dealing with theft, deceit, and force or violence.  That is necessary in order to prevent powerful corporate or collective powers from mistreatment of individuals.  If those corruptions of power are kept in check by a limited government, we have the best options in a broken world, and we’ve honoured what God honours.  Liberty, creativity, exchanges of mutual benefit, and people feeding their families.

What government should not do is engage in slavery. Slavery is when one person is forced to work for the benefit of another.  All involuntary redistribution schemes enacted by government are the moral equivalent of slavery, and these Christians must reject.

Jesus’ radical call for us to care for the poor is an individual personal call to each believer and voluntary community; it is a call to use their wealth to bless others.  That may mean selling everything and giving it away. Or it may mean Priscilla & Aquilla host a church in the home they can afford as business entrepreneurs.  Ananias & Sapphira can sell their field and give the money to the church, or not – a point Peter makes exceptionally clear when he affirms it was theirs to do with as they wished.

The care of the poor is for us to do: it falls to the low and middle orders of society, and not to the state.

So what should the state do?

As stated, the moral purpose for me is one of protecting liberty.  I am tempted a bit by folks like Herbert and the thinking around Voluntarism in the 19th century, but I do think that some things which simply need to be done (moments where a higher order must step in because lower orders cannot handle the problems), require a higher order intervention that I’m not convinced a wholly voluntary state can handle.

We can say some things logically:

1) Rom 13 makes the necessity of taxes clear, to cover the needs of those who’ve given themselves to governing. The state there is set in place to punish the wrong doer, but also ‘to do us good’. The question of what is good is open for some debate.

2) Stealing from one to help others, or setting up a regular system based on that process, is hardly ‘doing good’.  Again, that moves towards enslavement.

3) That doesn’t mean there’s no role for the state to play, of course. There are people who cannot, for very legitimate reasons (age, health, etc.) care for themselves, and some answer which just abandons them or leaves them in poverty is no good answer either.

4) Jesus’ calls us – regardless of whatever kind of state we may live under – to radical and active care for those in need. Faithful religion looks after widows and orphans. I see these as a call for individuals and Christian communities to take these needs seriously and act on them.

And so the state’s ‘good’ to be done to us, to my way of thinking, is well articulated by the notion of subsidiarity.  The priority is the freedom of individuals (the low order) and communities, churches, businesses, families, etc. (the middle orders) to be able to pursue the purpose to which they’ve been called by Christ. I think the state can facilitate and support those works without having to take them all over.  That facilitation is a clear ‘good’. When the low and middle orders reach their capacity, then for the state to step in with further assistance is also clearly to me a ‘good’. The same with even more substantial crises where no middle order could possibly manage the problem or coordinate aid (disaster relief, massive medical bills, society wide needs, etc.)

The moral goal of the state, then, is for action to be based on a clear recognition that stepping in would be to facilitate the free activities of low and middle orders, and only then to enable care to be given where no other realistic means exists, for a temporary time.  I see then a limited government, stripped down to these basic purposes: using other people’s money in a tight framework only for governing; for the purpose of protecting liberty (policing, courts, national defense of some kind); and to ‘do good’ in a clearly defined sense, meaning not spending other people’s money on every great idea that comes along, but first asking whether there are others who can do the good that we can enable and support.

Imagine that kind of government?  One that comes to charities, churches, and businesses alike and asks, how can we help you do what you?  What do you need to succeed?  What would be the best way for us to help you care for the poor.

Suddenly, we find the gap between poor and rich closing as government gets out of the way.

I’m concerned about a trend I see in the evangelical church.

In particular, what I see is a crisis arising because of the acceptance of government action as the sole means of addressing poverty.

The bottom line is that the state is not the best way to get aid to those who need it.  Perhaps some circumstances may require it, but questions of the expense of government bureaucracy (meaning that the monies given are significantly eroded before they actually get to the people in need), the inability of bureaucracy to respond to the particulars of a person’s situation, and the crisis we have as a result of the distancing of people from those in need, all suggest to me that the middle orders of society could do a better, more responsive, and more faithful work.

By crisis, I mean that we have a culture of people who ‘have’ who can live their whole lives totally detached from the poor because of the posture of government. Government stands between the rich and poor in our society, and treats the question of the rich poor divide wholly in materialistic terms. The result is a dehumanization of people – both poor and rich – who see only the stereotype told in their own narrative. The rich see only lazy people who don’t work and live off the dole; the poor see only greedy corporate pigs who won’t share. Neither narrative is true – but government, by it’s very posture as the only means of addressing poverty, perpetuates those narratives. Government is the opposite of community – and only community can really care for those in need.

I think the failure we’ve fallen over in the west, really, is the Rousseauian conflation of community and state. The result is, as de Tocqueville said, a soft despotism where real community (the middle orders from which Rousseau thought everyone needed to be liberated) are destroyed and replaced by one massive state ruling over lone individuals who can never resist state power. And we see the fruit of that today – suggest that the government won’t do something, and people wonder if that means it won’t be done at all. Suggest that the government shouldn’t do something, and people assume that means you think it shouldn’t be done at all.

I’m concerned that evangelicals have been buying into the state/community conflation – and so assuming that care for the poor necessarily means more government. But Jesus’ call is not for more government – it’s for us, personally, to take up the Kingdom work assigned to us.

What’s wrong with the state engaging in charitable causes?

The fundamental issue is the conflation of different uses of the state and the law. One type of use is moral, the other is not. It is moral for the law to be used to protect private property and persons; it is fundamentally immoral for the law to be used to take private property from persons, even for philanthropic ends.

In Bastiat’s words:

“Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every person the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.”
“This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again: These two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.”

Part of Bastiat’s logic, and I would say the faithful Christian position on the matter, is that the use of the law always implies force. Whatever law you make, because the state with its power is the actor, you plan to enforce. To say it differently, everything the state does ultimately is at the point of a gun.  If I reject a law, or refuse a tax, ultimately after fines and further refusal’s on my part, I will be arrested and held imprisoned. If I reject that imprisonment and try to leave I will be restrained by force and violence, and if I continue fight for my freedom I will face point of a gun.

Every well intentioned law you make, or tax you levy, assuming you expect the state to enforce it, you choose to enact at the point of a gun. You may not intend that, and socialism tries to pretend it away, but it is the fundamental fact of what the state is.

The Christian moral question, then, is: ‘when is it ok to put a gun in someone’s face?’

The scriptural answer for this question, in terms of the state, is found in Romans chapter 13, where we’re told that the state has been set by God and equipped with the use of force for the punishment of wrong-doers.  Because this is the state’s God given purpose, its use of force for the protection of others, of private property, and to enforce contractual arrangements is moral.

While the use of force is right for the punishment of wrong-doers, it is illegitimate and immoral for the sake of charity.  Why?  Because Christianity rejects the idea that the end justifies the means.  Christian’s must reject the naive interpretation of the state as some kind of financial dispensary.  The state has no financial resources of its own, apart perhaps from the sale of public lands or government assets which are hardly sufficient or sustainable as the financial basis for significant charitable works.  What that means is that when someone advocates that the state should undertake some philanthropic project, they are not asking a wealthy king to open his coffers.  They are suggesting, rather, that the state use its force to confiscate the wealth required to carry out its charitable aims.  That is exactly the same as going to a neighbour, putting a gun in their face, and taking their property under the threat of force.  Even if they let you take it, there’s no morality left in their act. They’ve been robbed. That’s all.

Some Christians point to passages like Psalm 72 to argue that the state should also offer charity to the poor.  But that is not the description of the King suggested in the Psalm.  In Psalm 72, the King should not allow the poor to be exploited because of their need, and he should ensure the OT laws applicable to them were enforced.  That matches Romans 13 and Jesus preference for the poor wonderfully.  The Psalm goes on to suggest that the King ought to give of His own immense wealth for the sake of the poor, reflecting the OT practice of the poor tithe. In OT times, the poor had the benefit of that tithe, and as well they had the freedom to glean after the harvest – and we’re right to understand that the King was also a landowner.  The scripture applied today, in effect then, is calling a Stephen Harper to use His personal finances to help care for the poor and to ensure that his state power is leveled for their protection. There is nothing in that passage that gives the King the right to grab other people’s property and redistribute it. (For scriptural support, consider Jezebel when she takes Naboth’s vineyard – Fr. Juan de Mariana makes this case in his chapter on “Does the King Own His Subject’s Goods?” from his A Treatise On The Alteration Of Money.  He’s an excellent read that helps with Christian thinking on economics and governance.)

There is no way for a serious Christian to make easy use of the state as a means to charity, because no matter how well intentioned or good the end might be, the means of state-force are a vile imitation of real righteousness and charity.

I write all this because I’m quite concerned about the current trend I see among some evangelicals and the missional church of which I’d consider myself a part.

Christian charity is self-sacrificial. We’re called personally to sell our possessions and give to the poor, trusting in the Kingdom. In the OT, the poor tithe is between the individual and God Himself, and not the state.

Instead, however, current hipster forms of Christianity seem to be producing uninformed and gullible Christians who use Jon Stewart as both news and education source. The personal call to charity in the scriptures is diminished in favour of offloading personal responsibility to the state, and justifying the state’s confiscation of the wealth of others.  And then, these Christians actually think they care about the poor because they advocated that someone else’s wealth be stolen and given away. It is a sham. It’s the classic elitist liberal guilt that chooses public advocacy instead of personal action; it cherishes a charitable image, but maintains a cold personal distance from the poor.

I can’t help but wonder if Christian’s who believe they’ve pursued charity, but carried it out by theft from others at the point of the state’s gun, are in for a sorry show when the judgment comes.  Naivete is the only defense; there is nothing Christian about it.  It is a repugnant pseudo-philanthropy based on evil.  One cannot mix food and poison: there can be no compromise with the socialistic use of the state; to hold a gun to the wealthy for the cause of the poor is a form of slavery with the produce of one man’s labour taken by force for another.

So what role can the state play in the face of poverty or distress?  Subsidiarity teaches that the Higher Orders only step in temporarily when the Middle Orders of society face a challenge to their pursuit of the good which they cannot overcome on their own.  Certainly a Christian case can be made for disasters, and even, perhaps, critical health care.  But how much better for the state to ask the middle orders of society how it can pave the way for their work!  What if the state, recognizing social needs, facilitated the generosity and growth of businesses, charitable organizations, and faith based organizations?  What if, seeing international needs for help, the state facilitated citizens efforts to care for others and backed them up?   Indeed, the greatest answer we have for poverty is employment.  The only source of wealth we have is our productive citizenry; the state is just an expensive means of gathering some of that wealth by force.  Jesus called for us to be the foundation of a better way.

The call of Christ – to every person – is to give to the poor and needy ourselves.  We must not use Jesus’ name to justify theft, not even for a ‘good’ cause.