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.