There is no end-point to our search for truth, and there is every reason to believe that every step along the way can be painful. This is not particularly insightful, and it is the merest recapitulation of my last post title of The Way of Pain and Truth. What has occurred to me recently, however, is the extent to which our search for milestones of truth can often reveal itself—if we are fortunate—in the distressing discovery that we are on a completely mistaken path (again, not particularly insightful.)
I came across an example of this recently. It has to do with arguments (hashed out over and over again among Christians) about the duties incumbent on believers regarding economic justice. One side has to do with social duties worked out as governmental initiatives (think of arguments against “grinding the faces of the poor”.) The other side has to do with governmental restraint predicated on concerns about inevitable overreach (think of arguments about the ruler wielding the sword of justice.)
One side thinks it virtuous of the government to make provision for what we currently call the “social safety net.” The other side thinks it virtuous for the government to stay its hand, reckoning that private generosity and charity are both more effective and safer for the whole. I’m sure, of course, that other people would frame the positions differently than I have, but I must admit that I am not concerned so much here about the claims of either side, as I am concerned about the premises of the argument to begin with. It is the age-old question applicable in many contexts: Do we really know what we are talking about?
When Christianity is the belief system is question, the economic system at hand is usually recognizable as Western and (more-or-less) free-market (compared to communist or “undeveloped” nation systems.) My own experience is that of the United States. Here the question of greater or lesser governmental manipulation of the economy is paralleled by arguments about which is more “Christian.” What is regrettable about this “Christian” argument is the fact that attempts to find biblical foundations for economic policy tend almost inevitably to be predicated on ostensible modern conditions that are really conjectures about the economies of “Bible days.”
In “Bible days,” (as the rhetoric tends) the economy was one of masters and servants (leaving aside certain niggling concerns about whether “servants”—or whatever they might be called—were really empowered participants in the economy.) In the simple “Bible days” view, the market was free, although at any point the convictions (or the whims) of the rulers might be expressed as taxations or confiscations for this or that purpose. The point for our discussion here is the fact that a lot of modern rehashing of biblical notions about economics is predicated on the simple master-servant relationship, shorn of complications, such that we might say that an employee in a modern privately-held company is the servant of the man or woman who owns the company.
This is precisely where the modern argument goes off the rails (though that does not stop it from plowing on.) We need to ask ourselves, as I did above, “Do we really know what we are talking about?” The predominant example of a privately-held company is a corporation affording its shareholders “limited liability” in some form or another. The corporation is a legal person, and it is ultimately (or, rather, in the case of bankruptcy or proprietors’ malfeasance, inevitably) revealed to be a ward of the state. The person or group who “owns” (the point is “controls”) the corporation has little incentive to own the corporation outright (and therefore to share in the losses in the event of the corporation’s demise.)
I do not say that this situation—a corporate economy hinging on limited liability—is good or bad. What I do say, however, is that a corporate economy is not merely unrecognizable as against its supposed “Bible days” progenitor—it positively opposes its progenitor. Our corporate economy is predicated on the non-existence nowadays of the crucial element latent in most musings about economic dealings in ancient times. That is—however much we might like to speak today about the “private sector”—we really have no “private sector.” The closest thing we have to a private sector resides in the rarified legal strata of holding companies and the like—organizations that possess (ultimately at our governments’ discretion) rights and privileges as proprietors of the government’s wards—corporations.
Ultimately, the corporations are ours—something that becomes apparent when bankruptcies of corporations, or incompetence or malfeasance of proprietors, leave us to pick up the pieces, both in terms of governmental clean-ups or bail-outs, and in terms of generalized burdens to the larger economy. The biblical notions of master and servant (even to the extent to which we can understand them) simply do not apply to our economies in the developed Western world—in, that is, historic Christendom.
We have made for ourselves an economy that would be unrecognizable to our ancient forebears. Most importantly (and this will probably expose my relative position on the safety-net-or-no-safety-net scale) we have made this anciently-unrecognizable economy by ourselves mutually, and for ourselves collectively.
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