God's Macroeconomics

" ... but you do not grieve over the collapse of Joseph ...." In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

May I begin with a few basic questions? Where do our laws come from? What about our form of government? Where does that come from? How do new laws come about? The answer to these questions lies at the heart of Winston Churchill's trenchant observation that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others. Our democratic form of government, once considered to be a radical experiment that was doomed to failure, was produced by people fleeing tyranny. Our original instruments of government: the Declaration and the Constitution were intent upon keeping excesses of power in check. Likewise, our laws have arisen to deal with problems, not to encourage virtues. To say it simply, our government and our laws were conceived in human brokenness. That we constantly need new laws is a sign of our continued brokenness though they do not pretend to heal it .... and in fact might make matters worse. Our civil order is not given from above, and indeed, the Founding Fathers by and large were Deists and did not believe in a God who could hear our prayers, much less answer them.

Our economic system, which is distinct from forms of government, is also not given from above. Capitalism, like democracy, developed as a remedy against tyranny. Democracy, ideally, gives each person a voice in how their lives will go; capitalism, ideally, gives everyone an equal opportunity to better their lives by owning private property and improving their financial lot in life. Both democracy and capitalism share an ideal of human freedom; we might even say that, like God, they grant the gift of freedom. And culture proceeds from this freedom. If the choices we make for ourselves and our families are enlightened, if our economic decisions are charitable and compassionate, then our culture will be filled with light. Conversely, if our choices for lifestyle and public policy are benighted and our economic decisions are selfish, then our culture races to the bottom into darkness.

Our present cultural imperatives, it is safe to say, would have no place in Heaven. What our culture values, whom our culture praises, the ones our children emulate point more to darkness than to endless light. As one measure of our present moral temper, we now face the widest gap in U.S. history between the "haves" and the "have-nots." The wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of Americans owns roughly one-quarter of all household wealth. This wealth, owned by a minuscule minority, is equal to the share owned by the bottom 90% of all Americans. Here's another telling fact: no developed country on earth has nearly so wide a gap between the top fifth and bottom fifth of families, yet fewer than 47% of all Americans thinks that is a problem. To read Amos' complaint against the indifferent, affluent families of Israel ought to be a chilling experience for us, therefore:

Woe to you who lie upon beds of ivory
and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat lambs from the flock,
and calves from the midst of the stalls ...
who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils,
but are not aggrieved over the ruin of Joseph!

The message is plain: how can you seek the tenderest morsels of young lamb and veal, drink to excess, and luxuriate in costly and exotic perfumes, when your brother is starving? The mention of Joseph is particularly grievous, for it is an image of capitalism at its worst. Capitalism by its nature is competitive. All people must compete for a finite quantity of wealth. In order for you to hold one gold coin in your hand, it must be taken from the hand of another. We call this a zero-sum game: for every gain there must be an equal and opposite loss. Winners console themselves by saying, "Survival of the fittest!"

In the case of Joseph, the favor of Jacob, his father, was deemed to be a precious limited quantity, so eleven brothers assaulted one, Joseph, his father's favorite, that they might have more of what he had, whence he was sold into slavery. Among the Twelve Tribes of Israel, the Tribe of Joseph is fragmented into two, signifying a lasting wound in Israel's body, the wound of depraved indifference to your own brother's life.

As you know, the notion of "survival of the fittest" has a dark underbelly. It points to Nietzsche, who argued that God was dead and that morals were invented by the weak to restrain the strong, and and to the Nazi party who sought to eradicate those they deemed to be unfit peoples. Yet, democracy and capitalism, if left to its own essences would quickly operate to abet the strong who would then prey upon the weak until they were drained of all their resources. We begin to see what Churchill meant when he said, "the worst," until you consider the others ...

The notable twentieth-century alternative to democratic government and capitalist economics was totalitarian government and communist economics. Many wonder if Christian life as depicted in the Acts of the Apostles might not be an example of this. Pope Leo XIII wrote the definitive answer to this fair question in his encyclical letter, Rerum novarum (1891) in reply to ideas that would all-too-soon lead to the Bolshevik Revolution. Communism, or collectivism, reduces each man or woman to the status of cog in a wheel, stripping them of their identity, creativity, and dignity. The dignity of each human life, Pope Leo wrote, resides in the freedom to aspire, to own one's home and private property, to work and to save, and to experience one's freedom to the fullest extent of one's capacities. It is telling that collectivism economics always requires totalitarian government, for who would submit to being a machine part voluntarily?

What would Amos counsel? He would direct us to read the Book of Life, which our God has given to us. Human freedom is uppermost in God's plan. We are to have dominion over the earth. We are God's only moral creatures, meaning that we are free to choose between right and wrong. Nor does He leave us in ignorance concerning right choices, for throughout the Scriptures we are instructed to care for the outcast and downtrodden, to give a generous portion of each harvest to the poor, to have special cares for the most vulnerable, who during the Iron Age, would have been widows and orphans. The degree to which we do not follow this advice -- I wonder how many people have even read it -- is the degree to which we continue a feud with God that began many eons ago. We see gross excesses in wealth before us, private passenger jets, enormous yachts, even the Island of Lanai here in Hawaii, belonging to individuals. Yet, here at ground level we are mindful of whole families in America who go to bed without a decent meal and are only one paycheck away from becoming homeless. Such enormities are grievous to the angels in Heaven and cry out for redress.

The points God makes to us over and over are simple ones. Ultimately, we do not own our property, any more than anyone can own a seacoast or an island or even the farm we call "the Hermitage." We do not really own property, but we are stewards of it. We are entrusted with wealth, so that God's economy might function properly. The Lord mentions good stewards and evil stewards, faithful servants and unfaithful servants, again and again .... and for a reason: stewardship is the sacred trust He has made with us. And we ought to study His plan as scrupulously as we study our own theories of economics, and we will quickly learn that His economic equations are not the same as ours:

To whom much is given much will be required.

The one who would be first must place himself last.

I am among you as a servant -- not be to be served, but to serve.

We like the term macroeconomics; it suggests that we have taken everything into account encompassing the greatest universe of economic consideration. Yet, we shall never account for all things of value, or even of great value. Consider the plantation owner whom Jesus describes in a parable. He also believed he had covered everything. His plans were brilliant, his execution perfect. His harvests succeeded ... and exceeded his capacity to store them. So he would tear down his barns and build bigger ones. After all, he was only securing the fruits of his own labor, from his own fields, and all for himself. Satisfied with his splendid blueprints, he turned to his perfect plans for a feast -- to eat, drink, and be merry, but he had forgotten one crucial thing, one overlooked equation in his economics: "'Thou, fool!,' God said to him. 'This night thy soul shall be required of thee. Then whose shall those things be, which thou hast hoarded?'"

But there is a forgotten equation still more important than the Last Four Things -- one which resembles a principle from quantum physics more than one from macroeconomics. We find it buried within the story of Joseph's collapse. Eleven sons of Jacob wanted Joseph's portion of his father's love. Since they perceived that he possessed it all, they would divide it amongst themselves by eliminating him. But that is not the way love works. God's macroeconomics forbids the operations of division and subtraction favoring, rather, multiplication and addition. Have you ever given away your own portion to where it was truly and greatly needed? God sent me a messenger at the town dump a few days ago. One thing led to another until he shared a story with me. Last Christmas he gave a hundred dollars (a very great sum for him) to a widowed mother who lived in poverty with two children. She was just coming out of the hospital, but her sorest grief was that she had nothing to place under the tree on Christmas morning. And then a princely gift arrived. A hundred dollars! The joy each of her girls experienced as each opened her gift -- the very dolls they had prayed for! .... reducing the donor to tears as he related the story to me nearly a year later.

Have you noticed that the Sacred Scriptures do not prescribe large charitable institutes? They prescribe a way of life that is humane; they ordain social customs that act on God's love to ensure that no one goes hungry; they enjoin us to forgive debts, so they do not go on and on; they restrict us from profiting from someone else's ill fortune. We are to watch out for the weak and the vulnerable, each of us is. For He entrusts us to be His hands and His feet, His face and His heart. We are to do His work as His trusted servants and stewards. And we discover a secret among his mysterious equations: that the one who "loses the most" is the one who "gains the most." This is anti-capitalism, the anti-zero-sum game, for here is never losing but always winning. His are the only, truly macroeconomics, and our calculations will always fall short of Heaven's accounting. Amen.