Redistributing Wealth in the Bible

[go4tli]

As we draw closer to the Presidential election, I hear with increasing
frequency an attempt to assert that certain ideas about taxation are
Biblical. And honestly, some of those claims seem patently false.

Take a article in the USA Today from last month. Gary Bauer -- a
former Republican Presidential candidate, and currently president of
"American Values", a conservative political organization -- wrote
about a man with whom he shared religious convictions, but not
political ones.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sojourners Editor Jim Wallis and I are both evangelical Christians.
But we come to radically different conclusions about government's role
in addressing poverty. Wallis thinks Republican tax cuts are
unbiblical, and that more government spending and taxes are the main
antidote. But nowhere in the Bible are we told that government should
take one man's money by force of law and give it to another man.
Jesus' admonition was a personal command to share, not a command for
Caesar to "spread the wealth around."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-01-08/religious-test-campaign-president/52455988/1

Well, honestly, the Sojourners have opened themselves to taxation as a
means to reduce deficit. (They are also careful to point out that
spending needs to go down, and that some of those spending reductions
should come from entitlements.)

But it's this part of the quote that I take issue with: "But nowhere
in the Bible are we told that government should take one man's money
by force of law and give it to another man." To put it bluntly,
that's not true.

Consider the Year of Jubilee -- in which all debts were forgiven, all
slaves were released (unless they wanted to stay), and all land was
returned to the family that owned it on entering the Promised Land.
Or consider the so-called "gleaning" laws, which required that some
crops should be left in the field, expressly to provide for the poor.
Both of these are government-mandated forms of wealth redistribution
from the haves to the have-nots -- and that in a government *created
by God Himself* (Leviticus 19:9; 23:22; 25; Deuteronomy 24:19-21; Ruth
2; Isaiah 61; Luke 4).

It's not clear from the history we have whether or not Israel ever had
the guts to actually have a Year of Jubilee. But even so, prophets
regularly criticized rulers for denying justice and care to the poor,
even pointing out that Israel wasn't doing any better than surrounding
nations who couldn't care less about following the God of Israel
(Isaiah, Amos).

And all this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the poor
in Scripture and the responsibility of governments to help.

Granted, the United States of America has salient economic differences
from Old Testament Israel. But I don't think that excuses ignoring
general principles of providing opportunity for people at the bottom
of the economic ladder, and having that mandated by the very
governmental structure.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have shown that the poverty
rate would be almost twice as large as it is without government
assistance; they've created an informative series that shows the
effectiveness of various kinds of social safety nets:

http://www.offthechartsblog.org/taking-stock-of-the-safety-net-part-1-overview/

Debate on which government programs are effective, and how much, is
natural and should be encouraged; only in the open exchange of ideas
can good solutions be determined. I'm all for trimming out the
wasteful and harmful parts; no matter how large it is, government's
resources are limited, and they should be used as wisely as we the
people can manage to make them.

But I oppose the attempt to convince Christians of the legitimacy of a
starkly selfish stance by asserting that the Bible never says
something when it does, and taking advantage of the fact that most
people are just disinclined to find out the truth of the matter for
themselves.

It's better if you read the Bible for yourself, naturally. There is,
according to a Baylor University study, a direct correlation between
the amount of concern a Christian has for economic justice and how
often that Christian reads the Bible:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/october/survey-bible-reading-liberal.html

Not proof of the correctness of my stance, of course, but I think one
can say with reasonable certainty that a stance like Bauer's, from a
Biblical standpoint, is *wrong*.

[go4tli]

While I'm on some of the weird ideas we've gotten from somewhere about
the relationship of the government to the poor, let me address this
one:

If the government would get out of the way -- or just stop encouraging
apathy for the poor by erecting a safety net of its own, making the
people think they don't have to -- then private charities, especially
churches, would finally have access to the resources they would need
to fix things. (After all, they could have some of the money we'd
otherwise have to spend in taxes, and they could redistribute it more
effectively than the government could.)

I've heard this from a number of sources, as with the idea previously
that using governmental resources to assist the poor is un-Biclical.
Ross Douthat recently argued this in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-government-and-its-rivals.html?_r=1&ref=rossdouthat

The column is titled "Government and Its Rivals". Rivals, obviously,
because it's a competition. It's a race to see who can help the poor
first. Because once one entity gets its foot in the door, that's it.
No one and nothing else can offer assistance.

The problem with this is that the facts and the numbers are rather
easy to find in this case, and they all contradict the idea that
government is "in the way". Private charity has *never* been up to
the task of helping the poor; it's never even been better at working
the problem on its own without government "in the way". Not even the
early Christian church could do that (Acts 6:1), and I'd argue that
they were far closer to God's Will in terms of helping the poor than
we are here and now.

Prior to Social Security, for example, private charities could only
service a small percentage of the elderly poor in the United States.
Since then, we've seen a massive reduction in poverty among the
elderly. It might surprise Douthat to know that private charities
still continue to assist the elderly, and that they can *leverage
Social Security to increase their effectiveness*. People who have
actually worked in charities in any and every capacity understand
this; these workers consistently seek *more* government assistance,
not *less*, a fact which would be peculiar indeed if government were
always "in the way" and not allowing them to reach the people they
claim to want to help.

As an example of what I mean and how dramatically government social
programs can help, let me recommend "Salvation in the Slums:
Evangelical Social Work 1865-1920" by Norris Magnuson. It's
remarkable to note that this work cites many of the same primary
sources as "The Tragedy of American Compassion" (Marvin Olansky) -- a
work that argues against governmental social programs -- but unlike
Olansky's book, Magnuson *actually quotes from them* in an attempt to
suss out what they really had to say. When you see the contrast, it's
hard *not* to see Olansky's book as a deliberate attempt to silence
the voices who could shed relevant light on the matter.

Pretending that government has "rivals" in helping the poor subtly
undermines the idea of mutual responsibility. Helping the poor is not
some kind of competitive, exclusive, zero-sum game. Pretending that
it is causes one to confuse cause and effect -- not seeing government
as a helper that is compelled by its people to fill in some gaps
charities can't or won't, but seeing it instead as something somehow
separate from its people and *actively trying to steal charity's
ability to help*.

Such an attitude, I would argue, encourages people to take their hands
off the wheel with respect to their government, since it makes the
government out to be some alien entity separate from its people and
its society rather than something people have the power to change or
influence.

But my point here is not quite as abstract as that. There is a
country that has, in modern times, been in a position to allow only
private charities to help the poor. There, literally thousands of
charities are diligently working with no government interference,
support, or "rivalry". We can see the results of government being
reduced to impotence so that churches and private charities can work
under their own steam, and measure and contemplate and discuss the
results; we can actually observe it, right this moment in a country
quite close by. It is the poorest country in the western hemisphere:
Haiti.

This is the utopia for the poor that Douthat and his ilk are pushing
for. It is not what I would wish for any poor anywhere, and certainly
not the poor in my homeland, a country granted the resources to do
significantly more -- at least for the time being.

(It's also kind of funny to me that the people on my radio who want
the government to keep its mitts off the poor also seem to be the
people on my radio who want the government to promote a certain family
model with their resources and funds. What kind of message does this
send? Is the idea here that churches are good at handing out money,
but *terrible* at fostering healthy family relationships?)

[go4tli]

Some more questions prompted by Douthat's article:

(1) Hull House, a charity in Chicago, is closing its doors due to
lack of funding after serving Chicago's poor for a century. If
private charities have some kind of magic power to take care of social
problems, what exactly are the poor supposed to do when institutions
they rely upon cease to exist?

(2) Consider the situation that *Douthat himself* describes. In
spite of insisting that, in the absence of government interference,
private services will step in to provide them, he cites an instance
where *exactly the opposite* happened -- a situation where private
services didn't *want* to provide a service (contraception), and the
government forces them to anyway. Isn't that a contradiction?

(3) Strongly related to (2), what prevents private charities from
discriminating in ways the government can't? What keeps them from
making their own policy to exclude women, or blacks, or homosexuals,
or Bob and Suzy, because, you know, screw them? (Governments aren't
automatically accountable, of course, but at least you can take some
action to try to compel them to stick to what they write down. And
you can also take some action to try to compel them to write non-
discriminatory practices.)

(4) If Haiti is a bad example of what happens when government is no
longer "in the way", why is that? Why would the suffering there be
replaced by paradise here? (I heard a lot of rhetoric following the
2010 earthquake about there being a "culture of poverty" in Haiti, as
if they just happen to be people who enjoy sitting around in abject
poverty... so there's no sense feeling bad for them or trying to help
them, no need to keep their government from being a corrupt and
cronyist cesspool. Haiti's "culture of poverty", it turns out, is
also strongly similar to the "culture of poverty" in the American
ghettos, which relieves us of the responsibility of providing things
like food stamps. I see no evidence that such a "culture of poverty"
even exists, and frankly find its mere suggestion insulting. People
tend to want as much as they can get, regardless of *what* kind of
culture they come from.)

(5) Private charities often see good giving amounts when: (a) needs
are urgent and have an immediate solution; (b) issues directly affect
many people; and (c) the needy are appealing victims. That's just
human nature. How will private charities meet fundraising needs when
issues are complex and not easy to solve (e.g., ongoing poverty)?
When they don't affect enough people to generate popular support
(e.g., prisoners entering the workforce)? When the victims they want
to help are difficult to sell in an attractive fashion (e.g., the
mentally ill)? Should the help these people receive be subject to the
vagaries of a *market*? How do we get the market to focus on "Where
is the need?" and not "Who do we like?"

(6) What about the charities that *leverage* government assistance,
helping people apply for and gain access to government services?
(Welfare does not consist of trucks driving through low-income
neighborhoods tossing money out the windows.) It's hard enough for me
to find time to work my way through the post office or the DMV when I
need to -- and I have only one job, I have a car, and I could probably
afford daycare if I absolutely had to, conveniences that lower-income
families typically haven't got. Not to mention that the post office
is a *breeze* compared to getting food stamps or other forms of
welfare. While I think this inefficiency needs addressing and fixing,
doesn't this demonstrate that both private charity and government tend
to pick up the slack when the other is inadequate? That the reality
of helping people is more complex than "this sector needs to handle it
all"?

(7) Remember, charity isn't *solely* there to teach us to be
generous. It also exists to provide for a need. If preventing
government from helping aids the former but completely demolishes the
latter, what good is it?

(8) You ever hear of the Walk a Mile Project (http://
www.socialdesign.org/welfare/project/walk_welcome.html)? The idea is
to pair legislators with welfare recipients for a month. The
legislators get to learn just how hard it is to live on welfare, and
how difficult it is to get out of living on it. As an added bonus,
the welfare recipients get to learn why making decisions to help them
into public policy is often difficult. This, I like. I don't know if
it's still going, though -- it seems to have stopped in 1995.

(9) Consider those who claim that poverty will never go away because
of Jesus' words, roughly, "The poor you will always have with you, and
you can help them whenever you want" (Matthew 26:11). Putting aside
for a moment that I think they have the interpretation wrong (Jesus
wasn't *prophesying*, He was *quoting*, and was actually condemning
the people He was speaking to), the very statement presumes that *the
poor are with us*. For so many of us -- myself, I must admit,
included -- that's not true. Should it be? (People who donate and
people who need donations rarely occupy the same demographics. People
tend to donate within their own demographic when they can. This leads
to a suboptimal distribution of resources. Perhaps Jesus' words are a
way to fix that.)

(10) Even assuming that people will rise up to take care of need when
they see how bad everything gets without government assistance -- a
premise I strongly doubt -- how many have to suffer, and how deeply,
before the larger population notices? Is this an acceptable price to
pay? Why?

(11) Private charities can demand whatever they like, short of
criminal activity, in exchange for receiving assistance. There are
limits to what the state can demand. Even if the actual aid given by
each entity is of the same amount and kind, who has more license to
abuse the power they have? Given human tendencies, who is more likely
to abuse that power? (Consider those who already do, even in a small
sense, by compelling those who would receive aid to join a certain
church or sit through to a proselytizer's sermon.) Should survival be
a right or a reward? (On the other hand, having freedom to set one's
own requirements *can* make a private charity with a lot less red tape
than a government charity. I only mean to assert why an all-private
charity system wouldn't be desirable. Food banks, for example, can be
flexible in ways that government can't match, but they'd be terrible
to have to rely on for a relatively long haul. I think there are
*reasons* -- divinely wise reasons -- why responsibility for this
problem is universal, mutual, and complementary. Anyone relieved of
the requirement to help the less fortunate can turn that license into
power to *oppress* the less fortunate.)