The Christian in the 21st Century who takes his faith seriously must at some point struggle with the ethical side of our global economic system. Generally speaking the world operates under capitalist principles, that is, property ownership is recognized and protected by law, and the means of production are in private hands. Most economies operate with a major caveat, which is that the State maintains the ability to confiscate large percentages of the revenues derived from capital in the form of corporate income tax, which could arguably call into question whether the system is capitalist or not. For the sake of argument, we will stipulate for the time being that this is a non-issue.
The capitalist system, which has been in operation on a global scale only really since the Second World War (and for much of the world, even more recently). Generally speaking, the colonial systems of the European Empires were mercantilist by nature, and not capitalist. However, the domestic industrial revolutions in America and Britain birthed modern capitalism, and it is their legacy that has brought us to our present state of affairs: relatively free trade, open international markets, globalization, free movement of capital & goods. This system has brought more wealth into the world in the last 60 years than has existed in all of the eras of history combined.
Yet, we look around ourselves and we see people living in abject poverty in all corners of the globe, even in the so-called "developed countries." Poverty and hunger are ubiquitous in places like Africa and Asia, and 40 years of foreign aid has done little to alleviate that pain. We look to other corners of the world and see wealthy bankers making billions of dollars on complex financial instruments that the average person doesn't understand (and likely never will), and it it certainly enough to make a thinking, compassionate Christian alert to the fact that something is horribly wrong.
The liberal wing of the mainline Churches in the United States have seized on the issue of poverty and inequality as an ersatz theology to fill a void left by their abandonment of the scriptures and 2,000 years of tradition. Their concern for the poor may be genuine, and it is undoubtedly appealing to those of us who believe Christianity is about binding ourselves to the person of Christ, who himself showed great love and empathy for the outcasts and downtrodden of society. But to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, they may be right about what is wrong, but they are wrong about what is right.
For they would have us believe that capitalism is the great satan, the creator of inequality, the depersonalization of humanity, run by robber barons and plunderers. They are quick to advocate State intervention to remedy these perceived social injustices through punitive taxation and the creation of entitlement programs to "help the less fortunate" (the Radical Orthodoxy crowd being a notable exception). But they rely on appeals to emotion, and not on facts and evidence to support their claims. They ignore (quite to their own peril, and everybody else's) the reality of incentives and economizing behavior in the creation and distribution of goods and services. And they continue to ignore the longterm consequences of entitlement programs, both to the people they are designed to help, and to the economic health and stability of the world at large. The economies of the developing world are now going to suffer global economic instability because of the licentious fiscal behavior of the Western countries over the last 50 years. Surely a system predicated on theft, debt, and default does not fit into the ethical framework of the New Testament.
One alternative, as I alluded to in the previous paragraph, is that provided by the Radical Orthodoxy movement, which favors what I would call Left-Libertarian / Anarcho-Socialist solutions to these problems. The followers tend to oppose globalization, prefer localism (especially consumption of things produced locally), and favor the use of cooperatives in lieu of corporations. They extol the virtues of the democratic governance of cooperatives in making decisions about production and consumption--a veritable utopia of workers united in solidarity with one another making choices for the common good.
Although the longterm fiscal implications of wealth transfer programs contemplated under State Socialism are not present in this anarcho-socialist vision, neither are the proper incentives of economizing behavior given to us by capitalism. Until the other side of this debate can provide a comprehensive, cogent argument that switching to such a system of exchange would not cause a collapse in the division of labor (the increase of which is the sine qua non of economic growth), then we cannot begin to take seriously their claims, no matter how theoretically appealing they may be.
For those of us who see the immense benefits capitalism has bestowed upon society in the last 200 years (at least in America), the question should not be "with what do we replace capitalism?" but rather, "how do we make capitalism a more ethical system?" If we want to achieve the permanent alleviation of poverty, we will be forced to make the pie bigger, not merely cut it into ever-smaller slices. My contention is that there is no system, other than capitalism, that provides the proper set of incentives to accomplish this end.
Capitalism's opponents contend that the system impersonalizes exchange, and robs our economic behavior of any sort of humanity. This is why, they argue, that we buy clothing made in Chinese sweatshops by laborers paid pennies an hour, working in horrendous working conditions. We do not see them, and thus we cannot appreciate the harm we are supposedly causing them. But I would argue that unless we were to go back to an agrarian society with a very low division of labor (and therefore far less wealth in total), we are never going to know the people who make and supply us with the goods and services we use in everyday life, and indeed this would be quite inefficient.
(It is worth noting that when we talk about "total wealth" this includes modern medical technology, modern communication & access to information, rapid transportation, and countless other conveniences of the modern age that free us to engage in untold quantities of leisurely pursuits utterly unknown to our ancestors.)
Certainly the idea of the impersonalized world, and the detachment of the post-industrial age should be grievous unto all of us. One of the collects in the Order for Compline in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer calls us to be mindful of this reality,
"O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other's toil; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
So the question we should pose is this: how do we repair capitalism? How do we transform it from a two-edged sword into a purer force for good in the world? Is it possible to combine the ethos of communitarianism and the systematic incentives of capitalism to maximize growth while eliminating poverty and hunger?
I hope to explore these questions in future posts, but would love to hear others' thoughts on the subject in the meantime.
No comments:
Post a Comment