A response to the youtube video “Money, Greed, and God” by Jay Richards (which is summation of his book by the same title.)
Richards says he wrote his book out of frustration. Frustration is a normal human emotion, and can be a useful tool. However, I don’t want it to be the prime motivator for my essay, so I took a few days to reflect. I am writing this essay out of Hope instead.
Before addressing Richards’ specific arguments, I have some big picture concerns. It’s easy to win a debate when you only share the best parts of your side, and make a weak straw man argument for your opponent’s side. Richards does this when he says things like, they want to raise the minimum wage to $100 per hour, or they think 99% of Americans live in squalor. (I understand there’s room for humorous exaggeration, but I don’t see any laughs here. He seems mad about the argument he invented.)
My other primary problem with Richards’ premise is that he is working within a world of binary options. There’s Bolshevik-style socialism/communism, or the most rosy version of Free Enterprise. (He does not like the term capitalism.) He’s not open to a combination of the two, or a third better option so far unimagined.
This brings us to our theological differences quite quickly. As long as we fallen human beings are on “this side of the Kingdom of God,” the free market is our best option, Richards says.
I disagree.
One day the Pharisees asked Jesus, “When will the Kingdom of God come?”
Jesus replied, “The Kingdom of God can’t be detected by visible signs. You won’t be able to say, ‘Here it is!’ or ‘It’s over there!’ For the Kingdom of God is already among you. -Luke 17:20-21 (NLT)
As a Christian, I’m not sitting around waiting for heaven after I die. I pray, “[God’s] will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” (Matthew 6:10) I believe we should be making earth more and more heavenly all the time. Justice and equality are godly pursuits. Shalom is universal flourishing.
This bothers me from a secular standpoint as well. It’s a failure of the imagination to think that we’ve arrived at a perfect system, that we can’t always be dreaming up new and better ways to run our society. A hundred years ago, people wouldn’t believe where we are now. And so on, further and further. My husband has a joke about this- saying that folks who don’t like change are like the 1899 patent officer commissioner who said, “Everything that can be invented has already been invented.”
Richards makes some good points when he tells a sad story about how well-intentioned action in the US to stop child labor in foreign countries resulted in children losing their jobs in the garment industry and moving on to worse jobs (stone crushing, street hustling, and prostitution). I looked up the 1997 Unicef report he mentioned. (see page 60)
This a a dreadful story, and we do need to learn from it. I fully agree with Richards that our good intentions and personal piety don’t matter one bit when we don’t make an effort to assure that the practical outcomes are also good.
But suddenly, we disagree again. The way I understand the rest of his argument (and I rather hope I’m wrong) is that he believes that child labor is a normal and natural part of a country’s development. Rich countries went through it already, evolved, and moved on. We can’t force countries in earlier stages to advance too fast. Richards dismissively suggests that progress will come “in the right time.”
In the US and Europe. we did not naturally progress out of child labor. People fought for it. Just like they fought for safe working conditions, healthier working hours, and fair wages. None of this happened naturally. The free market did not solve these problems. (And we don’t have time to get into the ways America helped cause the initial problems in that story.)
The UNICEF report, by the way, ends more optimistically. They tracked the children, sent them to school, gave them healthcare, and a stipend to compensate for their missing wages. (I wonder if Richards considers that a happy ending or not.)
The next issue that stood out to me was more theoretical. Richards quotes the famous economist Adam Smith.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. -Wealth of Nations, 1776
Richards draws from this that the free market system actually filters out bad intentions. He states, “the market economy channels people’s legitimate self-interest, and even their vices to some degree, into socially beneficial outcomes. Or at least more than the alternatives.” (I listened to this line again to make sure I didn’t misquote him. It strikes me, on this second listen, how weaselly he is with his words. It’s almost impossible to argue with someone who will wiggle out of a full commitment to their own argument.)
I felt he stumbled in his argument here by trying to consider the opposing side. If the butcher is greedy, he may give you rotten meat- but there’s laws against that! Or a bad Yelp review would stop him from doing it again, Richards joked. Other than being anachronistic to Smith’s time, I frankly wasn’t sure what Richards was saying. Does he approve of laws that prevent butchers from selling rotten meat? To what extent does he think the state should regulate businesses? (I understand free market to be anti-regulation.)
The Yelp example feels more free market orientated, but it also doesn’t feel true. There’s 100 reasons why businesses get away with selling terrible products, with ripping people off, or pricing products unfairly. I’m curious to know what Richards thinks about the absurd rising cost of insulin. How does the free market solve monopolies? What about slavery? Factories polluting rivers? Sweatshops, check-cashing businesses, televangelists, MLMs?
We may be not-fully-sanctified humans beings, but that’s no reason to settle. Richards upholds the status quo and urges contentment with with human greed. He says, It will sort itself out! (Maybe, mostly, don’t hold me accountable for the times that is does not.)
We don’t have to be perfect humans to say we can do better than children working in factories. I write in hope that we've learned a lot from the good and the bad of political and economical situations of the past, and we are pointed toward a more heavenly system on earth.
read more: Why Democratic Socialism isn't Anti-Christian from Sojourners
