Calvin the Capitalist?

In his Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation, Ronald Wallace shoots the tired old hypothesis full of holes.  After first surveying Calvin's teaching on usury, and pointing out just how restrictive his "permission" of it was, he tells us: 

"Though he believed in the necessity of some distinctions remaining, he believed that the appearance of extreme differences in wealth and poverty within a community was inexcusably evil.  His comment on Paul's ideal that 'through giving there should be equality' is illuminating.  'Equality', in Paul's mind, he thinks means a 'fair proportioning of our resources that we may, so far as funds allow, help those in difficulties that there may not be some in affluence and others in want'.  The vision given in Christ's parable of Lazarus in heaven lying at the bosom of Abraham implies that riches do not shut against any man the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven but that it is open alike to all who have either made a sober use of riches, or patiently endured the want of them. 

"Calvin believed that Christ's command to us to 'sell your possessions and give alms' might under certain circumstances demand the giving away of capital as well as current income.  It enjoined that 'we must not be satisfied with bestowing on the poor what we can easily spare, but that we must not refuse to part with our estates, if their revenue does not supply the wants of the poor.

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Leviathan or Puppet?

One of the favorite rhetorical weapons of the Right is to point to the sheer page count of federal legislation, particularly the Federal Tax Code.  They are especially fond of pointing out that the tax code is longer than the Bible, though there seems to be considerable haziness on the precise margin.  This is often presented as damning evidence of the overgrown power of the federal government, a sprawling, all-consuming monster that has its tentacles in everything.  Of course, no one would deny that there is a lot of truth to this picture.

But reading Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, it occurred to me that another interpretation is possible.  Perhaps the sheer length of US tax regulations is more a sign of impotence than omnipotence.  Think about it.  

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Wealth Inequality--A Moral Problem?

One of the more interesting chapters in Jay Richards's Money, Greed, and God is chapter 4, "If I Become Rich, Won't Someone Else Become Poor?"  This chapter brings us to the heart of the impasse between left and right, with the one side contending that "the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer" while the other insists that, on the contrary, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer too…just not as fast.  From a certain perspective, both claims are true.  Even the right, in its more honest moments, admits that income inequality is growing.  Which means that, in relative terms, the poor are growing poorer.  But is absolute poverty increasing?  The right denies it but of course, it depends where you are talking about--in sub-Saharan Africa, it is.  On the whole, my limited grasp of the statistics suggests that the right is correct, global absolute poverty is slowly declining.  

Now, from the right's standpoint, this means we do not have a moral problem--the rich are not getting rich at the poor's expense. (In fact, from the right's perspective, this would be true even if absolute poverty were increasing; so confident are they in the wealth-creating power of the market, that they would have to chalk this up exclusively to the failures of the poor or their governments).  Richards thinks that he has demonstrated another example of "zero-sum thinking," revealing the left's logical and moral idiocy.  If the poor are getting richer too, then why does it matter how fast the rich get richer?  It's not a moral issue.  

Here we find a clash of moral intuitions--Richards and his ilk honestly feel that there is no moral problem here, whereas others find a glaring injustice.  The source of it, I suggest, lies in different presuppositions about property.  

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Depart in Peace, Be Warmed and Filled (Good of Affluence #9)

So we have seen that Schneider explains Amos's attacks upon the unjust rich as first of all an attack on those who have direct responsibility for the poor and for unjust policies that are harming them, not as an attack on third parties who just happen to be rich.  His second line of argument is that what Amos is attacking is not the enjoyment of wealth per se, but a bad attitude toward wealth.  This is a very common sort of claim among divine right capitalists like Schneider--wealth isn't evil; it's a bad attitude toward wealth that is evil.  The implication is that their opponents disagree; they think that wealth itself is evil.  Generally, however, that's not the case; their opponents rather insist that attitudes issue in actions, and so a good attitude toward wealth requires certain concrete just and charitable uses of that wealth, whereas a bad attitude toward wealth can be identified through certain greedy or unjust uses of that wealth.  So I can agree with Schneider's general statement; however, I will then ask him to flesh out what this bad attitude looks like for us today, and what a corresponding good attitude would entail.  Unfortunately, he gives us little to go on--here, and in the rest of the book.

 So let's dig in to this section a bit and see what he does have to say. 

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How Much is Too Much? (Good of Affluence #8)

Before turning to consider the attitude that Amos is critiquing, and what this might mean for our attitude toward wealth, Schneider takes some time to critique what he considers to be irresponsible and unjustified uses of Amos-type rhetoric.  He complains that people like Ron Sider suggest that people's eternal salvation is on the line if they enjoy too much of their wealth, instead of giving it to the poor.  Not only do they make such harsh accusations, but they do so on a hopelessly ambiguous basis.  For how much is "too much"?  Schneider suggests at first that Sider and others (he includes John Wesley here) appear to operate on a utilitarian basis, whereby we are to seek to maximize happiness for the greatest number, and so, presumably, to keep giving away any resources we don't need as long as there are some people that are poorer than us.  But then he points to what seems like an inconsistency or hypocrisy in Sider's approach, by which he equivocates on the meaning of the word "need."  "'Necessities,' he writes, 'is not to be understood a the minimum necessary to keep from starving.'  It rather means, he explains, what is 'necessary' for a standard of living that 'would have been considered [in ancient Hebrew society] reasonable and acceptable, not embarrassingly minimal." 

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