Usury Today

May 21, 2010

Building off of my post yesterday, I now make a stab at answering the questions "Does the ban carry over into the New Covenant?" and "What does it mean for us today?"

Well, according to fairly standard accounts of applying the Old Testament law, it would carry over in its general equity.  It may be be straightforwardly part of the moral law, but it seems not.  It would seem to be a deduction, an application, from the moral law, for the nation of Israel.  This would mean that, to apply it, we have to deduce what moral principles it is seeking to apply, what things it is trying to safeguard for the communities of Israel, and then see to what extent those principles and concerns apply to other settings beyond ancient Israel.  Insofar as they do apply, then the prohibition on usury should continue to govern our societies, but we do not need to see it as a priori binding across the board.  (One thing that should be clear, though, is that insofar as it now applies, it would apply without distinction between co-religionists and foreigners, since in Christ all men become our neighbors.) 

Notice here that I am not taking the medieval scholastic approach, which sought to demonstrate why usury was an inherently unjust action from the standpoint of the natural law.  Why?  Well, two main reasons.  First, that whole line of argument is rather difficult for most people (including myself) to grasp, and relies on quite a few assumptions (e.g., about the nature of money) that many people are no longer inclined to grant, and which, in any case, seem to be largely of a philosophical nature that is hard to either prove or disprove Biblically.  Therefore, the scholastic position against usury has limited persuasive value, and I do not feel myself sufficiently qualified to decide whether or not I accept the argument, much less, to try to recommend it to others.  Second, that whole approach has proven to be very susceptible of casuistry.  That is to say, it gradually got watered down through various exceptions and qualifications and drawing what feel like arbitrary lines in the sand, so that it became nearly useless as a standard for modern economic ethics, and lost sight, it seems to me, of some of the concerns that lay at the root of the prohibition.  If this is overly harsh, correct me...I really only know about a tenth as much about this as I'd like to.  

So how might it apply to more "capitalist" economic settings?  What I outlined before was a fairly broad account of the harmful effects of usurious credit on communities and economies, but of course it has to be said that these effects would be much more serious in a small agrarian society like Israel.  That's because the chief resource of Israel's economy--land--was in limited supply, and the supply could not be increased.  The value of commercial credit, of course, is that it helps drive the expansion of production--finding more raw materials, tools to extract them faster, tools to process them faster, new ways of manufacturing and distributing them, etc.  Where the supply of raw materials is plenteous and flexible, credit can help boost production for everyone in the market--a rising tide lifts all boats--but, where the supply of raw materials is limited and relatively inflexible, credit just means an intensification of competition for a piece of the pie, and tends to have the effect of increasing inequality--making some members of the market masters of the resources, and others servants.  I think this effect will tend to happen in any economy, but the effect is considerably heightened in an agrarian setting. Therefore, one might well suggest that, in other economic settings, the second rationale for the ban that I've suggested--the tendency of credit to produce inequality--wouldn't be as much of a factor.  Likewise, the first rationale--the tendency of borrower to get enslaved to lender--might not be as much of a factor.  As I mentioned, in an agrarian setting, the farmer is largely at the mercy of fortune as regards his ability to produce a good crop and pay back the loan; it would be very easy for him, through no fault of his own, to default, because of weather, locusts, etc.  However, for people in more stable industries, interest-bearing loans really might help them expand their business without grave risk, unless they brought the risk on themselves by behaving foolishly.  So, one could argue that, on these two fronts at least, a much more positive case can be made for usury in our economies than could be made in ancient Israel (of course, one might then object that perhaps we ought to have a much more agrarian economy, more like Israel's, and I would be friendly to such an objection).  

Nevertheless, neither of these concerns about usury has been wholly done away with.  In any economy or any industry, usury can have the effect of imposing servitude upon the borrower, a servitude that it may prove difficult to escape, and will often have the effect of increasing inequality by encouraging the growth of the stronger producer at the expense of the weak.  Moreover, the third objection still stands: usurious credit reduces the need for cooperation and interdependence.  For these reasons, I think that we would do well to adopt the scholastic (and the Islamic) principle that commercial credit ought to be extended in the form of co-investment, in which the risk and profits are shared, rather than in the form of a loan, in which the creditor has a claim on the borrower and all his assets.  To be sure, if we do this, economic growth may not be as rapid, because the entrepreneur will have a harder time getting the capital to grow his business quickly, however, the growth that we have will be more stable, and more equally shared; certainly the last couple years should be enough proof that mere speed of growth is not the best thing for an economy.  

So, on the basis of the OT usury bans, I do not think that we can conclude that any charging of interest is wrong, or even that it may not have a limited role to play in some economic situations, but we can conclude that it is dangerous tool, and it is very dangerous to a society if that society becomes dominated by debt and interest, as our societies undoubtedly have been for a couple centuries, and so we should aggressively seek to foster alternative modes of finance and investment.  This sort of conclusion also means, of course, that a Christian does not need to immediately disengage himself from any usurious uses to which his money may be being put (indeed, it would be almost impossible for most of us to do so today), but it does mean he should seek to have an ethically critical, rather than a casual attitude toward the way he handles his own finances, and to the ways he might pursue a profession in finance (I say this as a part-time investment advisor, an ethically scary position if there ever was one), and that as Christian communities, we should look for alternative financial practices.

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All of this is much more thinking out loud than it is attempting to lay out a treatise (even if it sounds a bit like the latter), so by all means engage, critique, and force me to modify my proposals until they're unrecognizable.

Making Sense of the Usury Prohibition

A friend asked me recently to share some of my thoughts on usury--the meaning of the OT prohibitions, their validity in the NT, and their applicability in the modern world.  As usual, my thoughts turned out to be rather wordy, so I decided it was worth exploring them in a two- or three-part blog series.  

So, what was the original purpose of the ban on usury in the Old Testament?

I do not buy the idea that the ban on usury was simply on charitable loans, that commercial loans of any sort were not envisioned, because they weren't relevant in that sort of economy.  On this reading, they were relevant in the economy of trading with non-Israelites, and that was why the law in Deuteronomy permitted them to charge interest to aliens.  From the reading I have done, it seems the main function of loans in the ANE economy at the time the usury laws were given was to finance farmers--either simply to buy seed to plant extra crops for the next year, or to expand their fields to increase their production; a hefty portion of the crop's yield was then usually demanded as interest.  Now, this means that such loans fell somewhere along a spectrum between commercial and charitable.  For the very small subsistence farmer, who was so poor he hadn't been able to save any of his seed from the year before, and had to take out a loan to buy seed to plant a crop for the coming year, the loan would have much of the character of a charitable loan.  For a more well-off farmer, who was looking for an opportunity to rapidly boost his production, such loans would have been basically commercial loans.  Clearly there was then a significant place in even a rather agrarian economy like ancient Israel for productive commercial lending.  So I don't buy the idea that the ban was simply not envisioning the possibility of such loans.  

Why then would God have wanted to ban usury, even in cases when it wasn't straightforwardly exploiting a brother?  Three reasons, it seems to me.  First, because even prudent commercial loans, for clearly profitable enterprises, can quickly become enslaving.  Human nature being what it is, people tend to grasp for more than is wise, overconfident in their abilities, and so a borrower will borrow a little more than he can really afford at a higher rate than he can really afford, and will soon find himself and his farm at the mercy of his creditors; this would be particularly so in an agrarian economy where so much one's production depended on factors outside one's control.  The instability and unhealthy dependency that widespread credit introduces into an economy can be readily seen in our current financial crisis.  God wanted his people to be free, and such freedom would quickly be endangered if for-profit lending was allowed a large foothold in their economy.  

Second, because credit-driven production requires aggressive expansion.  To make an interest-paying loan worthwhile, you have to use it to expand your business and boost your production at a higher rate than the rate of interest; and of course, credit enables you to expand much faster than you would otherwise be able to do.  Of course, this is why credit is viewed as so wonderful and absolutely necessary in the modern economy--we are told that it is the only way in which we could generate as much economic growth as we have seen in the past couple centuries, and this is the way we're going to overcome poverty.  But of course, the problem is that credit-driven growth does not end poverty, because it increases inequality, at least, it certainly does in an economy like ancient Israel, where, with a limited amount of land to go around, and most of the economy dependent on the land, the only way for a borrower to expand his enterprise is to dispossess other smaller producers.  And then, of course, once he has expanded his enterprise so that he is much larger than nearby producers, he can command a much lower rate of interest than smaller borrowers, and so is able to continually strengthen his position relative to them.  In short, interest-bearing credit helps to consolidate larger and larger slices of the pie in certain hands at the expense of others.  

Third, because usurious credit reduces the need for cooperation and interdependence, since its absence would have to be filled either by interest-free loans or capital investments.  Interest-free loans would be more likely to establish brotherly relationships among Israelites, instead of the master-slave relationships that usurious credit would tend to engender.  If such loans were not forthcoming, then an Israelite wanting to embark on a risky business enterprise would need to solicit cooperative investment from fellow Israelites, who would share both the risk and the profits of the venture with him, instead of having a low-risk claim on his assets should he fail, as the creditor would.  This would mean a greater likelihood that Israelite society would be characterized by relationships of cooperation and interdependence.

The chief rationales for banning usury then, it seems to me, are just the same as that for the seven-year debt cancellation and the Jubilee law: to maintain a well-distributed possession of the land and its produce, in which each family maintained its patrimony; without these policies, there would have been a tendency over time for the land ownership to become gradually consolidated in wealthier hands, while more and more Israelites would become landless serfs.  With these policies, the people of God would be more likely to be free, equal, and interdependent.

Why then were they allowed to lend to foreigners?  The answer seems simple enough, if the problem with usury was not so much that there was something inherently unjust about charging it, but rather that its regular practice would have baleful implications for the economy of God's people.  Since the economies of the foreigners already operated on usury, with the inequalities and difficulties this created, then for the Israelites to lend to them would not have any serious effects on them, and such lending would presumably have remained a relatively small part of the Israelite economy--clearly, the law was not designed for the kind of permanent Diaspora that made money-lending the core of the Jewish economy for two millenia.  

Truth-Free Markets

May 20, 2010
Virgin screwed us, again.  I speak of Virgin Media, of course, as any UK reader might guess.  Having suffered under their hidden fees, overpriced services, and wretched customer service for nine months, and having heard from others about similar experiences, we knew they were likely to.  And that’s why we wanted out; so we made all the arrangements, prepared to switch to a new provider, only to find that Virgin had, without our knowledge, swindled us into an eight-month contract extension, to which we were now bound.  All this despite dedicated research and fine-print reading before we signed up, and ceaseless vigilance afterward (trust me, this is going somewhere--this isn’t just a rant...or, it may be a rant, but it's a thoughtful one).    

Our experience, it seems, is fairly typical.  When we were looking into switching, I found that the company we were planning on switching to was way cheaper than Virgin, so I figured there must be a dark side.  So I researched and found they had received 3.1 out of 5 stars from online reviewers.  Ew, I thought, that’s not very positive.  So I looked at Virgin.  1.4 out of 5 stars.  The third-largest broadband provider in the UK has a 1.4-star rating (and overpriced services!).  What about the largest provider, Talk-Talk?  1.3 stars.  How can this be?  If these companies are so hated by their customers, how could they be so successful?  Surely no one should be able to capture 30% of the UK market share with a 1.3-star rating from existing customers?  Didn’t we all learn in our economics textbooks about how competition will destroy all the companies that provide poor products at bad prices, and that the great companies, that make their customers happy, will automatically rise to the top?  Why isn’t that happening?  Is there some government monopoly?  No, this was a free competitive marketplace.  Why doesn’t competition work?

Everyone must know by now, deep down, that the fairy tale about free markets and competition isn’t true, but for some reason, one still hears it touted all the time.  The marketing pitch for free markets claims that all you need is a free arena for different providers of goods and services to compete to offer consumers the best product at the best price, and then customers will flock to whoever is offering the best product at the best price, and the providers of inferior products will have to give up or improve.  Competition, in this fairy tale, is all about seeing who can best meet the needs of consumers, and the more competition we have, the happier consumers will be.  The free market of competition is an automatic mechanism for separating the sheep from the goats--the bad companies will lose customers, and the good companies will gain them.  

There’s one problem with this lovely little portrait (well, actually there’s several, but I’m only talking about one right now)--it ignores the reality of marketing.  Perhaps this blissful state of affairs existed in someplace long, long ago and far, far, away, but it ceases to operate as soon as marketing enters an economy on any scale.  The simple fact of marketing  makes a lie out all of the free marketeers’ claims about how completely free and uncoerced consumers are.  

Who, in this day and age, is so naive or so arrogant as to claim that they are not manipulated every day by advertising?  Manipulation is the name of the game, and when manipulation fails, deception is called upon, and when deception fails, outright cheating is often the weapon of last resort.  In a marketing economy, competition is not over who has the best products at the best price, but over who has the best marketing.  Whoever has the best marketing strategy, and the most money to push it, wins the competition, even with a markedly inferior product, and whoever has lame marketing, loses, even with a markedly superior product.  In fact, one might even go so far as to say that the inferior product usually wins, because it’s the companies who spend less on providing a good product that have more money left to spend on marketing, while the companies that devote their resources to an outstanding product have little left over to market it.

Now don’t get me wrong--I am not meaning to suggest that the market will destroy every producer of quality goods; there are always enough savvy, picky customers to make a niche market for genuinely quality products that get most of their advertising by word-of mouth.  But the fact remains that the many sectors of the economy are substantially dominated by companies that can make no claim to providing the best product at the best price, but merely the best (or often, the sleaziest) marketing.  

The diehard free-marketeer will reply that, in a free market, consumers should be responsible to learn the truth about what they’re buying, and if they choose to be susceptible to manipulation, that’s their problem.  The obvious objection is--how far does this line of reasoning go?  Do we apply the same rationale to the case of a young girl who is manipulatively seduced into unwanted sex?  But in any case, this is an absurd defence, because all human beings have limited time--it is simply impossible for every working head of household to take the time to thoroughly research the truth about the products he is buying; just as in every other area of life, he has to take some things on trust.  And a truly free economy would be one in which the consumer was free to actually trust what merchants and salesmen told him, so that he can make an informed decision without having to have an exhaustive knowledge of his own.  

Trust, however, is long gone from our economic life, and we are caught in an unending spiral of ever more hardened cynicism--consumers learning to be more and more distrustful of advertisers and salesmen, and marketing gurus becoming ever more devious and stooping ever lower in their attempts to hook the suspicious shopper.  Unfortunately, in this cheerless game of cat and mouse, the marketer generally has the superior resources and determination to win in the end.  

The stale rhetoric of “free” vs. “coerced” exchange, it seems, simply does not apply to the seedy realities of our modern markets, if it ever did, since freedom requires truth, and our economic and political life is dominated by a commitment to hiding the truth and hiding from truth.  

Where Your Treasure is, There Your Heart will be Also

April 29, 2010
When I was buying plane tickets and booking accomodations earlier this week for a summer trip to Europe, I was surprised by all the little “insurance” add-ons I was being urged to purchase.  For an extra 20 euros, I could buy the right to receive a full refund on my ticket if for any reason I needed to cancel my travel plans.  For an extra 15, I could buy full coverage for any lost baggage.  For 10 (this was my favorite), I could guarantee myself a 75 euro refund if my flight arrived more than an hour late.  Now, needless to say, these little promises of security had little allure for me--my reaction was, “Heck, that takes all the fun out of it!  What’s the point of traveling if there’s no uncertainty?”  After all, I am the guy who intentionally proposed to my future wife when I really didn’t know if she would answer yes, just because I thought the uncertainty made it more interesting.

It got me to thinking, though, about the ubiquity of this sort of thing in our society.  There’s insurance for everything.  We’re currently in the process of downgrading our bank account from a “Silver Account” that offers lots of extra perks, like Car Breakdown Coverage, Mobile Phone Insurance, and European Travel Insurance, which promises me (among many other things) a £30,000 payout if I lose a limb while trekking up to an altitude of 2,500 metres.  

We surround ourselves with hedges against risk, and everyone from our grocery store to our bank is trying to sell us a few more hedges.  Our entire financial system is built the same way: we have moved far beyond the standard risk-control measures of diversifying stocks and bonds or even buying mutual funds or futures contracts.  Now there are elaborate ways for shorting, hedging, covering shorts, etc., to protect oneself against price changes in these assets.  Almost any kind of bond now has accompanying credit default swaps, which are essentially insurance you can buy against the risk of the bond defaulting.  The homeland security system and the “war on terror” follow the same logic--we will pay whatever it takes to take out this dictator here, add this airport screener there, establish a few new government agencies, all to protect ourselves against any unforeseen risks.  Our entire society is based around risk management, around the idea that, if you can shell out enough money, you can protect yourself against suffering from any unexpected tribulations or discomforts.  (And then, of course, we get things like the Icelandic volcano, which throw a wrench in every clever little system of control and risk management.)  

And this gets me to thinking about a crucial insight that I gleaned from Doug Jones back in the day: we think that the problem with money is when you get greedy--when you want more and more and more money, more than you could possibly need, when you turn money into an idol.  But as long as it’s simply a matter of “good stewardship,” a matter of using money and seeking money to provide for your family, to protect yourself and your family against unnecessary risks, to save up enough to ensure long-term financial security for you and your heirs, etc., then it’s fine.  Even the very wealthy can continue to rationalize continued acquisition in the name of security, stewardship, etc.  But this is to miss a lot of the Biblical message against mammon, against the way that people turn it into an idol. 

Consider Luke 12:13-34, one of Christ’s most sustained discussions of money.  He begins with the parable of the rich fool, warning us, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”  Then he describes the rich fool, who sounds just like a prudent capitalist: “And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store my grain and my goods.’...But God said to him, ‘Fool!  This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’”  In other words, by storing up his wealth for the future, he was putting a false confidence in it, forgetting that his life was in the hand of God.  Christ goes on to offer the famous words, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on.  For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.  Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them...Do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried.  For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them.”

It is in this context--one of faith in money as a means of security, not some kind of distorted insatiable greed for it--that Jesus tells us to let go of money: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.  Sell your possessions, and give to the needy.  Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.”  To which we say, “But Jesus, we don’t need to worry about those things anymore.  See, we’ve invented ways to make sure our moneybags do not grow old--they’re called variable annuities--and we don’t have to worry about thieves anymore, because we can buy high-tech security systems; and as for moths, well, we’ve got loads of ways to take care of that, plus we have homeowner’s insurance for any unforeseen dangers.”  How is it that we do not realize that it is precisely this that constitutes an idolatrous attitude toward money?!  “Oh, when Jesus tells us not to serve mammon, he’s just concerned about people who are full of idolatrous insatiable greed.”  What could be more idolatrous than a view of money that trusts it to protect us against any unforeseen circumstances, that seeks to guard against every danger, to control every variable, to make us masters of every bit of our lives? 

“Fool!  This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

Review of The Shock Doctrine

April 26, 2010

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is a must-read for anyone in the modern West.  Okay, that’s a broad statement, so let me try one more focused: it is a must-read for Red-state Christian America.  Too long have we blindly thrown our weight behind the idea that capitalism would bring peace, freedom, and prosperity to the benighted Third World, and have we, with dangerous syncretism, imagined that its onward march was the vanguard of the Kingdom of God, trampling over secularists in our race to declare its victories as the offspring of our Christianity’s genius.  We glibly reassure ourselves that we are “pro-life” because we decry the crimes of abortion doctors, all the while ignoring the blood of the neoliberalism crusade’s millions of victims.  Naomi Klein calls on us all to wake up and smell the ugly stench of reality.  What makes this book so compelling is that it transcends standard debates about whether the “free enterprise system” or state-run enterprise works better, by examining the actual track record of the Chicago School, pure capitalist notion of free markets, and concluding that this “free enterprise system” has never existed.  We are accustomed to treating “the government” and “private companies” as two antithetical actors, and yet this assumption is no longer true, if it ever was.  

Take Lockheed Martin, for example--the US government is their biggest client, and Lockheed receives a greater share of the federal budget than do several large governmental agencies like the Department of Commerce.  What we have now is a corporatist state, an unholy alliance of government force and market greed, each of which is dangerous enough on its own, but which together are a truly terrifying combination.  In this combination, the government imposes a “free” market by force on unwilling citizens, then helps make sure that big corporate or political supporters get the lion’s share of that market, at the expense of most of the citizenry.  These corporate giants then come to wield the lion’s share of political power as well, which they continue to use for their benefit.  At the same time, this alliance means that, as things like war and disaster relief become for-profit enterprises, large corporations position themselves both to exploit and to encourage political and social chaos worldwide.  

Klein’s core thesis is that all of this has been the direct result of the attempt to apply Friedmanite Chicago School economics, a thesis that does not need to rely on tendentious causal connections or vague post hoc ergo propter hocs, since in many cases she can show how self-avowed Friedman proteges were the architects of these enterprises, which were enthusiastically hailed by Friedman and his cohorts.  Shortly after I started reading this book, I looked at some of the reviews on Amazon and decided to check out the small cluster of 1-star reviews, just to see what the opposition was saying.  A common complaint seemed to be: “This woman must not have read Friedman!  Friedman’s ideal wasn’t all this stuff that she’s portraying--dictatorships and oligarchical economies and a powerful corporatist state--he wanted freedom!”  Yes, but these people must not have really been reading this book.  The point isn’t what Friedman’s ideal was, just as the point isn’t what Marx’s ideal was.  With both, the problem is that their ideal, while great on paper, simply did not reflect the way real societies function, with real power interests that will protect themselves.  Especially if read with Polanyi’s argument about the inherent unnnaturalness of the self-regulating market in mind, The Shock Doctrine strongly suggests the conclusion that Pinochet-style violence, repression, inequality, and corporate dominance is the inescapable result of the attempt to apply Friedmanism in the world as we know it.  Forget the facile equation of capitalism and “freedom” or “democracy”--a democratic society, Klein shows, will revolt against the attempt to impose such an economic system, and so it can only be imposed by force or chaos, and then freedom is out of the picture.

  

How did we ever trick ourselves into believing that if we just removed the impediments to letting society be run by greed, we’d have a free and peaceful world?  Greed means that Lockheed Martin will fund war propaganda to get us to invade Iraq, and who’s to tell them that’s off-limits?   

Now, this book has some flaws, of course, which can get quite annoying at times.  For one thing, Klein doesn’t always seem to realize the radicalness of her own thesis--the thesis that we can no longer dichotomize business and government, since the two have increasingly merged their interests, personnel, and operations.  Repeatedly, she falls back into talking as if we’re dealing with a straightforward government vs. business, public vs. private battle, in which the public sphere is always the good guy, and private business is always the bad guy.  All of the problems, on this narrative, stem from not enough government--if only the government were bigger and stronger, all would be well.  And this gets tiresome--for some reason, whenever some crucial task currently administered by government isn’t getting done, it’s because the government is underfunded and sapped of resources, but whenever some crucial task currently administered by a private company isn’t getting done, it’s because they’re lazy, corrupt, and inefficient.  This is a rather dubious picture.  However, that said, the book does force us to rethink some of our equally dubious conservative assumptions--namely, that a private company will always do a job better than the government will, or that governments cannot do a fair bit of good in restraining baleful inequalities within society.

Also, Klein is terribly one-sided in her telling of the story.  She never really gives Friedman, et. al., a chance to tell their side of the story; when she does quote them or give a bit of their perspective, she immediately makes snide mockeries.  I think this tale could be even more compelling than it is were she to give them a fair hearing, to say, “Here’s what this movement wanted to achieve.  They really wanted these great goals, and they really thought these things would happen, and here’s why.  But here’s why those dreams failed when they met reality.”  Without that kind of sympathy and perspective, this ends up sounding propagandistic at times.  

Of course, another related criticism is that, as would surely be the case in any book of this size and scope, there are some places where the argument seems much weaker, and somewhat strained.  Was there really foul play going on here?  Was the story really that simple there?  Are we really to believe that this policy was such a bad thing?  She has some really damning material when she’s discussing Chile and the South American juntas, and also when she discusses post-9/11 developments and the Iraq War.  Most of the stuff in between contributes valuably to her thesis and narrative, but in some of it, it feels like she’s overreacting.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly for us Christians, this book is handicapped by the fact that it is written in an almost relentless torrent of moral passion, but a passion without any clear basis.  As a Christian, I can offer all kinds of reasons why most of the phenomena described in this book are indeed evil and appalling and should be resisted.  But what’s her basis?  At times, it seems to be an unswerving devotion to democracy.  Time and time again, her objection to Friedmanism is that its adoption in a society has to be undemocratic--it will not be supported by the majority of the people, and so the rulers have to find some way of imposing it against their will.  I’m not convinced this is automatically wrong.  After all, the purpose of rulers is to rule, is to make hard decisions that may not be popular, and if the rulers are in fact wiser than the ruled, that may mean they will take the right course of action, even if it is not generally supported.  But there is a difference between governing and oppressing, and in most of her examples, the actions taken were not merely undemocratic, but violent and deceptive.  So, a Christian can get angry about this as well.  She also seems to operate on the assumption that there’s a huge range of tasks in a society that ought to be provided by the government rather than for a profit.  Many of us may not entirely agree with her here, but I do begin to see the benefits of leaving the profit motive out of the picture when it comes to basic services for a society, even if that doesn’t mean it’s best to put the central government in charge of them.    And as Christians, we should agree that there is something wrong and dangerous about companies making a profit off of disasters, violence, and people in great need.  Biblically, the principles are clear--if your brother is weak and poor, you can’t try to make money off of him; you have to help him at your own expense.  Capitalism says, “Aha!  This person or this country has been brought to its knees--now’s the chance to make a killing!”  Finally, she is operating on the assumption that the people of a country have a right to a fair share of the products of their country, and that huge income inequality is an unjust state of affairs. I have a feeling that many people from my background will not share these assumptions, but I confess that I’m finding it rather difficult to object to them.  

In conclusion, this book is a wake-up call for Christians in the Western world who are accustomed to take it as one of those inevitable facts of life that the two-thirds world is poor and oppressed, and who subconsciously (or even openly) attribute it to the native incompetence and wickedness of these peoples: “We’re Protestant Christians, and so we’ve figured out how to prosper; they’re not, so it’s no wonder they’re condemned to keep wallowing in poverty.”  This book alerts us to the fact that this poverty and oppression is the result of particular decisions and policies largely emanating from our shores, policies that we have enthusiastically supported as long as they made us richer, and that we have a responsibility to repent of.