Lux Lucet

Woe to those who join house to house; they add field to field, till there is no place where they may dwell alone in the midst of the land!. – Isaiah 5:8

Isaiah’s thundering indictment of Judah rivets the reader’s attention right from the beginning of the book bearing his name. The accusations fall like hammer blows from the prophets pen. Everything has become twisted, everything perverted: Worship, “I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting” (v13); Civil Society, “righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers” (v21); Business, “Your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water” (v22); Civil Government, “Your princes [are] rebellious and companions of thieves” (v23); and the Judiciary, “Everyone loves bribes, and follows after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, nor does the cause of the widow come before them” (v23).

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. For Americans are faced with much the same situation today as the men of Judah did some 2,700 years ago. Because Americans have rejected the revealed Word of God as the basis for their political views, limited government, private property and the rule of law – all Christian ideas woven into the fabric of our nation at the time of its founding – have likewise been rejected. One way this rejection manifests itself is the increasing polarization of society along lines of economic class. The popular way of putting this is to speak of the 1% versus the 99%. Across the political spectrum, many people perceive, and perceive correctly, that the we are no longer one nation governed by one set of laws. Rather, in many significant ways, the institutions of our nation are rigged to favor certain people at the expense of others.

Some would chalk this problem up to the natural tendency of capitalism itself. Writing in Salon, Edward McClelland commented,

The shrinking of the middle class is not a failure of capitalism. It’s a failure of government. Capitalism has been doing exactly what it was designed to do: concentrating wealth in the ownership class, while providing the mass of workers with just enough wages to feed, house and clothe themselves.

This is much the same argument pope Francis made in his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. According to the Bishop of Rome,

[S]ome people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.

In an interview he gave with Italian newspaper La Stampa, Francis defended himself against charges of Marxism by saying,

There is nothing in the Exhortation that cannot be found in the social Doctrine of the Church. I wasn’t speaking from a technical point of view, what I was trying to do was to give a picture of what is going on. The only specific quote I used was the one regarding the “trickle-down theories” which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about great er justice and social inclusiveness in the world. The promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefitting the poor. But what happens instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger[,] nothing ever comes out for the poor.

But is it true that capitalism – an economic arrangement in which the means of production are held privately and used according to the wishes of the owner – is designed to concentrate wealth in the hands of the ownership class? Is the pope right to caricature of economic liberty as some trickle-down theory that does nothing for the poor? Can the Bible provide any guidance to us in answering these questions?

The Establishment of the Hebrew Middle Class

Those who believe capitalism is opposes to middle class prosperity should consider the laws of the Hebrew republic as set down in the Pentateuch. The Law of Moses was very strong in its protection of property rights, that is to say, the Law of Moses was capitalistic.

For example, before the conquest of Canaan, statutes were established for how to divide the land, “And you shall divide the land by lot as an inheritance among your families; to the larger you shall give a larger inheritance, and to the smaller you shall give a smaller inheritance: there everyone’s inheritance shall be whatever falls to him by lot” (Num.33:54). This land, once assigned, was to remain with the tribe and with the family in perpetuity. And these property rights were to be ensured by laws concerning inheritance (Num. 27 and 36), laws against moving boundary markers (Deut. 19:14), and the laws of the kinsman redeemer and of the Jubilee (Lev.25:23-34). The capitalistic Law of Moses, far from concentrating wealth in the hands of the Hebrew 1%, ensured that everyone had the opportunity to own and use the capital goods of the society. Is short, Mosaic capitalism endowed the Hebrew nations with a large and vibrant land holding middle class.

The Destruction of the Hebrew Middle Class

I Samuel Chapter 8 outlines the beginning of the decline of the Hebrew middle class. Up to that time, the nation had been governed by a series of judges, with God as king. But the people, dissatisfied with Gods’ arrangement, longed for a king – that is to say, they wanted big government – just like all the surrounding nations had. In a remarkable passage, Samuel warned the people about asking for a king. The king, said Samuel, would take their sons to be in his army, their daughters to work as perfumers, cooks and bakers. He would take their fields, their vineyards, and olive groves and give them to his servants, etc. To put it another way, the Hebrews would be subjected to the sort of “crony capitalism” we see today that runs rampant in our own society today, replete as it is with subsidies, bailouts and special deals for the well-heeled and well-connected.

Fast forward a few hundred years, and we see that the dispossession of the hardy yeoman farmers of the Hebrew republic, a trend that began as a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand at the anointing of king Saul, had by Isaiah’s day progressed to the point where their descendents were little more than serfs. Commenting on this, Isaiah cried out, “Woe to those who join house to house; they add field to field, till [there] is no place where they may dwell alone in the midst of the land!” (Isa.5:8). In his commentary on Isaiah, Edward J. Young observed,

The condemnation is not of the purchase of property as such, but of monopoly and the acquisition of what belongs to a poor owner. Although not stated in so many words the implication seems to be that this was an unjust acquiring on the part of the wealthy. Against such procedures the law had provided checks, but there were not unscrupulous men in Israel who circumvented the law and were not content until they had obtained all the property which they could. Their action revealed an ungodly disposition, one involving covetousness and selfish ambition (p.206).

It was not the capitalism of the Hebrew republic that brought about the enserfment of the Hebrew middle class, but rather the lack of it. Corrupt princes and civil magistrates turned a blind eye to the cause of justice – Biblical justice, not social justice, which is not justice at all, but theft – refusing to enforce property rights and allowing the powerful and covetous to take advantage of their weaker brethren. Couched in the language the Occupy Wall Street movement, it was the so-called Judean 1% dominating the 99%.

Conclusion

Contra Salon and the Pope, the Bible teaches us capitalism, with its corollary emphasis on property rights and the rule of law, serves as a bulwark to middle class prosperity. Socialism, on the other hand, so far from being a means of establishing and preserving the middle class, actually lays the groundwork for its destruction. Big government everywhere and always is the enemy of mass prosperity. In ancient Israel, it was the peoples’ rejection of God as king that led to big government in the form of the monarchy, the subversion of the rule of law, and eventual dispossession of many small landowners. In the United States of the early 21st century, it is the rejection of God as our king that has led to the evils of fascist big government, the destruction of the rule of law, loss personal civil rights, loss of economic rights, banker bailouts and monetary debasement in the form of never ending Quantitative Easing (QE), all which in their own way work contrary to the interests of ordinary Americans, but are a boon to the central planners and their political favorite. Please see here and here for the truth about QE, which is sold to the public as necessary for achieving a stable currency and full employment, but which in the words of hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller is actually, “the biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the rich ever.”

It is critical that the American people understand the source of their economic troubles. To the degree that they have come to do so, the 1% were not empowered to dominate the 99% because of capitalism and limited government. This is the result of the fascist regulatory state that has been under construction since the Progressive era. If Americans are ever to be successful at throwing off their shackles, they must first understand who it was that forged them in the first place.