Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Should Christians support social justice? Is wealth redistribution good for the poor?

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Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Witt pens this article in the American Spectator on the Gospel, business and social justice.

Excerpt:

The third term, social justice, is unlike the other two in its having a justifiable raison d’être. It stretches back to 19th century Catholic social thought and was used in the context of nuanced explorations of law, ethics, and justice. Unfortunately, this nuance and precision usually falls away in popular usage, and the term has been co-opted by the left to imply that ordinary justice is a mere tool of the ruling elite, with the real deal being “social justice.”

This impoverished meaning needs to be addressed. If a society extends justice to the rich and well-connected but allows the poor to be bullied and swindled by corrupt players inside and outside of the government, the problem isn’t unsocial justice but a lack of justice. If the poor in many developing nations can’t get access to credit or the courts because they can’t register their businesses, and they can’t register their businesses because they don’t have the bribe money and connections to navigate a byzantine regulatory maze, the problem is injustice, plain and simple. Such a society doesn’t need a social brand of justice any more than a poor neighborhood without stores needs a social grocery store. The neighborhood needs an ordinary grocery store, and the unjust society needs basic justice. Grocery stores and justice are already intrinsically social.

More than accurate semantics is at stake here. Often the popular call for “social justice” boils down to an ill-conceived call for coercive wealth transfers — for instance, getting rich countries to transfer more of their tax revenues to the governments of poor countries as foreign aid. It’d be nice if this approach actually helped the poor, since we’ve been using it for the past 60 years. Unfortunately, the statistical and narrative testimony on this strategy hovers between mixed and scandalous.

The reasons for this are complex but not so complex as to excuse the status quo. Much of the aid money gets quietly funneled into the pockets of corrupt politicians. In other cases the aid money reaches its intended target but, since the aid money is fungible, it still supports bad actors. It does so by freeing a regime of the political necessity of paying for the schools, road projects and emergency relief already covered by the foreign assistance. This, in turn, allows the regimes to spend more of their tax revenues for enhancing their own wealth and power.

Worse, the small fraction of aid money that actually reaches its intended destination often puts indigenous producers out of business, since it’s difficult to compete against free goods from abroad. Haiti’s rice farmers, for instance, once exported rice, but today their livelihoods have been all but wiped out by subsidized U.S. rice dumped on the country as foreign aid.

Add to all of this international “social justice” the devastating cultural effects of America’s welfare state. The neighborhoods flooded with 50 years of this domestic “social justice” now face far higher levels of criminal injustice and anti-social behavior than before the justice arrived.

Much of the problem stems from welfare’s effect on the institution of the family. The percentage of children being raised by both of their biological parents in America’s poorest neighborhoods used to be low and fairly comparable to what was found in middle and upper class neighborhoods, but the Great Society programs of the 1960s changed that.

As George Gilder put it in Wealth and Poverty, the underclass husband and father was “cuckolded by the compassionate state,” a violation which has incited “that very combination of resignation and rage, escapism and violence, short horizons and promiscuous sexuality that characterizes everywhere the life of the poor.”

Yale University sociologist Elijah Anderson put it almost as bluntly in a 1989 journal article: “It has become increasingly socially acceptable for a young woman to have children out of wedlock — significantly, with the help of a regular welfare check.”

The plain testimony of history is that the left’s strategy for saving the poor has been a tragic failure. It has stifled development in poor countries, bred a fatherless underclass in the United States, and all but bankrupted the European Union. Cloaking all of this in the guise of “social justice” serves only to perpetuate the tragedy.

It turns out that the very people who cry the loudest about wanting to help the poor – by redistributing wealth from those who produce to those who don’t – are the ones who incentivize people to make decisions that will make them poorer and expose them to more violence. Sure, there is a certain amount of uncertainty in life, but when you reward failure and punish success, you get more takers and fewer makers. The alternative to taxation and redistribution is to leave wealth in the hands of the individuals and businesses and trust them to make the decision about sharing. When businesses pay less in taxes, they expand – and more people start up new businesses, because they are attracted by the chance to make higher profits. Although letting individuals and business keep their own money is frowned on by the secular left, that’s because they themselves project their tendency not to give to charity and create jobs onto everyone else. They don’t understand charity and entrepreneurialism, that’s why they take money away from people who work and who create wealth.

I do want to say one other thing. I find it troubling when Christians present themselves to me as being social conservative, and fiscally liberal. There is no such thing as a social conservative and a fiscal liberal. If a person demands that the state provide cheese sandwiches to the children of single mothers in public schools, then  it creates more of an incentive to become a single mother, and less of an incentive to marry. That redistribution lowers the cost of single motherhood and raises the cost of marriage. It has been shown that single motherhood is the leading cause of child poverty – so why would we put into place incentives that encourage people to not make good decisions about sex? Why subsidize people who refuse to exercise self-control in sexual matters? Why make it encourage people to inflict fatherlessness on their own innocent children? Marriage is correlated with increased safety for women and children. Lowering the moral standards and paying people to make mistakes isn’t good for them. And it’s not good for their children.

The more you tax those who produce, the fewer of them you get. And the more you subsidize those who collect, the more of them you get. When men see themselves as slaves of the state – working only to be plundered – they stop working and they stop marrying. Why would a man work to feed the children of someone who could not even bother to get married before having babies? Why would a man get married knowing that half of what he earns will go to the state? Let families keep more of their own money, so that families are empowered – and not government. Let families keep their own money so they decide how to spend it, instead of depending on government. Let single mothers have to face the cost of their decisions. Let them ask charities for help, not the government. When people have to ask their neighbors for help, they know that they have done wrong, and that the money they get came from someone who worked for it. That is not there when government taxes and writes them a no-guilt check. Then it’s an entitlement, and they don’t learn their lesson.

Instead, let individuals and businesses make the decision to help those who they think are truly willing to try to improve their lot in life. Those are the ones who need support. When you leave wealth distribution to the government, no one is there to make those moral judgments. And it’s worse than that. When government takes over industries like health care, they are often supported by naive pro-lifers who think that wealth redistribution is compassion. But a secular government has no interest in women who stay home to raise their children – they want women to get out into the work force and pay income taxes. A single-payer health care system is always going to be pro-abortion for that reason. And any pro-lifer who votes “with their heart” for single-payer health care is a fool. They are, in effect, pro-abortion. Think before you vote.

Commentary

Should Christians give money to help the poor or to apologists and scholars?

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Here’s a post from Triablogue, the Internet lair of the most fearsome Calvinist bloggers!

Excerpt:

As you make donations over this Christmas season, are you including apologetics ministries in your giving? People will donate many millions of dollars to helping the poor, finding cures for diseases, and other such causes. Governments, universities, and other segments of society will also invest large amounts of money in such things. On an average day, you might hear a few advertisements for charities on the radio, see a few more on television, see a couple others in a magazine, and get an email about one from your employer. Part of the money you earn by going to work will go to government programs intended to do things like providing food and shelter for the poor, in this country and around the world. These efforts involve a tremendous number of organizations and individuals and a tremendous amount of time and money, among other resources. But you’ll rarely be encouraged to give a single penny to any apologetic work.

One of the excuses sometimes cited to justify Christian neglect of apologetics is that God doesn’t need apologetics in order to work in people’s lives. He doesn’t need to use something like a philosophical, historical, or scientific argument.

Let’s apply that same reasoning to other areas of life. God doesn’t need our prayers. Let’s stop praying. Or just let a tiny minority of the church do it occasionally. God also doesn’t need Bible translators and publishers, and He doesn’t need to have you read the Bible. He can just implant the information directly into your heart. He also doesn’t need parents. Or pastors. He’s omnipotent. He can accomplish things without using us. Let’s not just neglect apologetics. Let’s neglect these other things, too, and see what happens.

I’m convinced that one of the most significant weaknesses of the modern church is a neglect of apologetics. And we’re living in an information age, when apologetics is even more important than it was previously. What if God sometimes allows us to suffer the normal consequences of our intellectual carelessness? What if, instead of constantly supernaturally intervening in order to make up for our neglect, He sometimes lets us suffer the natural consequences of our bad choices?

Ideas have consequences, and persuading people to hold one belief rather than another can have major significance. It’s something that can “greatly help” (Acts 18:27-28). If you give money to alleviate something like poverty or a disease, then why not give money to uproot ideas that produce those symptoms? We’re often focused more on shallow solutions than ones that are deeper and more lasting. We give money in response to poverty, a tsunami, or the spread of a disease, but we give much less, if anything, in response to the false ideas that surround us. Instead of feeling guilty for giving money to an apologetics ministry rather than something like a ministry that helps the poor, we ought to feel guilty for giving such a low percentage of our donations to apologetic work. If you give all of your donations to non-apologetic causes and none to apologetics, the world will applaud you. But we should be judging things by a different standard.

That’s a perfect post, and I left some of it out. The Triabloguers also give a list of charities that they support, and I support those too.

But here are the ones I personally like best: (in alphabetical order)

Jim Wallace is a bit of a neat case, because as far as I can tell, he doesn’t accept donations. But I list him here anyway, because I respect him highly.

And by the way, if you know any Christian scholars who are busy getting their undergraduate and graduate degrees, why not fire them a book or two? I have five good friends on Facebook who are working hard on their degrees, and it’s a good thing for us to take an interest in their progress.

UPDATE: Justin Brierley, the force behind the recent Reasonable Faith UK Speaking Tour, writes this in the comments:

Well since we’re in a generous mood… follow the link below to contribute towards funding the production of the videos from the UK Reasonable Faith Tour!

http://www.bethinking.org/what-is-apologetics/introductory/helping-fund-the-reasonable-faith-tour.htm

Not a bad idea. Getting the recordings of those debates out there is good work, and deserves funding.

Commentary

James Dobson lists ten potential sources of depression for wives

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I’ve been reading this interesting book by James Dobson, entitled “What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women“. In the book he asks the reader to rank the 10 common sources of depression for wives in order:

  • low self-esteem
  • fatigue and time pressure
  • loneliness, isolation, and boredom
  • absence of romantic love in marriage
  • financial difficulties
  • sexual problems in marriage
  • menstrual and physiological problems
  • problems with the children
  • aging
  • in-law problems

He has surveyed a whole bunch of Christian and the order above is the order that they gave him from most severe to least severe.

There is room in the book for ranking these and my ranking was like his, pretty much, except that I had two things reversed. I had the financial difficulties and in-law problems reversed, because I have this idea that women are really bad with money and that they care more about relationships. I also had aging and sexual problems reversed because I don’t think that sex is very important to women, and they are sort of unaware of how much of a problem it is for men. However, I think they are terribly concerned about aging.

Note: Commenter Maureen points out to me that women are better than men with money these days. I can’t go against this evidence showing that she is right.

So I thought I would post this to see if anyone else has any thoughts about this list. Does it seem right to you?

I noticed in this article that more and more women are suffering from depression, so it’s important to know why they do that.

Excerpt:

One in four women aged between 45 and 64 now experience some form of mental disorder – an increase of 20 per cent in the last 15 years.

This decline in mental health is greater than any other age or gender group, according to the research.

The study also found that women in general suffer more mental problems – or talk about it more -with 21.5 per cent complaining of stress or depression compared to 13.6 per cent of men.

Mental health charity Mind said women in their 40s and 50s were becoming increasingly affected by trying to manage the responsibilities of family, home and work.

The figures emerged as the independent psychiatric Capio Nightingale Hospital reported a 20 per cent rise in enquiries relating to depression since the start of the year, many related to financial pressures.

The NHS Information Centre report, entitled the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2007, was carried out by the National Centre for Social Research and the University of Leicester and questioned 7,461 adults.

It followed on from two similar NHS studies carried out in England in 1993 and 2000.

The report concluded that the number of 45 to 64 year old women with a common mental disorder rose from 20.5 per cent in 1993 to 25.2 per cent in 2007.

The survey also found that the number of women aged between 16 and 74 who reported thinking suicidal thoughts in the previous year rose from 4.2 per cent in 2000 to 5.5 per cent in 2007.

Dr Peter Byrne, director of public education at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the role of woman had changed significantly in the last 15 years.

“This particular age group was probably reared by their stay-at-home mothers and they are almost certainly now working mothers, who face the financial pressure of being part of a two income family,” he said.

It’s also important to pick a woman who can be made happy by things that the man can do. I think the wise man has to be careful to choose a woman whose interests are not based on her emotions but on a plan with outward-facing goals. Someone who likes to work at projects and get things done, rather than be dominated by her feelings. Someone who tries to control her feelings when she sees that they are not rooted in reality.

I think it’s a better situation for a man where he is in a relationship with a woman where he can do things in the world and that will drive her emotions. The situation to avoid is where a woman’s emotions are not rooted in anything in the real world and she in’t impressed by what a man does that accomplishes tasks to achieve specific goals that she is passionate about. You want to avoid a woman who is concerns about Betty Friedan’s “the problem that has no name” and one who is impressed with the apologetics course that you are teaching at the church.

You don’t want a woman who says “I’m depressed and since I don’t care about anything except my feelings and victimhood, nothing you can do for me impresses me”. You want a woman who says “I’m depressed but if you do things in the real world that help to achieve goals that I care about, then I’ll feel better”. This is something that has to be tested for in the courtship. At the very least, women ought to know how to identify when they are being tricked by their emotions. They have to be able to talk it out and see that there is nothing specific that is bothering them, and then realize that their feelings are playing tricks on them.