Cassidy and Peacock on Capitalism and Socialism

David Cassidy, my church’s former pastor and a godly man, and I had a brief conversation on Facebook a while back. I thought I’d re-post it here:

Cassidy: Pastors are not on the job to ‘Save America’. We are here to announce its eventual demise, conquest, redemption, and replacement with something that is already here and growing ever more powerful in this world every day – the Kingdom of God. Capitalism and Socialism are just labels for power centers that will fall. The flags of men will be folded up before the unfurled banners of Christ the King. That’s what pastors announce. Christian faith is not an exercise for weekend warriors. If anyone expects their pastors to simply affirm them in their marginalizing of reality, all in the name of the so-called real and relevant, they either have the right pastor for their pipe dream, or they are quietly being served by someone who actually loves them as he patiently subverts their false hope. There. You’ve been warned.

Peacock: Capitalism is corrupted today by humans, but it’s foundations in the ownership (God’s) and stewardship (humans’) of property (the Earth and its fruit) are scriptural and will never go away. As long as the heavens and earth exist – which will be for eternity, we will be called to be stewards of God’s private property. The best way to do that today is through the ownership and free exchange of private property. All this can be found in Scripture, starting with Genesis 1.

Cassidy: Corrupted would be a correct – if mild – description of the theft and exploitation of Gods property to the end that the poor are abused in the name of personal freedom. I agree it is the best system – largely considered – in a fallen world, but it isn’t the eternal kingdom.

Peacock: The Bible tells us, “You shall not steal.” So as the seventh commandment presupposes marriage, the eighth presupposes private property, which is part of God’s economy for carrying out the cultural mandate. Part of this is also the stewardship to which we are called to care for that property.

However, one can’t be a good steward of someone else’s’ property by force. Efforts of the government to take over stewardship our property, i.e., taxation, regulation, and condemnation, at some point (which we have gone far beyond today) undermine God’s economy for carrying out the cultural mandate and violate the 8th commandment. The result is that prosperity is reduced and morality corrupted.

Of course, we knew this was coming. Samual warned us the king “will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants.” If it were only 10% today! It is good that we are concerned about the poor, but the path for addressing that concern is through charity: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

There is nothing compassionate or charitable, though, about forcibly taking money from a person through taxes and giving it to another through welfare programs that encourage mothers to have (or abort) children out of wedlock. Additionally, such a system, as we have today, results in companies seeking profits from the government instead of the marketplace. So instead of businesses seeking to earn profits through voluntary purchases by consumers, they get their profits by lobbying government to forcibly take money from taxpayers and then turn it over to them through corporate welfare. I suggest the corruption in the profit-seeking corporate welfare system far outweighs the corruption we find in the market system of voluntary exchange. Which makes sense, because markets and charity, not government theft and welfare, is how God designed the world to work in the first place!

Cassidy: A lot I agree with there Bill, though I think the stewardship of another’s property is actually deeply Biblical and sometimes essential (Luke 16:10-12, etc). We are certainly not under-taxed on the Fed level, though the proper use of the gathered funds is a different matter, whether its 10% or 38%… I even recall a 90% tax bracket that existed in the UK in 1979 when I moved there. There will always be a debate on where the line is in regard to Fed and state responsibilities, from disaster relief to road construction and other infrastructure issues to care for the poor.

I don’t think we are worse off because of Medicaid and would be all for a fed tax-funded, state-administered Medicaid type system for those unable to buy health insurance etc. So the debate about the proper amount of tax and the right use of what’s collected will continue. I hope it will generate wise answers to the many challenges our cities, rural areas, and other communities and individuals face. Kind regards, and thanks again for commenting!

Peacock: You point out something that I missed, though I would put it differently. Gary North asserted that property ownership is trinitarian in nature, and thus ownership is overlapping: “Certain pieces of property are owned primarily by individuals but only secondarily by the state. In other cases, property is owned by individuals, but families also have rightful claims. In other words, property must never be defined as exclusively and absolutely owned by any single human being or any single human institution. This conclusion is implied by the very statement which begins this chapter: God alone is the absolute owner of all the creation. He, and He alone, possesses absolute rights of ownership. All other ownership claims are subordinate.”

North further points out that “The biblically mandated system of private ownership establishes an unbreakable legal connection between ownership and responsibility.” I would say then that if we start trying to be stewards of other’s property (Luke 16:10-12 points out the problem of poor stewardship by some, but doesn’t call for stewardship by others as the solution) it obfuscates the unbreakable connection between ownership and responsibility, which then ultimately leads to the tragedy of the commons where no one is in charge. Instead, we should seek to enforce the connection, largely through contracts and (very) secondarily through regulations as needed.

Applying this to Medicaid, one can make a strong case with the data that medical care under Medicaid is substandard, which thus demonstrates the obfuscation of property ownership responsibility. The poor would receive better medical care if we eliminated Medicaid and other government health care mandates and regulations (especially the FDA drug approval process which is the primary driver of high prescription drug costs) and relied on charity (love) to establish means of health care treatment for the poor. This, after all, was the model being lived out in America through non-profit hospitals (Ben Taub, St. David’s, etc.) before government stepped in. I do agree that it is not so much the level of taxation as how the tax revenue is used in determining when the level of taxes is too high. Though I would suggest to Christian policymakers that Scripture’s direction on a 10% tithe is not a bad place to start when it comes to understanding the proper level of taxation.