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“Greed is good.” So went Gordon Gekko’s defence of capitalism in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street, yet as the film goes on to show greed can also be destructive for all involved. So also goes the classic Christian criticism of capitalism; in the words of Lesslie Newbigin, a distinguished Christian missionary to India:
The driving power of capitalism is the desire of the individual to better his material condition … The name that the New Testament gives to the force in question is covetousness. The capitalist system is powered by the unremitting stimulation of covetousness.
Yet while this might be one condemnation of capitalism it can also be one justification. Indeed it is perhaps worth speculating that if such a theory were accepted by a poor nation it would be its own punishment.
However the quote also reveals the anomaly that lies at the heart of many Christian condemnations of capitalism, namely a false view of wealth. The desire to improve one’s own material position is described as covetousness (something which the Bible forbids five times in ten commandments) for whatever you require is already owned by someone else. Yet as was mention above this is a fundamentally false view, what economists call the fixed wealth fallacy: the amount of wealth in society is not fixed and there always exists the capacity for invention, discovery and wealth creation.
The other issue that is touched upon is that of greed, something that the Bible condemns with regard to many things but most especially with regard to money (1 Timothy 6:10), but is this the fault of the system or the individual? Here, surely, Christianity can provide us with only one answer, the individual. Sin, of which greed is one of Dante’s seven deadly, is an individual problem requiring individual repentance leading to individual salvation. Sin is not the fault of a system and to blame that system, however imperfect it is, is to become an apologist for many crimes when the ultimate responsibility is an individual one (replace greed with genocide and capitalism with National Socialism and you have yet another, but more horrific, example of this.) Greed is not inherent in any system, whether political or not, and any system leaves scope for it. While capitalism on the outside might seem to encourage it more it is undeniably present in other political systems, most notably socialism. Consider whether the arguments for redistributing wealth are not just as much an example of covetousness and greed. Indeed it is also perhaps worth considering the point that the stock market (condemned by many for being the home of the yuppie culture) is where capital is raised which provides for investment and research jobs, areas normally considered to be more respectable.
Up until now I have tried to show that wealth creation and the desire for self improvement are not fundamentally immoral and that greed is not the fault of the capitalist system and is therefore not a reason to condemn it. Yet within what limits should a Christian operate in capitalist world?
Here the answer is again provided by the Bible. The Christian does have a responsibility towards the poor and the dispossessed (the Old Testament laws of tithe and jubilee make this clear) as well as the responsibility to pay people for work done for him (Lev 19:13 and James 5:4 for example) but responses, by their very nature, will be individual, and changing according to circumstances. How much this responsibility is an individual one and how much of it should be done by the State is a question that lies outside the purposes of this article but it is certain that the welfare state can be attacked as well as defended from a Christian perspective. Indeed socialists amongst us and those who would seek to defend big government might well wish to consider the words of 1 Samuel 8:10-18 before too quickly resorting to a Christian/moral defence.
Capitalism is not perfect, nothing created by fallible human beings ever will be, yet it is hard to condemn it as immoral. It is capitalism that has brought about the vast increases in living standards over the last century — consider now how poverty is defined as living below a level of basic decency rather than living at subsistence level — and it is capitalism that provides the opportunities and rewards that are the best and only real answer to the problems of poverty. I shall end by quoting the theologian Michael Novak who gives what is surely the most powerful moral defence of capitalism:
In comparing which system is more likely to bring about universal opportunity, prosperity from the bottom up, the embourgeoisement of the proletariat, and the raising up of the poor, the historical answer is clear: for the poor, market systems provide for better chances of improving income, condition, and status. That is one reason why so many of the world’s poor migrate toward democratic and capitalist systems.
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Last modified: 25th November 2005