It’s strange how the world no longer will use the category of sin. Even progressives, with a deeply puritan secular morality, don’t want to use that word. Rather their condemnation of actions is not to call out the truth, e.g., that a fallen person with common humanity to them has done something they feel is very wrong, but rather they want to label that person as somehow categorically different and only worthy of condemnation. Racist! Homophobe! The concept of sin itself necessitates an external standard that is both the declarer and the judge of the offense, and more importantly, the only one who truly has a right to be offended. But that would bring God into the picture, so we can’t have that–sin has to go. But with the repudiation of the concept of sin, it’s easy to jettison entire categories of sin. Sometimes that even enters into the church. When is the last time you have heard a sermon that had more than a few moments of discussion around envy? Have you ever heard a prayer that we would not be envious, or that repented of envy? Yet the Bible has quite a few references to envy (~15-25 depending on translation), such as this one in Proverbs 14:30 : A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot. Wow. Makes the bones rot. And yet much of our public policy is to focus on inequalities and use the power of the state to take from one to give to another–pure pillage. Which leads us to today’s quote of the day, from Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas (who focused quite a bit of his thought on economic growth):

Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution. In this very minute, a child is being born to an American family and another child, equally valued by God, is being born to a family in India. The resources of all kinds that will be at the disposal of this new American will be on the order of 15 times the resources available to his Indian brother. This seems to us a terrible wrong, justifying direct corrective action, and perhaps some actions of this kind can and should be taken. But of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production. (Lucas 2004)

In my class on macroeconomics (productivity chapter), I always make the point that “People and nations are poor because they do not produce enough.” And then I’ll say something to the effect of “there may be many underlying factors and evils that help explain why they don’t produce enough, but this recognition is essential–to help them become richer, we must help both individuals and nations become more productive.”

Let’s not drink the poison. Let’s figure out how to lift the poor brother up rather than tear the rich person down.