Pastor's note: This is the third sermon of a four part series on economics. I owe a great debt of gratitude to William Cavenaugh and the book he wrote, Being Consumed. These four sermons on economics are an attempt to share the insights he writes about in that book.
Scripture: Matthew 16:13-20, Romans 12:1-8
This is the third Sunday of a four-Sunday series on Economics. We all know that we must and do operate as players in the economic system. We must buy, sell, consume, work, choose, own, and trade. This is a reality of life. And with each day that we wake up, open the paper and see another story about the decline of the economy, we are faced with being necessary players in a system that wields great and sometimes terrifying power over our lives and the lives of others.
It is precisely when things get difficult that we are most tempted to move into “survival mentality” and abandon our principles and ideals. But, as Christians living during an economic downturn – or even recession – we can’t afford to abandon our ideals. The world can’t afford for us to do that. In fact, in my opinion, Christian churches have been far too absent from economic discussions believing theology and economics have little to say to one another. But, if our faith has little to say to the economic systems of our day, then we have little to say, period. People’s lives are affected by economics more than almost anything else.
The first week we looked at contrasting assumptions we have about our world and its resources. One can assume scarcity and then operate economically with that at the center and ground of everything. Or, one can trust in God’s generosity and assume abundance as the basis of everything which altars how we interact with one another as we engage in economic decisions.
Last week we talked about the fact that far from being too attached to material goods, it is our growing detachment from things that has led to a morally blind, or even morally suspect, economic system. We no longer know where things are produced, who produces them, how they get to us, and what happens to all the people and God’s creation along the way. This detachment keeps us from making informed decisions in our purchasing, and makes us unsuspecting accomplices in an economy that is devastating the planet and exploiting workers all over the world.
This week we will talk about what a truly free market looks like in God’s realm.
A free market, we are told, is a market in which prices of goods and services are arranged completely by mutual consent of sellers and buyers. In such a market, a decision is free if an exchange is informed and entered into voluntarily. After that, very little matters except reducing, as much as possible, interference in those decisions from the state. The less state intervention there is, according to theorists like Milton Friedman, the more free a market is. The value of goods and services is determined entirely by what people desire and the market does not judge those desires and does not encourage any community development of agreed upon desires for the social good.
When free, the market beautifully responds to what the people want; it bends and folds and changes in mutually beneficial ways because, through their free choices, the people are dictating what should be produced, how much we will pay, and how much we value certain items. And in general, this is the system we have.
The problem is, many of us do not feel particularly free in the economic arena. There are all kinds of signs that our supposedly free market is anything but.
- Many of us feel “stuck” in jobs that we stay in only because we need the health insurance or income.
- Many of us feel forced to make decisions that go against our conscience – do I pay the rent, pay off my visa bill, pay off my medical bills or buy food at the grocery store this month?
- We have lost control over our private information in the name of market research under the pretense that companies are only trying to understand our desires better in order to give us what we want.
- We hear rumors that our clothes are made by children and other exploited laborers, but we have no idea how we could begin to resist.
- Many people in our world exchange their labor for a “free market rate” of 60 cents an hour. When the choice is no work or work for 60 cents an hour, and someone chooses to work for 60 cents an hour, that can hardly be called a “free decision.”
Freedom, in the Milton Friedman sense, is pursing whatever you want without interference from others. Your only part in the system is to satisfy your desires, as long as it doesn’t harm others. But, freedom from a Christian perspective is not just a lack of external interference. We all know that just desiring something does not make that desire good. Even if we are free to act on out desires, if we can’t control them – or more precisely cultivate the “right” desires – then that freedom to act is not necessarily Christian freedom.
Our free market system makes no judgments about what we desire – our faith, on the other hand, does. In faith, all desires are subsumed and ordered under our greatest desire, which is to love and serve God. In the language of Augustine, a Christian theologian from the 4th century, there are true desires and false desires, and we cannot always figure out on our own which is which. We need a community to help us sort it out, and absent that, we are not free in the Christian sense of the word. We will be ruled by our false desires – the ones that are given to us by the world through advertising, a culture of consumption, peer pressure, and our own anxieties and fears.
The key to true freedom is not just following whatever desire we happen to have, but cultivating the right desires. We do this through worship, prayer, and conversation with other people of faith, and service.
So that’s one disconnect. We know we are not always free when we are ruled by our false desires even though the market allows us to indulge those desires endlessly and rewards them with unfettered, unregulated access to the goods and services that satisfy us.
But there are other reasons our markets are not really free in the Christian sense of the word. When there is no shared, communal objective sense of what is good to desire, then all that is left is a battle of desires arbitrated by sheer power. And the market system has fostered a massive imbalance of power making almost everyone within it anything but free.
One way this power imbalance has arisen is through marketing. There is a thinly veiled lie that marketing is important because it provides the individual with the information necessary to make a truly informed – and thus free – decision. Yet, as the marketing companies themselves would boast, more often ads are about creating and manipulating desires. Through saturation and surveillance – companies collecting information about us in order to better target our unique patterns and personalities, marketing exerts a power that takes away freedom, and certainly distracts us from cultivating “true” desires.
While we set aside a couple of hours on Sunday mornings to be immersed in worship and prayer and to fill our hearts and minds with God’s words and music, every other minute of our week we are immersed in advertising. It’s everywhere, and even those of us who make an effort to reduce the power of advertising on our lives are exposed to it when we’re not even aware.
And, marketing is not the only area in which the logic of sheer power is manifest. Another is the concentration of power in enormous transnational corporations.
Transnational corporations are able to shop around the globe for the most advantageous wage environments, that is, those places where people are so desperate that they must take jobs that pay extremely low wages, in many cases wages insufficient to feed and house themselves and their dependents. All of this is done in the name of “free” trade.
But, is the person who works for dollars a day “free”? In the definitions of free market advocates, the answer seems to be “yes”. A woman’s decision to take a job making clothes for American markets would presumably be both informed and voluntary, provided she was not deceived about the kind and amount of work she would be doing, or about the hourly rate she would be paid. Presumably no one would force her to take the job, and no one would prevent her from leaving it. Both she and her employer would enter into this exchange in the expectation of benefiting from it. The employer would expect to increase profits by paying low wages, and the worker would expect an improvement over starvation.
The problem with this view is that it is blind to the real disparity of power at work here. And, in the free market context, to ask whether the exchange serves the common good, or it if is just, is irrelevant to the question of whether or not the exchange is free. Yet, this woman is not free in the Christian sense of the word. Nor is the market that is forcing her to take a job that does not allow her to flourish.
And, while some profit massively from these un-free market systems, most people in these corporations actually feel trapped.
When managers lament the displacement and suffering caused by closing factories that pay living wages and opening others that do not, I believe they are not just being disingenuous. When they blame the move on necessity, they recognize that the “free” market does not leave them free to act in ways they might believe are more just. They feel like they have no choice in the matter, because they assume that consumers will want to maximize their own gain in any transaction by paying the lowest price possible for a product.
Yet those of us consumers who might wish to communicate otherwise to the corporations don’t always have ways to do that. First, the products don’t come with enough information for us to “vote with our money”, so to speak. Take the example of buying beef in the supermarket. These days, in efforts to be more efficient and “meet consumer demand”, the cattle industry has changed dramatically. Each head of cattle now requires about 284 gallons of oil in its lifetime. Runnoff from the petroleum-based fertilizer has traveled down the Mississippi and created a 12,000-square-mile “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Extensive use of antibiotics has led to resistant strains of bacteria. And scientists believe that hormone use has contributed to dropping human sperm counts and sexual abnormalities in fish.
One cattleman interviewed said, “I’d love to give up hormones. If the consumer said, ‘We don’t want hormones,’ we’d stop in a second. The cattle could get along better without them. But the market signal is not there, and as long as my competitor is doing it, I’ve got to do it, too.” But it is difficult to imagine how this signal would be generated, because the system is designed to keep the origins of beef a mystery to the consumer. So the cattleman continues to feel coerced into using hormones. The exchange when we buy meat in the supermarket is less than free because the information we need is not actually available to us.
So what is the way out? How do we move from a free market system where most are prisoners to an economic system that is truly free? Paul gives it to us in one simple command: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed so that you may discern what is the will of God; what is good. Paul, based on his own conversion, had a vision of the church – that it would be different. Not separate from the world, but different in it.
He writes to the church in Rome, “do not be conformed to the world”, but maybe the better way to hear that, given what he says next, is “do not be formed by the world.” In other words, when we take the economic system we have as a given, it will trap us. If we don’t step outside of it – get away from the advertising, the assumptions, the power imbalance – then we will be formed by a world where human freedom is not the true goal. Do not be conformed, Paul says, so that you may discern the will of God.
And Jesus offers this same vision to Peter. Once Peter called Jesus Messiah, Jesus talked about what it meant to be transformed. “Everything you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven, and everything you bind will be bound.” We have the ability to change the forces of the universe itself when we act as transformed member of the body of Christ.
If we step out, we can cultivate the right desires – so that we can figure out what is truly good and what we should allow to inform our economic decisions. We can live differently – which is no small thing, according to Jesus. It can have massive effect, on us, but also on all those who we will affect with our transformed decisions.
There is a company, Mondragon, that began in the Basque region of Spain half a century ago. It was started by a Catholic priest and it is now a transnational corporation that does more than 4.8 billion dollars of business annually. Yet, this is one of the success stories of people who take the Church's social doctrine seriously, in particular, the teachings regarding (1) the dignity of the human person and his or her labor, (2) social solidarity, (3) the primacy of labor over capital. Management is elected by the workers, not hired by the money men, and the managers are part of the cooperative process in the enterprise. Each enterprise has a social committee that considers issues of health, safety, environment, and the social responsibilities of the enterprise. Capital is borrowed, stock is not sold for financing. All new employees become worker owners. Ten percent of corporate profits are donated to charity, 40% are retained by the cooperative to be used to benefit the "common good" of the cooperative (research, development, job creation, etc.), and the balance of the profits goes into capital accounts for the worker owners. These funds may be borrowed against at the cooperative's bank at very low interest rates, and are important parts of the social security arrangements.
It all sounds idealistic I'm sure, except for the fact that it is actually working, profitable, and growing.
It is possible to be different. It is possible, in the midst of a system that traps people in lives that don’t feel free, to offer a vision of free markets “Yahweh style”. Do not be formed by this world – be transformed. Then we can discern God’s will, and act in ways that will shift even the entrenched forces of our economy. May we all live in a free market someday. Amen.
