The Economic State We'Re in: Can the Economy Work for Everyone?

Abstract

flexibility of labour', wage dumping, the feminisation of poverty, degradation of social services, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, the extinction of species, and so on. Simultaneously, we witness tremendous wealth accumulation in the hands of a few.But to whom should Christians and churches listen to understand what is happening and to discern requisite courses of action? Should we listen to the 'experts' and to the politicians guided by them? They tell us that there is no alternative to the present system and state of affairs. They present us with abstract economic models and figures. According to them, the economy has its laws to be followed. Biblically speaking, however, there is no doubt that God looks at economies from a different perspectivenot from the deterministic laws of market forces but from the actual life of God's children and the earth.According to Exodus 3, the first self-revelation of God starts with God's listening to the cries and seeing the misery of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. God says with respect to credit mechanisms which hurt people: 'If your neighbour cries out to me, I will listen, for I am compassionate' (Exod. 22:27). Compassion is the hermeneutic key to economics from a biblical perspective.This approach, however, entails conflict for those who follow it. Compassion is an emotion. Yet mainstream experts tell us that economics is a science from which emotions should be excluded.Within the church there will be conflict, too. Most members will understand compassion as charity. Yet the Bible attacks unjust structures in the name of compassion, talks about the liberation of slaves, asks for the breaking of debt mechanisms in the name of reallife people, and so on. Biblical accounts of compassion involve changes of place, moving to the side of the downtroddennot for charity but because there, and only there, God and God's Messiah Jesus can be found (Matt. 25:31ff.).2 2. The socially regulated market economy in industrialised countries after the Second World War at least tried to make the capitalist economy work for everyone. The assumption was that national governments could regulate national economies and that the economy would respond to mass demand. Keynes's 1944 attempt at Bretton Woods to introduce instruments for a global social regulation of the economy was rejected by the United States. This was one of the factors paving the way for neo-liberal globalisation starting in the early 1970s. The classical liberal period of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries ended in catastrophes: the great recession of 1929 and two world wars. One of the key causes of the recession was the dominance of financial speculation over the economy.2 Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 'Das Wesen der Kirche', lecture delivered in 1932 while Bonhoeffer was Privatdozent in Berlin; Dietrich Bonhoeffers Werke 11, 239ff.