Praising Inequality

So here's what Brian Griffiths of Goldman Sachs says:

We have to tolerate the inequality [between Wall Street bonuses & Main Street pay] as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all

He was commenting on the $16.9 BILLION paid to Goldman Sachs for the 1st 9 months of 2009 after receiving billions in TARP funds from the US government.

Is this the kind or "free market" Christians should embrace?

Christian Robin Hoods

Suppose I gamble in the stock market and the company I "invest" in starts laying off hard working American engineers, not because of tough economic times, but because they are replacing them with just as hard working cheap foreign labor which is one tenth the cost. By doing this, they increase "shareholder value". After all, we "investors" demand quarterly results whereby our companies are working diligently to improve the bottom line, right?

Let's make it more interesting - more holy.

Suppose the company is a non-profit para-church organization. By laying off the Christian American engineer and hiring several remote Indians (or say Chinese or better yet, Burmese) programmers, the company then uses those savings to help the poor and needy.

A shrewd move, eh? Making "wise" use of what God has entrusted to us? Aren't we just "being a good steward" like the parable of the talents says to? Sounds pretty holy to me…

Many Christians would applaud such tactics - as long as the lost job isn't theirs. But that is the subject of another post (see "As Long As Its Not My Job"). What I want to focus on here is the notion that such thinking is moral.

Is it?

Or is it really just "ends justifying the means" thinking all gussied up as "doing God's will on earth"?

Is our motivation really to help the poor - or is it to increase the income stream of the corporation, thereby our own potential future profits? Or perhaps the motivation is simply pious - to make ourselves "look better" to both God and to the world.

The notion of choosing to bless one set of people over another...Does God ask us to do this? Would God do this?

No. God wants us to spread the Gospel (by living the gospel), to feed the poor and the widows - but not at the expense of other people - especially Christians. Our role on earth is not to behave as some sort of “Christian Robin Hood” stealing from the "rich" - even if it is helping the poor.

As Christians formulating our world view, let's make sure we get this right: God does not favor one group of His children over another - no matter what their earthly circumstances are. The God of the Bible would never do such a thing. Nor would He support such wrong thinking.

And neither should we.