CAN GOD'S ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES SOLVE POVERTY
& ECONOMIC INJUSTICE?
!!YES THEY CAN AND THEY HAVE!!
"There can be no fairness or justice in a society in which some live in homelessness, or in the shadow of that risk, while others cannot even imagine it.” Jordan Flaherty
"Sodom’s sins were pride, gluttony, and laziness, while the poor and needy suffered outside her door." Ezekiel 16:49
"Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." Nelson Mandela
"There should be no poor among you, for the Lord your God will greatly bless you in the land he is giving you as a special possession. 5 You will receive this blessing if you are careful to obey all the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today." Deut. 15:4,5 (poverty has been reduced by ~26% in the last 30 years by anti-poverty work)
"In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of." - Confucius
“There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.” -Plato, 427-347 BC
"Poverty is death in another form." Latin proverb
"Sodom’s sins were pride, gluttony, and laziness, while the poor and needy suffered outside her door." Ezekiel 16:49
"Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." Nelson Mandela
"There should be no poor among you, for the Lord your God will greatly bless you in the land he is giving you as a special possession. 5 You will receive this blessing if you are careful to obey all the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today." Deut. 15:4,5 (poverty has been reduced by ~26% in the last 30 years by anti-poverty work)
"In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of." - Confucius
“There should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor again excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.” -Plato, 427-347 BC
"Poverty is death in another form." Latin proverb
"If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark....there are endless problems with social gradients [crime, health, infant mortality, education, mental illness, trust, divorce, etc.) that are worse in more [economically] unequal countries -- not just a little bit worse, but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common. Think of the expense, the human cost of that. ...in the more equal countries on the left -- Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden -- the top 20 percent are about three and a half, four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent. But on the more unequal end -- U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore -- the differences are twice as big. " Dr. Wilkinson, www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
"You must distribute the land among the clans by sacred lot and in proportion to their size. A larger portion of land will be allotted to each of the larger clans, and a smaller portion will be allotted to each of the smaller clans...In this way, the portions of land will be divided among your ancestral tribes. Numbers 33:54 (This land could be leased, but never permanently sold. This ensured that every clan/family in every generation had capital to work with to support their needs and dreams. It was impossible for the 1% to take control of say ~50% of the natural resources.)
"When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw."--Nelson Mandela (speaking about apartheid and the injustices that forced him to fight it.)
Have you ever been homeless, hungry, in poverty so severe that you were not able to think about anything else? Have you ever had to choose between committing a crime and starving, between selling your body for sex and malnutrition? Has your marriage been broken apart because of broken contracts or because you lost a job due to a betrayal. Have you lost all your savings because of corrupt businessmen (such as happened with the collapse of Enron and other companies in economic crashes)? Have you ever missed out on a graduation trip because your family didn't have even $1 dollar to spare so you could go? I have experienced some economic injustice myself and read research or personally know of individuals who have experienced each of the above cases due to terrible greed and economic injustice.
At present the top 1% own more than the other 99% combined and just 8 people own more than the bottom half of humanity COMBINE!. This is an obscene injustice that results in all sorts of abuse and exploitation around the planet.
Economic rights or the lack of these rights have dramatic effects on almost every sector of society from poor to rich and every sane person must oppose extreme economic inequalities like this just for the sake of the survival of civilization alone, let alone many other reasons. When people's economic rights are respected and granted, this dramatically improves freedom, economic prosperity for all, limits damage/stress to marriages/family, improves children's education/potential, etc. When fair economic rights are robbed, a few elite can control media and therefore the thinking of millions, manipulate governments, education, science esp, in unjust ways that the Bible's economic principles are designed to prevent Economic injustice can and often directly does result in human trafficking, sex slavery, broken families, divorce, health/hunger problem, clean water problems, political manipulation, educational indoctrination in secularism and a myriad of other human rights problems. Read about more of this here:
The cost of inequality: how wealth and income extremes hurt us all
https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cost-of-inequality-oxfam-mb180113.pdf
The Bible specifically predicts that there will be terrible times due to greed in the end days (2 Timothy 3:1-5), but that God knows about all trials and temptations we have gone through and He has world (John 16:33). He helped the early church overcome the economic injustice of the nations of their time with simple principles and science shows that this is very possible to do in our time as well in various ways.
The most important by far are:
1) Be part of a church that teaches both God's grace and forgiveness (Eph. 2:8, 9; 1 John 1:8-9) and also faithfully obeying His laws that express the highest levels of love, freedom and service (Romans 13:8-10, James 1:25-7). Make sure it respects God's laws and principles from both the Old and New Testaments since Jesus said He did not come to abolish God's laws, but to fulfill them and that replacing God's laws with man's laws is vain and useless (Matt 5:17-18, Mark 7:5-13, Rev. 12:17, 14:12). Institutions and corporations that are making people poorer often charge 5-25% interest rates and drain billions per year from the middle class and poor by doing this. But when you contribute to an average church, it brings about $4.77 in benefits to the community, or an increase of ~477%! More biblical churches can make that $1 turn into up to $10 of benefits or a whopping 1000% increase.
http://www.haloproject.ca/phase-1-toronto
2) Make your family strong. Broken/divorced families can cause a couple to spend up to $1 million more during their lifetimes on corporations. This is a big reason why so many wrong concepts of love are promoted in media which illed by corporations.
3) Follow God's principles, especially in health, economics, human rights and other areas.
4) After your family needs and comforts are taken care of, do all you can to help other families become stable, independent and self-supporting (such as finding people jobs, supporting job training, teaching healthy cooking skills, funding education, etc.). Avoid giving that makes people dependent. That is damaging both to you and the person you are giving to.
Many people who have never experienced dire poverty have great difficulty understanding the full range of consequences that it has for individual lives, families, children and society. They think, oh just pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and you'll be successful like me. But as both research and experience demonstrate conclusively, many of the poor have no bootstraps left because of extremely unfair economic justice by wealthy banks like Goldman Sachs that pillage the lower classes, by government policies that allow the wealthy to skip out on paying taxes using loopholes and tax havens and in many other ways. In the
It is true that there are some homeless and poor who have made wrong choices (such as getting addicted to alcohol and drugs) that caused their situation. But, this is a small proportion compared to the number of people who have been forced into poverty due to severe economic injustice, exploitation, greed based crime and warfare and many other reasons. They don't realize that many people who are poor work just as hard if not harder than those who are rich. They just haven't had the same opportunities and benefits in history and the present that others have.
How important are economic rights? The fact that God and prophets emphasized them in ~2,000 verses to both Israel and foreign nations at all levels of society (such as Daniel to King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:25), more than most other topics in the Bible, means they are one of the highest priorities in the Bible. Only a few like salvation, eternity, the marriage/family unity, etc. are higher. There are ~30 economic principles in the Bible that apply to all levels of society, the individual, church, government, the poor, middle class and rich. The Bible tells us that while money is important, the love of money (greed) is the root of all evil. And economic researchers now understand much more why the prophets condemned economic injustice of many kinds, such as charging interest, monopolizing land (Nehemiah 5:1-12), hoarding (Eccl. 5:13, James 5:3, Prov. 22:16), getting out of paying fair taxes (Romans 13:6,7), oppressing the poor or welfare for the rich (Proverbs 22:16) so strongly in up to ~2,000 verses. Economic injustice, greed and poverty are major causes of a whole host of problems including hunger, crippling childhood development, lower IQ/grades, diseases, enormously increasing stress on marriages/families, abuse/disempowerment of children and women, crime, gangs, sex trafficking, debt slavery, wage slavery, chattel slavery, dramatic losses of many kinds of freedom, war and others. See for example: www.poverties.org/blog/effects-of-poverty,
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson#t-477261
There are many reasons why we need to make economic justice a priority. The Bible puts it very simply, that it is essential for the stability of a society.
"If a king steadfastly gives justice to the poor, his throne will be secure forever." Proverbs 29:14 (CJB)
Even conservative icons recognize that most other kinds of freedom are impossible if wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few.
At present the top 1% own more than the other 99% combined and just 8 people own more than the bottom half of humanity COMBINE!. This is an obscene injustice that results in all sorts of abuse and exploitation around the planet.
Economic rights or the lack of these rights have dramatic effects on almost every sector of society from poor to rich and every sane person must oppose extreme economic inequalities like this just for the sake of the survival of civilization alone, let alone many other reasons. When people's economic rights are respected and granted, this dramatically improves freedom, economic prosperity for all, limits damage/stress to marriages/family, improves children's education/potential, etc. When fair economic rights are robbed, a few elite can control media and therefore the thinking of millions, manipulate governments, education, science esp, in unjust ways that the Bible's economic principles are designed to prevent Economic injustice can and often directly does result in human trafficking, sex slavery, broken families, divorce, health/hunger problem, clean water problems, political manipulation, educational indoctrination in secularism and a myriad of other human rights problems. Read about more of this here:
The cost of inequality: how wealth and income extremes hurt us all
https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cost-of-inequality-oxfam-mb180113.pdf
The Bible specifically predicts that there will be terrible times due to greed in the end days (2 Timothy 3:1-5), but that God knows about all trials and temptations we have gone through and He has world (John 16:33). He helped the early church overcome the economic injustice of the nations of their time with simple principles and science shows that this is very possible to do in our time as well in various ways.
The most important by far are:
1) Be part of a church that teaches both God's grace and forgiveness (Eph. 2:8, 9; 1 John 1:8-9) and also faithfully obeying His laws that express the highest levels of love, freedom and service (Romans 13:8-10, James 1:25-7). Make sure it respects God's laws and principles from both the Old and New Testaments since Jesus said He did not come to abolish God's laws, but to fulfill them and that replacing God's laws with man's laws is vain and useless (Matt 5:17-18, Mark 7:5-13, Rev. 12:17, 14:12). Institutions and corporations that are making people poorer often charge 5-25% interest rates and drain billions per year from the middle class and poor by doing this. But when you contribute to an average church, it brings about $4.77 in benefits to the community, or an increase of ~477%! More biblical churches can make that $1 turn into up to $10 of benefits or a whopping 1000% increase.
http://www.haloproject.ca/phase-1-toronto
2) Make your family strong. Broken/divorced families can cause a couple to spend up to $1 million more during their lifetimes on corporations. This is a big reason why so many wrong concepts of love are promoted in media which illed by corporations.
3) Follow God's principles, especially in health, economics, human rights and other areas.
4) After your family needs and comforts are taken care of, do all you can to help other families become stable, independent and self-supporting (such as finding people jobs, supporting job training, teaching healthy cooking skills, funding education, etc.). Avoid giving that makes people dependent. That is damaging both to you and the person you are giving to.
Many people who have never experienced dire poverty have great difficulty understanding the full range of consequences that it has for individual lives, families, children and society. They think, oh just pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and you'll be successful like me. But as both research and experience demonstrate conclusively, many of the poor have no bootstraps left because of extremely unfair economic justice by wealthy banks like Goldman Sachs that pillage the lower classes, by government policies that allow the wealthy to skip out on paying taxes using loopholes and tax havens and in many other ways. In the
It is true that there are some homeless and poor who have made wrong choices (such as getting addicted to alcohol and drugs) that caused their situation. But, this is a small proportion compared to the number of people who have been forced into poverty due to severe economic injustice, exploitation, greed based crime and warfare and many other reasons. They don't realize that many people who are poor work just as hard if not harder than those who are rich. They just haven't had the same opportunities and benefits in history and the present that others have.
How important are economic rights? The fact that God and prophets emphasized them in ~2,000 verses to both Israel and foreign nations at all levels of society (such as Daniel to King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:25), more than most other topics in the Bible, means they are one of the highest priorities in the Bible. Only a few like salvation, eternity, the marriage/family unity, etc. are higher. There are ~30 economic principles in the Bible that apply to all levels of society, the individual, church, government, the poor, middle class and rich. The Bible tells us that while money is important, the love of money (greed) is the root of all evil. And economic researchers now understand much more why the prophets condemned economic injustice of many kinds, such as charging interest, monopolizing land (Nehemiah 5:1-12), hoarding (Eccl. 5:13, James 5:3, Prov. 22:16), getting out of paying fair taxes (Romans 13:6,7), oppressing the poor or welfare for the rich (Proverbs 22:16) so strongly in up to ~2,000 verses. Economic injustice, greed and poverty are major causes of a whole host of problems including hunger, crippling childhood development, lower IQ/grades, diseases, enormously increasing stress on marriages/families, abuse/disempowerment of children and women, crime, gangs, sex trafficking, debt slavery, wage slavery, chattel slavery, dramatic losses of many kinds of freedom, war and others. See for example: www.poverties.org/blog/effects-of-poverty,
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson#t-477261
There are many reasons why we need to make economic justice a priority. The Bible puts it very simply, that it is essential for the stability of a society.
"If a king steadfastly gives justice to the poor, his throne will be secure forever." Proverbs 29:14 (CJB)
Even conservative icons recognize that most other kinds of freedom are impossible if wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few.
“Our founding fathers knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise, and Republican self-government could succeed only if power was widely distributed, and since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people in the country ..Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few?“--President Ronald Reagan, conservative icon
And quite a few liberals do too. Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC). He writes:
"Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state. Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans...For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges...the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, also communal infrastructure and extract tribute.Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s Stopped,
www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/02/debt-slavery-why-it-destroyed-rome-why-it-will-destroy-us-unless-its-stopped/
Once you understand that it is economic concentration of wealth that is the foundation of oligarchies and plutocracies, the reasons for God's economic laws becomes much clearer and God's wisdom in these simple principles can be called genius. God's economic laws were not just for Israel. They are valid at all times. Following God's economic policies has proven crucial in modern times in many ways, but 2 big ones which we will discuss in more detail below are:
1) In just the last 30 years, churches and NGOs following just 3 economic principles in the Bible have led in saving millions of lives, helped 1.3 billion people get out of poverty and helped 42 million kids get a chance at an education.
2) Korea followed many policies of the Bible at many levels of society, including the government sharing land with most families equitably along with a free market. These policies led to Korea skyrocketing from one of very poorest nations in the world in the 1950s to now being one of the top 15 richest nations in the world that frequently ranks #1 or close to it in in all sorts of areas, ranging from math/science/literacy scores in education to IT and internet development and more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_South_Korea
What concentrates wealth in a few hands most? It is concentration of land rights. Archer Torrey (grandson of R. A. Torry, president of Moody Bible Institute) writes: "Henry George and Scripture teach the same thing: that the space on the surface of this globe has been created by God and not by man. "Any man who does not have any 'right' to any space of his own ha been robbed, and people who buy and sell space are dealing in stolen goods. Without space of his Without a space of his own, a human being is completely at the mercy of whomever 'owns' the space: he must come to him humbly asking for a job and for money to buy the necessities of life. If he is a slave, he has a right to be fed, sheltered, and clothed until he dies. But if he is a 'free' man he is worse off than a slave because no one is responsible for taking care of him [and he has no right to land]. To say that everyone has a right to work, to health care, to this, that and the other without at the same time recognizing his right to land (which is space)is to frankly declare that he is a slave.
The United Nations has published a list of 30 "human rights". But, they omit the right to land, which is the basic human right given by God and clearly defined in the Bible. If the right to land were recognized, the other rights would follow automatically and would hardly need to be defined. As it is the UN's "human rights" are only the rights of slaves!...
Archer Torrey, Jane Grey Torrey, Biblical Economics, p. 8.
https://books.google.co.kr/books?id=GqMhHAivCTwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=human rights&f=false (you can read a summary of each chapter here (read especially chapters 4 & 5 from 1 Kings 21 on how the wicked queen Jezebel and king Ahab tried to violate Naboth's rights to his ancestral land and the punishment that God gave them for doing so): http://www.landreform.org/be1.htm
This may sound quite extreme and many people may think that land is just something important for ancient agricultural societies. But there has been a centuries long campaign to concentrate land in the hands of a few powerful groups, esp. the Vatican, the American military, and a few wealthy corporations and families. And it is continuing now because land has not lost it's crucial importance. You can watch an extremely insightful documentary that covers the last 500 years or so and shows how the most powerful nations and organizations now have for many, many years been focusing on acquiring and controlling more and more land, including the Catholic church, American and Europe, as well as atheist states confiscating all land of their citizens, sometimes by very unethical, dishonest or even exploitative and cruel methods.
The End of Poverty? by Philippe Diaz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pktOXJr1vOQ
Land is crucial for economic freedom and justice now as well for many reasons:
1) If people don't own their own land, the economist Michael Hudson and others explain that they often end up paying 40-50% of their income just on rent.
Record Number of Americans Can’t Afford Their Rent
billmoyers.com/2013/12/09/record-number-of-americans-can’t-afford-their-rent/
Bread, Circuses and... Taco Bowls https://sputniknews.com/radio_double_down/201608021043866518-bread-circuses-taco-bowls/
2) If people don't own their own land, they can't grow their own food usually. So they may spend up to 35% of their salary on food instead of much less.
3) Without land, people have a far higher risk of going into poverty and being exploited in various ways.
4) Without land, people have a far higher risk of going into debt slavery.
5) Without land, many people can only take care of their basic survival needs by getting a job. This is called waged slavery. Another problem is that when they get a job and work for someone else, they don't have the freedom to use their God given talents in ways that God wishes them too. They also often are banned from speaking about God's truths in the job or are restricted in other ways. Teachers in public schools for example have to teach according to evaluation questions designed to benefit corporations instead of teaching valuable critical thought and what really benefits students as the Bible and science say if they wish to keep their jobs.
6) The value of land now is ~$217 trillion dollars worldwide and in America, the richest 5% own ~75% of all privately held land.
All the property in the world is worth $217 trillion
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/news/12116347/What-is-all-the-property-in-the-world-worth.html
7) When a few people monopolize most of the land, it massively cripples those who don't own land. If you visualize it like an economic race, it's sort of like the land owner start out on the 50 yard line of a 100 meter race, while others start at the beginning line or even further back. They have very little chance of reaching the finish line, which represents economic freedom and the ability to have enough to take care of family needs, comforts and emergencies.
8) If you still don't believe that land is important, maybe looking at who owns most of the rich will convince you. It's usually the wealthiest and most powerful people and institutions that own the most land. Do you think they might have an intelligent reason for doing so? One is that money is just printed by governments and if there's a market crash or a war, it can lose a large percentage of it's value or even all of it. Land usually goes higher and higher in value since you can't make any more land. Thus, the world's biggest land owners are also often the richest people in the world:
1. The Queen
2. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
3. The Pope
4. King Mohammed of Morocco
5. King Bhumibhol of Thailand
6. Sultan Qaboos of Oman
7. King Gyanendra of Nepal
8. Kidman Holdings
9. King Abdullah of Jordan
10. AA Company of Brisbane
www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1364750/Nicole-Kidmans-family-1-worlds-largest-landowners.html
They missed one of the biggest land holders in the world in the list above. The US military. It's at least #3 if not higher with 1000 bases around the world and massive amounts of land around the world.
This is a list in America.
"Years ago, I interviewed Ted Turner about his vast landholdings. The 76-year-old Turner, who is currently the second-largest landowner in the United States, referred me to a line from his favorite movie, Gone With the Wind, when Scarlett O’Hara’s father emphatically tells her that “land is the only thing in the world worth workin' for, worth fightin' for, worth dyin' for, because it's the only thing that lasts.”
The top 5 largest landowners in the U.S., according to The Land Report:
1) John Malone. 2.2 million acres. Malone, the 74-year-old chairman Liberty Media LMCA +%, is worth $7.4 billion. He has property in New Mexico, Maine and Kansas.
2) Ted Turner. 2 million acres. Turner is worth $2.2 billion. On his properties, he owns the world’s largest private bison herd, and The Land Report says he recently began an ecotourism venture on his properties. Turner has land all over the country, from the Rocky Mountain west, to the Midwest to the South.
3) The Emmerson Family. 1.9 million acres. The 86-year-old Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson runs Sierra Pacific Industries, the second-largest timber company in the country. The family’s land is mainly in California and Washington. Red is worth $3.6 billion.
4) Brad Kelley. 1.5 million acres. The former discount cigarette baron (he sold his company in 2001) is now worth $2.2 billion. The 58-year-old’s properties are in Texas, Kentucky, New Mexico and Florida. Oxbow, one of Kelley’s horses, won the 2013 Preakness.
5) The Reed Family. 1.37 million acres. The lumber family owns Green Diamond Resource Company in the Pacific Northwest, which was founded back in 1890. The family is worth $1.7 billion. The company has become part of the “responsible forestry” movement, and discontinued its pulp and paper division last year.
Jeff Bezos is number 26 on the list, with 290,000 acres. The 51-year-old Amazon founder is worth $55.2 billion, which makes him the fourth-richest person in the U.S. His property is in West Texas/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2015/11/03/americas-largest-landowners/#53738d0b18a2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2015/11/03/americas-largest-landowners/#53738d0b18a2
When even some Bible economic principles are followed, especially sharing land fairly with each family permanently (but city land/property could be bought and sold on a free market), it has led to peace and safety for society:
"During the lifetime of Solomon, all of Judah and Israel lived in peace and safety. And from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the south, each family had its own home and garden." 1 Kings 4:25
In Acts, the government didn't do it and so the church compensated by sharing within the church. This concern for social issues and for the downtrodden dumbfounded the pagans in Roman times for whom charity for the downtrodden was nearly unknown. This along with the proof of a risen Christ who was active in transforming lives were major factors that were very powerful and convincing to many in that culture. These are major reasons why the early church turned the world upside down. Society was amazed at how they loved each other and also non-believers and the disenfranchised by sacrificing so much for each other. This also helped them achieve the eradication of poverty within the church.
"There were no needy people among them." Acts 2:42-45 (See also Acts 4:32-35. This confirmed God's promise in Deut. 15:4 that following God's principles could eliminate poverty.)
Let's look at a few reasons of the myriad of reasons why this issue should be important to every thinking person and why most human rights are degraded severely or don't exist if we don't have the foundation of economic rights. If you think poverty is something that people mostly bring on themselves, please spend some time reading the facts/links and watching the videos to become educated about the real causes and consequences of economic injustice on human lives and to know some ways you can help:
1) POVERTY HARMS/KILLS MILLIONS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE, ESP. CHILDREN: These videos demonstrate some of the myriads of problems that poverty causes such as these 2 about toddlers living on the street and rats eating their toes, or a girl's mother dying because she didn't have access to medicine people in wealthy countries can buy for pennies:
See more here:
http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/video/
But, in the last ~30 years poverty has been cut by about half with 1.3 billion being lifted out of extreme poverty and millions of lives saved and more. How? Professors, pastors and churches started campaigning for following just 3 of ~20 biblical economic principles, cancelling debt (Deut. 15:1,2, making fair trade (Amos 8:4-8) and aid for the poor (James 1:27....many more details and verses listed below in the section: "Summary of Biblical Economic Principles..."). This Jubilee 2000 movement expanded to include 400 NGOs, other religions and non-religious people and became the ONE movement which radically changed the world in recent decades. I'll list more details below regarding this. While much has been done, much more needs to be done and YOU TOO can help make a difference. The campaign continues at places like these sites and it's important to join their newsletters/facebook sites, etc. to learn how you can help best).
http://www.jubileeusa.org/home.html http://jubileedebt.org.uk
http://www.oxfam.org
http://www.one.org
http://www.live58.org
Some will say that Jesus said the poor will always be with us. Actually, Jesus as the Jehovah of the OT and the Messiah of the NT said these things and at certain times in Israel and in the NT church there was no poverty, in terms of people needing their basic necessities.
"There should be no poor among you, for the Lord your God will greatly bless you in the land he is giving you as a special possession. 5 You will receive this blessing if you are careful to obey all the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today." Deut. 15:4,5In the last 30 years poverty has been cut by about 1/2 from ~52% of the world to about 26% of the world. And we are working to do more. See evidence that following God's principles DOES work here:
"All the believers were united in heart and mind. And they felt that what they owned was not their own, so they shared everything they had. 33 The apostles testified powerfully to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God’s great blessing was upon them all. 34 There were no needy people among them, because those who owned land or houses would sell them 35 and bring the money to the apostles to give to those in need." Acts 4:32-35
http://www.live58.org/are-you-in
There will always be differences in wealth (and some difference is fine) and that kind of poverty will exist until heaven. But, it's been conclusively demonstrated many times that nations can follow good principles and eliminate extreme poverty of the type where people are homeless, starving, have no access to medical care, education, and other basic human rights. It's NOT hard at all. As Nelson Mandela puts it, "Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."
Here are ~26 states/nations where extreme poverty has been greatly reduced or eradicated all over the world:
www.pipalya.com/rlt/public/taxshift.htm
2) POVERTY FORCES PEOPLE INTO SEX SLAVERY:
Forced into Sexual Slavery by the Cruel Hand of Poverty
www.worldvision.ca/ContentArchives/content-stories/Pages/ForcedintoSexualSlaverybytheCruelHandofPoverty.aspx
Again, this is not only a problem in foreign countries. It happens in western countries and the USA as well.
"The correlation between poverty and trafficking has been corroborated by qualitative reports from law enforcement, social service providers, and others working in the anti-trafficking movements (Clawson & Dutch, 2008). Further, Lloyd (2005) states that low-income girls are at greater risk of recruitment and may find it harder to exit."
aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/07/humantrafficking/litrev/
And it often is worst around sporting events:
"Super Bowl Is Single Largest Human Trafficking Incident In U.S."
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/03/super-bowl-sex-trafficking_n_2607871.html
3) LOAN SHARKS KEEP ~27 MILLION IN DEBT SLAVERY: There are ~27 million people in debt slavery such as Haresh:
"A bonded laborer named Haresh in West Bengal, India, once described to me how he took a loan of approximately $110 from the local landowner to get married to his beloved wife, Sarika. Two decades later, Haresh told me,
'My entire family is still in debt to the landowner. Sarika and I work in the fields, my sons and their wives work at the brick kilns. One day my grandchildren will work for the landowner. There is no way to repay these debts. We will only be free when we die.'
Since his initial loan, he had taken numerous loans from the same landowner for basic subsistence, medicines, repairs to his hut and other reasons. He was also charged interest that often exceeded 100% per year....He and his family were forced to work 14 or more hours a day by the landowner, almost every day of the year, with barely enough food and water to survive."
thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/02/a-110-loan-then-20-years-of-debt-bondage/
4) POVERTY CAUSES MALNUTRITION/IQ LOSSES: The sites above describe what happens in many foreign countries. But, there are severe problems in America as well.
“Good nutrition, particularly in the first three years of life, is important in establishing a good foundation that has implications for a child’s future physical and mental health, academic achievement, and economic productivity…According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 16.7 million children under 18 in the United States live in households where they are unable to consistently access enough nutritious food necessary for a healthy life. Although food insecurity is harmful to any individual, it can be particularly devastating among children due to their increased vulnerability and the potential for long-term consequences. http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/child-hunger-facts.aspx
This is really embarrassing for America. Some people say,
"Well, a person can have a television, microwave, refrigerator, washer and dryer and a cellphone and still fall under the poverty line."That's heartless and missing the point for the kids whose futures are being ruined by injustice as well as many adults and is a serious abdication of morality that is entirely ignoring the real problems and lives that are being ruined. The other evil though is to just pay out lots of money that enables people to do nothing and be lazy and have an easy life without work. That's the opposite evil and is simply not sustainable long term. As you will see below, God gave principles that have a perfect balance to avoid the harmful concepts on both the conservative and the liberal sides and when they've been followed in history, they have eliminated dire poverty consistently, just as God promised in Deuteronomy 15:4.
A new study in the journal science shows how poverty causes losses of IQ and opportunities in other ways.
"Poverty reduces brainpower, it uses up so much mental energy that there is much less brainpower left to address other areas of life, researchers reported in the journal Science....The daily struggle to cope with the immediate effects of not having enough money - such as cutting costs, and begging and borrowing to pay bills - has a detrimental effect on cognitive function...An individual who lives in poverty ends up with fewer "mental resources" to concentrate on complicated, less immediate matters such as job training and education. Poverty robs people of the ability to manage their time.
After performing a number of experiments, the investigators found that financial worries had an immediate negative impact on a poor person's performance in common logic and cognitive tests. People who were overly worried about money problems demonstrated a drop in cognitive function equivalent to a 13-point fall in IQ - a similar effect is seen when a person loses a whole night's sleep..."
www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/265501.php
www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976
5) UNFAIR TRADE ROBS THE POOR:
Unfair trade robs poor people, esp. in 3rd world nations, of ~$700,000,000,000 per year according to United Nations statistics. See how at this link:
http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/trade
6) LACK OF HEALTH CARE CAUSES BANKRUPTCIES/LOST JOBS:
Another related issue is that very expensive medical problems cause a mass of bankruptcies, destroying MANY businesses and jobs along with them:
“Our 2001 study in 5 states found that medical problems contributed to at least 46.2% of all bankruptcies….Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical;… Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations…. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%...Illness and medical bills contribute to a large and increasing share of US bankruptcies."
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/american_journal_of_medicine_09.pdf
7) UNJUST ECONOMICS CAUSES UNEMPLOYMENT AND SOCIETAL INSTABILITY:
Everyone knows that there have been serious economics crises in recent years. Economic stability is very important for society, but there are many factors that influence it that are often not considered. Currently many nations, including the EU and America have dire economic problems that could be partly or totally solved by following Biblical economic principles. One of the biggest causes of economic crises is unemployment and debt. The European Commission reported that unemployment issues will cause a permanent decline in GDP unless dealt with effectively:
According
to the Commission's analysis, unless policies take up the new
challenges, potential GDP in the EU could fall to a permanently “lower
trajectory, due to several factors. First, protracted spells of
unemployment in the workforce tend to lead to a permanent loss of
skills. Second, the stock of equipment and infrastructure will decrease
and become obsolete due to lower investment. Third, innovation may be
hampered as spending on research and development is one of the first
outlays that businesses cut back on during a recession. Member States
have implemented a range of measures to provide temporary support to
labour markets, boost investment in public infrastructure and support
companies.
http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/publication15887_en.pdf
http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/publication15887_en.pdf
The Economist reports about unemployment:
The
worst-affected countries include Ireland and Spain, where a collapse in
construction has swollen the dole queues. Youth unemployment is
especially high in Spain, prompting protests.
www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/europes_economies
www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/05/europes_economies
On January 31, 2012, the Guardian reported:
Unemployment
data for the whole eurozone has been released, and show that the
jobless rate has hit its highest level since the euro was created, at
10.4%.
www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/31/eurozone-debt-crisis-summit-greece#block-11
www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/31/eurozone-debt-crisis-summit-greece#block-11
Another report summarizes how unemployment was a significant cause of the debt problems in Spain:
“As unemployment skyrocketed, so did unemployment benefits. In a welfare state like Spain, unemployment benefits are generous. However, what was a sustainable unemployment level quickly became a drain on the Spanish government. The reduction in the Spanish government’s tax revenue, which is heavily dependent on real estate, exacerbated the problem. These drains on the economy turned a previous budget surplus of over 2 percent of GDP into a deficit of almost 4 percent of GDP.”
http://blogs.law.uiowa.edu/ebook/content/spanish-financial-crisis
8) UNJUST ECONOMICS/PLUTOCRACY KILLS DEMOCRACY/ENABLES PLUTOCRACY:
"The wealthiest 1 percent now control 39 percent of the world's wealth, and their share is likely to grow in the coming years, according to a new report....That concentration is likely to increase in the coming years as the wealth of the wealthy grows faster than overall global wealth." www.cnbc.com/id/100780163
The danger of wealth concentration was explicitly guarded against by NUMEROUS Bible principles and it was also clearly seen by many of the world’s greatest pioneers and thinkers. Republicans/Conservatives often accuse Democrats/liberals of redistributing wealth or class warfare. But the most extreme threat to democracy is by far the redistribution of wealth by the government to the wealthy. Unfortunately, republican economic policies (such as giving many loopholes, lower tax rates, gifting natural resource for pennies on the dollar to the wealthy and others) are the primary cause of this BY FAR. This is the biggest danger to democracy all over the world many nations. Simply, with concentration of wealth, democracy dies and plutocracy wins. Here are a few thinkers who saw this danger:
• Rutherford B. Hayes (19th U.S. President) wrote this in his diary between 1881-1891, “December 4 Sunday. In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
• Ronald Reagan also said,
“Certainly no thinking American would dispute the idea that there should be an economic floor beneath which no citizen of this land should be allowed to live.” and this is a crucial factor to teach and recognize for the best economic progress of society.
http://www.livedash.com/transcript/reagan/5916/HISTP/Wednesday_February_9_2011/559426/
• “The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."Abraham Lincoln
• “I slowly came to realize that political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.” --M Mortimer Adler, former professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.
• "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. "
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd US president 1801-1809
• "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible, to maintain their control over governments, by controlling money and its issuance." - James Madison
• Baron M.A. Rothschild understood when he once said: "Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws."
The situation that we see in the world today with millions in dire poverty not able to afford their basic needs (even in America) is NOT natural. It is intentionally caused. It can be changed as many other human rights abuses have been in history. Again as Nelson Mandela rightly says,
"Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." www.makepovertyhistory.org/extras/mandela.shtml
There are MANY ways to solve these problems. One of the simplest would be to just put the world's money into PEOPLE instead of war machines.
Surprisingly, the Bible has many practical solutions for solving these problems. God saw the dangers of concentrating wealth and others and so prophets repeatedly condemned exploitative economics at all levels of society in ~2,000 verses in the Bible. These problems are really harmful for individuals, workers, human rights, businesses, countries and the world. Just really bad all the way around. As is often the case, the Bible has practical solutions that work to solve problems these days. Below are ~7 major principles that the Bible advocated briefly, and then ~16 in more detail later. These have and can worked to solve problems NOW.
Economic injustice and large income gaps are extremely harmful and immoral to all levels of society and if we care about human lives, economic human rights must be a priority for us. It was for God in~2,000 in the Bible. Dr. Wilkinson explains why it's so crucial based on 100s of scientific studies. In his TED lecture, he points out that high income gaps in a society are not good for anyone, not even the rich. They cause more crime, mental disease, lower health quality, more school dropouts, higher infant mortality, more teen pregnancy, distrust in society, eventually crime, terrorism, war and their millions of ruined lives and many problems that destabilize societies. This results in wasted money, higher costs for government which cause much instability in many areas for nations and are extremely expensive both in money and lives that are wasted.
He points out that because America has in recent decades experienced very extreme wealth gaps, that,
"If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark....there are endless problems with social gradients [crime, health, infant mortality, education, mental illness, trust, divorce, etc.) that are worse in more [economically] unequal countries -- not just a little bit worse, but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common. Think of the expense, the human cost of that. ...in the more equal countries on the left -- Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden -- the top 20 percent are about three and a half, four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent. But on the more unequal end -- U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore -- the differences are twice as big. " Dr. Wilkinson (in his TED talk)
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why
What is the economic inequality in America like? You will be surprised at the facts in this video:
Now, let's go look at some biblical economic principles. For some Americans raised and fed capitalism and the American dream from birth almost nonstop, it is going to be hard to wrap your mind around some of these concepts. It's not easy to challenge something one has believed for decades. Even most pastors are never taught much about biblical economics and it took me years to learn these concepts and why they are so crucial to solve economic problems now and why all man's distortions of them do great harm (including communism, socialism and capitalism). I don't expect anyone to understand this in days. But this is a brief summary of the Bible system and vast economic confirmation now shows that it's crucial to preserve freedom, democracy and avoid great harm to human lives. The Bible basically advocated these main principles:
1) SHARE NATURE EQUITABLY--DISTRIBUTED BY GOVT: The Bible teaches that God is the Creator (vast scientific evidence confirms this strongly. See www.creation.com for 1000s of articles explaining this). As the Creator HE has the right to tell us how to divide the natural resources and He does:
** “Moreover the profit of the earth is for all:” Ecclesiastes 5:9
** “The heavens belong to the Lord, but he has given the earth to all humanity.” Psalm 115:16
Note that the "PROFIT" of the earth is for ALL humanity, not just the elite, not just the 1%, not just for the powerful, not just those well connected to the government, but all have a right to own part of the earth and profit from it. ALL. If they work hard/are creative, they will profit more. But, all have a right to own and work part of the earth and profit so that they can be self-supporting. Any system that ignores this biblical foundation will cause poverty, crime and grievous harm. Again and again in the Bible God stated in different ways that every person has a God given right to own an equitable part of nature and PROFIT from it. ALL. This is the crucial foundation of Biblical economics, rooted in creation and it is what capitalism habitually rejects, in all forms.
This idea of sharing nature equitably is an economic foundation that 1000s of the world's greatest thinkers, including many of America's founders, Bible prophets, atheists, Chinese sages, financial wizards, presidents, etc. have agreed is the sole and only ethical foundation for economics. One reason it's very important is that freedom/democracy are destroyed if wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. Capitalism, socialism, and communism all totally reject this ethical foundation. Some forms of socialism try to guarantee economic rights that partially replace this, but they often enable some lazy people to live off the work of others, which is wrong biblically. None of these systems can be sustained long term without serious problems and damaging millions of lives, something that has already happened many times in history.
GOVERNMENT ECONOMIC RESPONSIBILITIES
This profit of the earth for all was to be ensured by governments/leaders of the nation so that every family would have the capital it needed to be self-supporting, have incentive to work hard and a chance to reach whatever dreams they might have. This was not an individual thing. God instructed the Israeli leadership/government to distribute all equitably among tribes and families. Crucially, this land could not ever be sold. It could only be leased for up to 49 years and then it returned to the original family, giving each generation capital to work with to be self-supporting and achieve their dreams and avoiding the natural end of capitalism, great concentration of wealth in a few hands (as happens in monopoly games which are based on capitalism, but can be played a very different way, land rent, where no one goes bankrupt). Property in cities COULD be permanently sold, but not ancestral lands.
"You must distribute the land among the clans by sacred lot and in proportion to their size. A larger portion of land will be allotted to each of the larger clans, and a smaller portion will be allotted to each of the smaller clans...In this way, the portions of land will be divided among your ancestral tribes." Numbers 33:54 (This land could be leased, but never permanently sold. This ensured that every clan/family in every generation had capital to work with to support their needs and dreams. It was impossible for the 1% to take control of say ~50% of the natural resources. that never happened in Israel when they followed God's instructions) See also Numbers 34:13-15, Leviticus 25:8-30, 2 Kings 8, 1 Kings 21:1,2, 19; I Kings 22; 2 Kings 9:7-10, etc.
Ahab tried to violate God’s principle and buy Naboth's ancestral lands from him, which Naboth correctly knew was wrong. Ahab and others who tried to violate God's economics were severely for this, both in Israel and in pagan countries. Governments were responsible to protect people from being robbed in all sorts of ways, and that included robbery and depriving them of the land God gave them.
** “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Enough, you princes of Israel! Stop all your violence and oppression and do what is just and right. Quit robbing and cheating my people out of their land! Stop expelling them from their homes!” Ezekiel 45:9
** “Destruction is certain for you who buy up property so others have no place to live. Your homes are built on great estates so you can be alone in the land.” Isaiah 5:8
“Say to the royal family of Judah, ‘Listen to this message from the LORD! 12 This is what the LORD says to the dynasty of David: “‘Give justice each morning to the people you judge!
"Help those who have been robbed; rescue them from their oppressors." Jeremiah 21:11-12
Equitable distribution by the government of all natural resources so that people could be self-supporting was required in the Jubilee economic system of the Bible. This is an economics foundation that 1000s of the world's greatest thinkers, including many of America's founders, Bible prophets, atheists, Chinese sages, financial wizards, presidents, etc. have agreed is the sole and only ethical foundation for economics. Many have also agreed that wealth concentrated in the hands of a few is one of the worst evils in history, and destroys real freedom and democracy.
Capitalism and communism both totally reject this ethical foundation. Some forms of socialism try to guarantee some economic rights, but they fall far short of biblical economic justice and often make another serious error of enabling some lazy people to live off the work of others, which is wrong biblically. None of these systems can be sustained long term without serious problems, which have been repeatedly experienced in all three systems by millions.
2) FAIR FREE MARKET: Free market capitalism takes over after nature is shared. Unfair trading is banned and strongly warned against. The Bible is full of verses on this topic. Not many disagree on this topic, so only 2 verses:
Leviticus 19:35 "Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity. 36Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt.
Amos 8:4 “Listen to this, you who rob the poor and trample down the needy! 5 You can’t wait for the Sabbath day to be over and the religious festivals to end so you can get back to cheating the helpless.You measure out grain with dishonest measures and cheat the buyer with dishonest scales. 6 And you mix the grain you sell with chaff swept from the floor. Then you enslave poor people for one piece of silver or a pair of sandals.7 Now the LORD has sworn… I will never forget the wicked things you have done!”
The poor in the world are routinely robbed of ~$700,000,000,000 a year through unfair trade and subsidies that enable rich countries to dump tons of cheap food on the markets of poor countries
See here for more on how this happens:
http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/trade
3) ENSURE BASIC NEEDS FOR ALL: There are only 2 basic ethical foundations for a fair and just economic system in the Bible:
A) As above, divide natural resources among everyone and then they work the land to support themselves. This is the ideal system and provides best for everyone's needs if they work some. There are 2 main forms of this, the biblical jubilee system or land rent/single tax.
B) If governments do not do this (and communism, socialism, and communism these days all ignore this crucial foundation), the sole and only other ethical option is to guarantee everyone's basic needs, including housing, health care, education, etc. Natural resources in America now are valued at ~45 trillion now and that's after centuries of exploitation. A worldwide economic conspiracy documented by people such as Karen Hudes, Dr. J. W Smith (www.ied.info) and many others, as well as many strong arm tactics and unethical enclosure acts and other methods, has robbed the poor and middle class of what rightfully belongs to them, to the tune of many trillions of dollars. So, the least the wealthy can do is ensure the basic needs of people. In the Bible God required this even of pagan governments and called them wicked if they did not do this.
If a nation is concerned about advancing and progress, then basic needs like housing, nutritious food, education and good health care must be provided. M.L. King recognized that fair economics and decent affordable healthcare is an essential right and crucial for the general welfare, stability and progress of society.
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.” Martin Luther King, Jr. – Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights – Chicago, March 25, 1966
"The godly care about the rights of the poor; the wicked don’t care at all." Proverbs 29:7
What are these rights? The Bible describes them in many places and instructs the government to defend them. Psalms 72 describes the role of the king, as an agent of justice, to defend the rights and needs of the poor. The king was enjoined by God with protecting the poor and ensuring that their basic needs were met.
Psalms 72:
1 Give your love of justice to the king, O God,and righteousness to the king’s son.
What does this justice look like? Continue reading:
2 Help him judge your people in the right way; ***let the poor always be treated fairly***.
3 May the mountains yield ***prosperity for all***, and may the hills be fruitful.
4 Help him to ***defend the poor***, to ***rescue the children of the needy***, and to ***crush their oppressors***.
12 He will rescue the poor when they cry to him; he will help the oppressed, who have no one to defend them.13 He feels pity for the weak and the needy,and he will rescue them. 14 He will redeem them from oppression and violence, for their lives are precious to him.
Psalm 82:3“Give justice to the poor and the orphan; uphold the rights of the oppressed and the destitute.
Isaiah 10:2They deprive the poor of justice and deny the rights of the needy among my people. They prey on widows and take advantage of orphans.
Taxes can be a way to steal (and right now, letting the rich go scot free or pay many times less than the poor do is a way of theft).
Amos 5:11 “You trample the poor and steal what little they have through taxes and unfair rent…14Do what is good and run from evil--that you may live! ”
PAGAN GOVERNMENT RESPONSIBILITIES
Even pagan governments were responsible to ensure economic fairness and justice at a minimum level so that the rights of the poor were protected.
“‘King Nebuchadnezzar, please accept my advice. Stop sinning and do what is right. Break from your wicked past and be merciful to the poor. Perhaps then you will continue to prosper.’ Daniel 4:27
"Sodom’s sins were pride, gluttony, and laziness, while the poor and needy suffered outside her door." Ezekiel 16:49
King Lemuel was likely a north Arab monarch. God's instruction were given to him:
"It is not for kings, O Lemuel—not for kings to drink wine,not for rulers to crave beer, lest they drink and forget what the law decrees,and deprive all the oppressed of their rights.“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves,for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” Proverbs 31:4,5,8,9
4) NO ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION/NO INTEREST/CANCEL DEBTS: The Bible strongly warns against charging interest, paying unfair wages, unfair trade, debt slavery (debts were cancelled every 7 years) and other exploitative practices. It warns against giving money to able-bodied people for no work.
**Deuteronomy 15:1 “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.” (Rabbis say this could not be done irresponsibly. Only after diligent effort to repay was it allowed.):
**“When you gather the grapes in your vineyard, don’t glean the vines after they are picked. Leave the remaining grapes for the foreigners, orphans, and widows.” Deuteronomy 24:21
**"Leviticus 25:35 If any of your Israelite relatives fall into poverty and cannot support themselves, support them as you would a resident foreigner and allow them to live with you. Do not demand an advance or charge interest on the money you lend them. Instead, show your fear of God by letting them live with you as your relatives.
many others.
5) NO FREE LUNCH: God's economic policy forbade laziness, saying that if you want to eat, you should work.
**2 Thes. 3:10 “Even while we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘Whoever does not work should not eat.’”
**1 Timothy 5:8 “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
6) WELFARE:
The Bible had a welfare concept that is far better than any now. It is mistranslated as slavery unfortunately. It was basically a voluntary concept where if you couldn't support yourself, you of your own free choice decided to become an indentured servant for up to 7 years. Then your boss/master would assign work and provide for your needs. No taxpayers were taxed to support your basic needs. This is very simple and FAR better than any modern welfare system. I've explained it more fully here:
http://questions.truth-is-life.org/IsGodEvil.html (start at " QUESTION: WHAT ABOUT SLAVERY? ANSWER: IT WAS MAINLY A WELFARE SYSTEM "about 1/2 way down)
7) CHURCH/RICH BE GENEROUS TO THE POOR: The Bible reserves ~1/3 of the tithe from the church for the poor and encourages much generosity from the rich to the poor.
“At the end of every third year, bring the entire tithe of that year’s harvest and store it in the nearest town. Give it to the Levites, who will receive no allotment of land among you, as well as to the foreigners living among you, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, so they can eat and be satisfied. Then the LORD your God will bless you in all your work.” Deuteronomoy 14:28,29
Deut. 15:7"But if there are any poor people in your towns…, do not be hard-hearted or tightfisted toward them. 8Instead, be generous and lend them whatever they need. If you refuse to make the loan and the needy person cries out to the LORD, you will be considered guilty of sin. 10 Give freely without begrudging it, and the LORD your God will bless you in everything you do.
There are MANY more verses like these above. Again, a major focus of these principles was to discourage huge income gaps between the rich and the poor. Why? Economic injustice and large income gaps are extremely harmful and immoral to all levels of society.
Another helpful solution is for the world to stop manipulating people into believing that when you have more zeroes in your bank account, that that makes you important and successful. The facts is that there are MANY kinds of success, not just being wealthy. Being wealthy is not bad or a crime at all. But, it is how you USE your wealth that counts, not just being rich. Professor Tal Ben Shahar, who teaches a wildly popular class on happiness at Harvard, puts it simply agreeing with the comedian George Carlin, that just getting things isn't what makes us happy. And a survey of American incomes compared to happiness shows the same basic fact.
Denmark has learned this lesson and found that there are much better ways to make people happy, many parallel Bible principles:
And it routinely scores #1 or close to it on world happiness surveys, precisely because it puts people above greed and other reasons.
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/22/denmark-happiest-country_n_4070761.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
And from the NY times, here's another comparison of wealth and happiness, showing that in many cases, they simply do not have any correlation once people's basic needs are taken care of and some to pursue specific goals they have.
A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom
www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/science/04happ.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom
www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/science/04happ.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I've long been interested in many economic issues...ranging from how capitalism, socialism and communism all ignore basic human economic rights, to theories on GNH (Gross National Happiness) to campaigns for basic economic rights for all. My journey to learning much more on this was sparked partly by campaigns against poverty and realizing that some of the problem was structural and would never disappear until government laws were changed and also by reading the seminal work, "Economic Democracy" which is available free at www.ied.info in the free book section and is a quite scholarly and highly referenced work showing how the modern form of capitalism is very different from what it was in early America and how it's being used to siphon off trillions of dollars from the middle and lower classes. I was quite surprised to find that God's principles of economics can and are helping solve many of the dire economic problems of poverty in our modern times. And below you will see a bit of this.
Recently, I found that in just the last 20 years, ~1.3 billion people have escaped poverty due to Bible principles. How? It basically happened this way:
1) In Leviticus 25, Deuteronomy 15, and other places the Bible lists at least 16 economic principles that God promises can reduce and even end poverty if followed. Professor Dent, a Christian in the UK, thought of a campaign against poverty based on Jubilee concepts in the Bible and began talking about this as a solution to the problems that many nations were having with debt. He basically focused on promoting 3 biblical ideas (cancelling debt for the poor, increasing aid and making trade fair...see Bible verses on these and many other economic areas below)
http://cases.som.yale.edu/jubilee/
2) Along with students, pastors and churches, they formed the Jubilee2000 campaign. This spread to many churches around the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_2000
See also this research:
“DEBT CANCELLATION AND CIVIL SOCIETY: A CASE STUDY OF JUBILEE 2000” by Nick Buxton)
http://eslmission.truth-is-life.org/docs/esl/Debt%20Cancellation%20and%20Civil%20Society-A%20Case%20Study%20of%20Jubilee%202000%20by%20Nick%20Buxton.doc
3) The Jubilee2000 campaign caught fire and expanded to become the ONE campaign (one.org) which promoted the Millenium Development Goals. Eventually over 400 NGOs and numerous politicians, businessmen, actors and singers joined to promoting the cause. This has already had these results:
• 18 countries debt has been cancelled & ~$107 billion of debt has been cancelled in the last 10 years following the Biblical principle of cancelling debt after 7 years have gone by!
• Aid has been doubled to $50 billion following James 1:27 and countless other verses that speak of helping the poor! Millions of lives have been saved & 42 million more children are now in school!
• They have been working to make trade fair, another very strongly biblical concept.
• 1.3 BILLION have been lifted out of poverty. Melinda Gates recently reported about the Millenium Development Goals, “We’ve made more progress in the last 10 years than in any other period in history combined....The first of the 8 Millenium Development Goals is around poverty. It's to reduce poverty by half. What I'm here to tell you is that we're on track with this millenium development goal. In fact, 1.3 billion have lifted themselves out of poverty in the last 23 years...for me, I can't imagine a bigger impact." www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEPjEimKrJs”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEPjEimKrJs
See more at http://www.jubileeusa.org/, www.makepovertyhistory.org, www.one.org, www.oxfam.org/.
Unfortunately, Melinda like many others, swept the foundational work of Christians in fighting poverty based on taking the Bible seriously under the rug. But, the documentation is conclusive that it all started with a Christian professor and churches taking a couple biblical economic principles seriously and campaigning and protesting until the world took notice and realized there were human rights abuses going on that they needed to solve.
Involving my university students in this made studying much more interesting and connected to real life and they were a part of the movement that helped 1.3 billion people escape poverty in the last 20 years and found out how God’s truths are very practical NOW What could be more satisfying and practical than that?
The campaign is continuing right now at places like www.live58.org! Join the campaign and make a difference!
Below you can learn quite a bit more about the Bible's principles and how they can solve poverty and greatly alleviate many problems in human life.
SUMMARY OF BIBLICAL ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES THAT CAN SKYROCKET ECONOMIES & SOLVE FINANCIAL CRISES
The Bible has very concrete economic ideas that can mostly or totally resolve the above problems. Here are 7 major ones of more than 16. Check it out!
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1) DISTRIBUTE NATURAL RESOURCES EQUITABLY
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One of the thorniest problems of economics and most important issues in economic justice is how to share natural resources. Geniuses often disagree. But, on this area, many of the greatest philosophers, thinkers and economists in history from all sides agree (Fortune Magazine, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Moses/God, Voltaire, Tom Paine, Confucius, John Locke, Churchill, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Douglas MacArthur, Einstein, Tolstoy, Pliny the Elder, Aristotle and literally 1000s of others). Natural resources were not created by any person (religious people believe God created them. Atheists agree that no person created them) and God has stated that they must be shared equitably by all.
MANY thinkers from all sides agree:
• ABRAHAM LINCOLN: “The land, the earth God gave to man for his home,sustenance and support, should never be the possession of any man,corporation,society or unfriendly government,any more than the air or water”
• VOLTAIRE (atheist): "The fruits of the earth are a common heritage of all, to which each man has equal right."
• ROUSSEAU (atheist): "You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to no one."
• WILLIAM BLACKSTONE (British judge): "The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind from the immediate gift of the Creator."
• THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and with Ben Franklin the most inventive and intellectual of the Founding Fathers, wrote, "The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and to live on... Wherever in any country there are idle lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. Everyone may have land to labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age." (Notes on Virginia, 1791)
• CONFUCIUS (BC 551-479), Chinese philosopher, said, "When the Great Way prevailed, natural resources were fully used for the benefit of all and not appropriated for selfish ends... This was the Age of the Great Commonwealth of peace and prosperity."
The ideal way to do this is in the Bible is explained in the Jubilee system with land divided equally among each family, tribe, nations, etc. But, even pagan nations were responsible to have a basic minimum level for all its citizens. And there’s a second way to do it called Land rent where those who remove natural resources from the community’s use pay a yearly fee to society for doing so, often around 15% of the value of the land/resource per year.
See 100s more thinkers who advocate sharing nature with all in some way here::
http://commongroundorwa.org/index.php/research/research-reports/item/386-http-commongroundorwaorg-famsthnkpdf/386-http-commongroundorwaorg-famsthnkpdf
http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/georgism_01.htm
The Bible advocated these ideas 1000s of years before anyone else.
BIBLE VERSES:
** When Israel entered Canaan, all the land was divided equitably among tribes and families. This land could not ever be sold. It could only be leased for up to 49 years and then it returned to the original family, giving each generation capital to work with to be self-supporting and achieve their dreams. Property in cities COULD be permanently sold, but not ancestral lands. This gave each generation capital to work with and opportunity to achieve their dreams. See Numbers 34:13-15, Leviticus 25:8-30, 2 Kg 8, etc. In 1 Kings 21:1,2, 19; In I Kg 22; 2 Kg 9.7-10, Ahab tried to violate God’s principle and take eventually took ancestral property by force, but was punished severely for this.
** “Moreover the profit of the earth is for all:” Ecclesiastes 5:9
** “The heavens belong to the Lord, but he has given the earth to all humanity.” Psalm 115:16
** “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Enough, you princes of Israel! Stop all your violence and oppression and do what is just and right. Quit robbing and cheating my people out of their land! Stop expelling them from their homes!” Ezekiel 45:9
** “Destruction is certain for you who buy up property so others have no place to live. Your homes are built on great estates so you can be alone in the land.” Isaiah 5:8
God through prophets repeatedly insisted that the government give and protect each family's right to a permanent section of land outside the city as described in Joshua 13-18, Deuteronomy 15, Ezekiel 45-46 (see also Elijah's response to Ahab's attempted violation of this with Naboth). These and other policies simultaneously produce many benefits such as:
a) INCENTIVE: God's principles give a right to land to each family and so protect the right of a family to capital that enables them to have a great chance at being independent and reaching their dreams whatever they may be instead of being stuck in economic slavery with little or no hope of reaching any significant dreams all their lives. If more people have hope and opportunity, then society will be all that more productive and wealthy. If people don't have hope, they won't have passion or dedication to their job and there are many negative consequences that go with that.
These principles of right to land + free market protect incentives to work hard and succeed financially which enables multiple kinds of freedom as well as service to others. Since everyone has equitable opportunities to reach their dreams, the envy and jealousy factors drop dramatically. This creates peace, reduces crime and other societal instability since people have a hope and dreams to work on that are achievable and don't want to waste it in damaging others.
b) LIMIT CONTROL/POVERTY: They limit how much the powerful can concentrate wealth. This is crucial because concentrated wealth inevitably causes corruption with time and often great societal instability. When the rich/poor gap becomes too large (usually when the gini coefficient is above 9:1), it causes all sorts of social ills and enables the wealthy to buy out many businesses which increase their concentration of wealth. Then they turn to buying up media and distracting or indoctrinating most of the public with fiction so they don't pay attention to the exploitation going on. They buy politicians/govt. with bribes and subvert education to hide their graft and how they are cheating the middle class and poor out of their rights. They manipulate economics at the macro level by causing economic catastrophes where they can buy more land/businesses for pennies on the dollar. They exploit the poor by pushing wages down or inflation up, gaining both ways while cheating families out of their rights. These are only a few of the myriad of ways concentration of wealth wreaks havoc for families and national stability.
When people have resources and materials to work with and since the improvements on the land aren’t taxed, just the land itself, there is a strong incentive to make improvements on buildings and a huge natural incentive for people to produce and create more wealth with the resources that they own and have access to.
c) NO LAZINESS: They stop laziness and people eating without working for it. Since people have a decent amount of land capital to work with, the government then has no responsibility to give them welfare (with only rare exceptions). They must be self supporting.
d) BELIEVERS AID POOR: The few who experience injustice can be supported by God's believers at different levels which becomes a great witness of God's care and love for them and attracts them to belief in Him. Regarding this, E. R. Dodds writes that:
"A Christian congregation was from the first a community...Love of one's neighbour is not an exclusively Christian virtue, but in [this] period Christians appear to have practiced it much more effectively than any other group. The Church provided the essentials of social security.... But even more important...was the sense of belonging which the Christian community could give." and of course knowing God.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/why/starksociology.html
See also:
www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
http://creation.com/darwins-critical-influence-on-the-ruthless-extremes-of-capitalism
www.truth-is-life.org/jubileeeconomics.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
4 IMPORTANT REASONS FOR ALL TO ADVOCATE ECONOMIC JUSTICE
1. GREAT WEALTH CONCENTRATION DESTROYS DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM & HUMAN POTENTIAL.
The danger of wealth concentration was explicitly guarded against by NUMEROUS Bible principles and it was also clearly seen by many of the world’s greatest pioneers and thinkers. Republicans/Conservatives often attack Democrats/liberals for trying to engage in redistributing wealth or class warfare. But, the most extreme threat to democracy that is by far the redistribution of wealth that benefits the wealthy. This is the biggest danger by far to our economy. Here are a few thinkers who saw this danger:
• “Our founding fathers knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise, and Republican self-government could succeed only if power was widely distributed, and since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people in the country ..Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few?“--President Ronald Reagan, conservative icon
• Ronald Reagan also said,
“Certainly no thinking American would dispute the idea that there should be an economic floor beneath which no citizen of this land should be allowed to live.” and this is a crucial factor to teach and recognize for the best economic progress of society.
http://www.livedash.com/transcript/reagan/5916/HISTP/Wednesday_February_9_2011/559426/
• "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible, to maintain their control over governments, by controlling money and its issuance." - James Madison
• “The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."Abraham Lincoln
• “I slowly came to realize that political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.” --M Mortimer Adler, former professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago
• Rutherford B. Hayes (19th U.S. President) wrote this in his diary between 1881-1891, “December 4 Sunday. In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
• Baron M.A. Rothschild understood when he once said: "Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws."
If wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, democracy is pretty much an illusion. America is already VERY VERY far towards democracy being just an illusion and many around the world are in a similar state:
“The rich-man, poor-man gap also widened {in 2008} with the nation's top one percent now collecting 23 percent of total income, the biggest disparity since 1928, according to the Economic Policy Institute.”
66.35.240.8/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/31/EDEC12L3SN.DTL
2. IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO GROW A MILLIONAIRE
Many rich people have worked hard, but most of the rich did not make their fortune alone. Some have rightly said, “It takes a village to grow a millionaire.” Society is seldom compensated for its investment in the creation of wealth. This should be corrected. Buffett points out that he attended a publicly supported state school, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and is crystal clear that his investment wealth depends on America's social and economic infrastructure.
"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned," Buffett told the folks at http://www.responsiblewealth.org/ "I happen to work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well - disproportionately well."
The creation of wealth depends on a huge number of factors, most paid for by the entire society and because of that the entire society should benefit proportionately:
“Consider the many components of the social framework that enable great wealth to be built in the United States. Among them are a patent system, enforceable contracts, open courts, property ownership records, protection against crime and external threats, and public education. Even the stock market is a form of socially created wealth that provides liquidity to enterprises. David Blitzer, the chief investment strategist at Standard and Poors, recently wrote, ‘Financial markets are as much a social contract as is democratic government.’ When faith in this social system is shaken, as it has been by recent breaches of trust, we see how quickly individual wealth evaporates.”
www.prospect.org/article/tax-wealthy
Responsible Wealth co-director Mike Lapham has a humorous way of putting it. "It takes a village to raise a billionaire. Every taxpayer deserves some credit for Forbes 400 wealth.
(adapted from: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0929-15.htm)
Elizabeth Warren makes it very clear, that there is no wealthy person who got rich on their own. NONE (watch esp. from 0:50).
But, in nearly all these areas above, the wealthy and big corporations receive astronomical benefits from what society has invested in compared to the profit they earn. This is not just or fair in any way, shape or form and many non-Christians, atheists, economists and many of the wealthy themselves fully agree with this. This needs to be changed so society can be run far more efficiently and so it can eliminate its debts and run with fiscal responsibility.
3. TOO MUCH CONCENTRATED WEALTH WASTES TALENT, TIME, ENERGY, CREATIVITY
As they say, it takes money to make money. But, much of the intellectual capital of most nations is wasted precisely because many people with great ideas don’t have the money to implement their creative ideas. But, if some of the profits of natural resources and societal investments are used to promote self-supporting independence for every citizen, this will empower and motivate many people out of their disillusionment and hopelessness into creative production and will directly promote the creation of many more businesses and more jobs. This of course will spur the economy, increase government revenue and create much lower rates of unemployment for the nation’s work force all and these all of course contribute to eliminating national debt.
4. WORLD PEACE & ECONOMIC JUSTICE
When Confucius was sad about the state of the world he said in reply to a question as to why he was "overcome with sighs":
Confucius' Great Harmony
When the Great Way prevailed, the world community was equally shared by all. The worthy and able were chosen as office-holders. Mutual confidence was fostered and good neighborliness cultivated. Therefore people did not regard as parents only their own parents, nor did they treat children only their own children. Provision was made for the aged till their death, the adults were given employment, and the young enabled to grow up. Old widows and widowers, the orphaned, the old and childless, as well as the sick and the disabled were all well taken care of. Men had their proper roles and women their homes. While they hated to see wealth lying about on the ground, they did not necessarily keep it for their own use. While they hated not to exert their effort, they did not necessarily devote it to their own ends. Thus evil schemings were repressed, and robbers, thieves and other lawless elements failed to arise, so that outer doors did not have to be shut. This was called the age of Great Harmony (Ta Tung)
...Now the Great Way has fallen into obscurity, . . . Each one separately loves his own parents; each looks upon his own children only as his children. People take the wealth of natural resources and the fruits of their own labors as their own. . . . Castle walls and outer defenses, moats and ditches, are made strong and secure. . . ."
Noted Confucius: "To implement my principle is nothing more than being honest and just." (sharing natural resources)
Excerpt only of his full reply. Hsiao, Kung-chuan (trans. F. W. Mote). A History of Chinese Political Thought. Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century A.D. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979, p. 125.
ONLY TWO FOUNDATIONS FOR ETHICAL ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
Because of the reasons above, there are only 2 ethical foundations for economic systems:
a) (Jubilee) Distribute natural resources equitably among all citizens as the Biblical Jubilee concept instructed or
b) (Land rent) Recognize that it is the right of the whole society to profit substantially from natural resources. Those who remove natural resources from the community’s use pay a yearly fee to society for doing so, often around 15% of the value of the land/resource per year. This money is used to fund national security, education, health care, infrastructure, etc. and promote self-reliance and independence for all. It can also be distributed as citizen’s dividends as happens in Alaska and certain Arab countries and others.
The profits from natural resources are not a small number. They are in the trillions of dollars annually and many of the biggest companies in the world are making astronomical profits from what belongs to society (Exxon alone for example made a profit of ~$35,000,000,000 in one year). Companies, workers, CEOs, etc. that recover the resources must be rewarded appropriately. But, society must also be compensated fairly for the use of natural resources that objectively belong to it.
Nations Where Sharing Natural Resources Eliminated Extreme Poverty
Many nations and tribes in history have followed this principle with great success. When they followed this idea well, extreme poverty was almost completely unknown. Land Rent and Jubilee have been tested many times in ancient and recent history and have caused Israelis to become some of the wealthiest people on the planet and many economies to skyrocket past the best performances of capitalism. Here are a couple examples of countries following a modification of the biblical concept of sharing natural resources, land rent.
www.pipalya.com/rlt/public/taxshift.htm
Here's one example from Korea in some more detail.
WHY KOREA'S ECONOMY SKY ROCKETED--THEY FOLLOWED BIBLE LAND JUSTICE
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There are usually several factors in important positive or negative changes in society. Korean's have an amazing work ethic, Confucian love for education/wisdom helps. Hangeul is the world's #1 best alphabet due to King Sejong (and missionaries who first taught it to people in schools) and there are other factors.
In a lengthy scholarly article, Dr. Luis Bush explains the importance of a Christian revival in Korea and how that influenced Korean Christians such as Kim Yong Ki to follow Bible ideas in a range of areas emphasizing resource management, work ethics, social, health and spiritual improvement in various ways. Kim Yong Ki and others also heavily promoted the Bible's jubilee economic ideas that each family should own and work its own plot of land.
You can see more details of how the Christian Canaan farm movement influenced the nation here:
http://darrowmillerandfriends.com/2013/12/19/disciple-a-nation-the-story-of-the-canaan-farm-school/
http://darrowmillerandfriends.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ABOUT-CANAAN-YONSEI-PROGRAM.pdf
http://www.canaanglc.or.kr/brocher.pdf
This idea of the Bible worked so well that eventually President Park Chung Hee came to see what was happening and was very impressed. His government adapted it into a national law that gave most farmers land and limited ownership to ~3 hectares (US leaders like Douglas MacArthur also promoted this..and North Korea's land policies also influenced it some). President Park said of Kim Yong Gi:
“This home and this farm, have carried out a revolution to advance our nation.”
This Bible idea of sharing land started with Christians and then went nationwide. This increased individual freedom/independence and also reduced concentration of wealth and power which always brings a lot of very massive problems. These also sky rocket economies.
Dr. Bush wrote about how Christians influenced Korea's government.
"Biblical values permeate government policy and have produced the engine that has driven transformational development of Korea as this paper seeks to demonstrate, particularly in regards to its economic development. This phenomenal development of South Korea is often called the "Miracle on the Han River” which is a primary subject of Part II of this presentation as it relates to the developmental phases of the transformation of Korea."
https://www.disciplenations.org/article/pdf-transformation-poor-blessed-korean-case-study/
Combined with the land justice focus, Koreans have a strong sense of concern for the entire community, which is another crucial biblical aspect (Phil. 2:4 says to look out for the interests of others, not only our own, and that's intrinsic in the golden rule as well). A Korean doctor friend of mine says that both conservative and liberal Koreans agree that the basic needs of the poor must be protected somehow, at all levels of society and by the government if necessary. This is also a Bible principle that the prophets repeatedly spoke of, even to foreign nations like Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon and others.
Here's an academic peer reviewed article about how Korea and Taiwan's economies sky rocketed while the Philippines has been very unequal with lots of poverty around the country. The economist shows that it was basically due to 3 reasons:
1) Korea and Taiwan shared land fairly (This happened mostly due to major Christian/Bible influence cited above). The rich in the Philippines prevented this..
2) The war in Korea broke the power of the rich. In Taiwan, General Chiang Kai Shek had a strong army as well as a strong commitment to land justice. So it was easier in those countries to overcome the resistance of the wealthy and make fair land laws. But, in the Philippines, the rich were so powerful that they stopped the fair laws on land justice.
3) American leaders and the military strongly supported land justice in Korea and Taiwan because of nearby communist threats (North Korea and China respectively). But they didn't emphasize it so much in the Philippines since communism wasn't a nearby threat there.
In Korean and Taiwan, land justice reduced corruption enormously and made it very hard to concentrate wealth. It brought a much fairer playing field for all which gave people incentives to work hard. This energized the economies and they rose at record rates that shocked the world. The Philippines failed to share land fairly and still has much grinding poverty because the wealthy exploit the poor. This research basically shows that there is a strong causal mechanism of “inequality→higher corruption→lower growth”. This confirms many other studies on this (such as You and Khagram (2005) and Easterly (2007)).
Inequality and Corruption: The Role of Land Reform in Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines
http://irps.ucsd.edu/assets/001/503066.pdf
This was crucial in the development of Korea.
"In South Korea, the U.S. military authorities and the new postwar government also instituted a land-to-the-tiller reform. Prior to this, most farmland was cultivated by tenant farmers, who paid half or more of their crop to Japanese and Korean landlords. The reform transferred ownership rights to former tenants. The ceiling on land ownership was set at three hectares (about 7.5 acres). Korean landlords (but not their Japanese counterparts) received compensation, nominally equal to the ‘market price’ of the land. In practice, the market price already was deflated by landowner fears of expropriation, and the value of the compensation was further curtailed by stretching payments over time, with no interest or inflation adjustments. The former tenants made in-kind payments (in rice) to the government in return for the land. The government used the income from sale of the rice not only to compensate landlords, but also to invest in rural water supply systems (Jang 2004).
By redistributing rights to the most important rural asset, East Asia’s postwar land reforms did much to reduce poverty in the countryside. At the same time, the land reforms helped to set the stage for the rapid industrialization that one day would be hailed as ‘the East Asian miracle’ (World Bank 1993). Two links between land reform and industrial growth were particularly important. First, farmers’ improved economic security meant that they could afford to send their children to school, providing a skilled workforce for industry (Shin, 1998). Second, compared to the landed oligarchies that dominated political life in the pre-reform era, the reforms brought about a more egalitarian order. This helps to explain why government efforts to promote industrialization did not degenerate into a mere pretext for looting state resources and capturing 5 policy-generated ‘rents,’ as so often happened in countries where traditional landed elites retained their grip on power.10 Analyzing how and why the state succeeded in promoting industrial growth in South Korea and
Taiwan, economist Dani Rodrik (1995, pp. 92-93) concludes that the ‘initial advantage’ conferred by an egalitarian distribution of wealth and income was ‘probably the single most important reason why extensive government intervention could be carried out effectively, without giving rise to rampant rent seeking.’ In other words, land reform was one of the keys – arguably the key – to East Asia’s economic ‘miracle.’"
Land Reform and Sustainable Development http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=peri_workingpapers (and http://countrystudies.us/south-korea/36.htm)
Principles like the above and others have helped protestant Christian missionaries become the #1 source of freedom in human rights, education, health/medicine and other areas. Sometimes they understood the importance of land..sometimes they didn't, but saw the importance of other principles of God that were valuable for human freedom.
Dr. Woodberry recently published exhaustive research showing decisively that protestant missionaries (esp. those not connected to the government) are responsible for over 50% of democracy, higher levels of printing, education, economic development, organizational civil society, protection of private property, the rule of law and lower levels of corruption in modern society. There is a laymen's level article here on this.
https://www.disciplenations.org/media/CT-Article-On-Missionaries-And-Global-Democracy.pdf
Dr. Woodberry writes:
"Protestantism is associated with democracy. In broad comparative historical analyses, CPs consistently initiated and spread factors that past research suggests promote democracy (e.g., mass printing, mass education, civil society, and colonial rule of law). In cross-national statistical analysis Protestant missions are significantly and robustly associated with higher levels of printing, education, economic development, organizational civil society, protection of private property and rule of law and with lower levels of corruption (Woodberry2004a;2004c;2006c;2011b; 2011c and Table 21). Moreover, wherever they have been tested, these patterns repeat at the subnational level (Woodberry 2004a; Gallego and Woodberry 2010; Nunn 2010; Bai and Kung 2010;Lankina and Getachew forthcoming).
Finally, statistical analysis suggests that Protestant missions are strongly and robustly associated with democracy. In fact, missions seem to explain about half the variation in democracy outside Europe and survive dozens of controls and robustness checks."
The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy, Robert D. Woodberry, p. 43.
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic965299.files/Woodberry%20APSR%202011.pdf
In a review, Dr. Robin Greer, professor of economics and international and area studies at the University of Oklahoma says,
"I think it's the best work out there on religion and economic development. It 's incredibly sophisticated and well grounded. I haven't seen anything quite like it."
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2) FOLLOW FAIR TRADE & FREE MARKET
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Once this basic economic right of sharing natural resources is provided to all, then everyone can follow free market economics and if you work hard (or are lucky), you can get rich or do whatever else your dreams are in life (and hopefully follow God’s plans for you which are higher than the highest human thought). So, it provides for the basic needs of ALL and enough for most to have a chance at their dreams as well. But, God gives very stern warnings against cheating in business:
In the land rent system, the government is not allowed to tax anything except natural resources (at a low rate) and then use those for the betterment of the community. Subsidies are also not allowed in Jubilee or Land Rent (these have often resulted in dire market distortions and destroyed millions of jobs). Governments are spending trillions in subsidizing a variety of business ranging from farmers to energy companies***. This distorts the costs consumers pay for products and destroys free and fair markets. Governments may rightfully invest in research that is important for their nation’s security, economy, technology, happiness, etc. But, they should let free market forces prevail for the most part.
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3) BE SELF-SUPPORTING / NO WORK=NO FREE LUNCH
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Once natural resources are distributed fairly among the population of a nation, it will empower independence and the maximum efficiency of the work force and unemployment plummets. Nearly everyone should be able to be self-supporting. No one should be given money by the government, church, etc. if they don’t work.
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4) REDUCE INCOME GAPS—KEEP A BALANCED VIEW OF MONEY
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BIBLE VERSES:
How can all these verses be unified? Simple. Money is important, but it shouldn’t be the #1 goal.
Many societies measure the success of society by its GDP. But, MUCH research shows that money only improves happiness from poverty to middle class levels***. More wealth after that does very little to improve happiness. A couple nations have measured their society by its gross national happiness (GNH). There are many factors by which we should measure the success of society, not just GDP and we should educate people to understand facts in this area. One of these is that MUCH research shows that money only improves happiness from poverty to middle class levels. More wealth after that does very little to improve happiness.
Research by Richard Wilkinson, professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham (until 2008) shows that high income gaps in a society are not good for anyone, not even the rich. Economic injustice harms all in society, including the richest in causing more crime, mental disease, lower health quality, more school dropouts, higher infant mortality, more teen pregnancy, distrust in society , etc. which result in higher costs for government which are passed on to us in taxes.
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why
There are a basket of crucial areas that are affected by reducing income gaps within a society. Wilkinson reports evidence that suggests that if we halved inequality (in the UK specifically, but it would apply similarly elsewhere):
Reducing the income gap has dramatic impacts on the social costs governments have to pay as well as reducing crime, insecurity, terrorism, distrust and violence both within and between societies. If we can cut these costs, it will much more quickly help nations solve their debt problems and be able to fund development, health care, education, science, technology and more. If these facts are promoted, it can encourage people to work for the correct priorities and solve many of our economic problems.
Denmark has done a pretty good job of educating its population to put happiness, relationships, family and other things as higher priorities than being wealthy and other nations could learn much from their example. Watch the short 6 minute video on that here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TruthIsLife7#g/c/985FFAA48DE1801F
In addition to distributing natural resources equitably among all above, God gave several principles of generosity to Israel that would lessen the gap between the rich and the poor, admonishing those well off to donate to those in need or at least lend and NEVER EVER to charge interest for doing so (a great evil in the Bible).
BE GENEROUS
DON’T CHARGE INTEREST TO THOSE IN NEED:
ALLOW THE POOR TO GLEAN FROM FIELDS:
In addition to the principles of generosity, God required that the edges of fields not be harvested so that the poor could glean from them what they needed to eat.
CANCEL DEBTS AFTER 7 YEARS:
WHY ARE THESE IMPORTANT?
Why are all these principles important? Consider this:
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5) IMPROVE HEALTH=IMPROVE WEALTH=REDUCE DEBT:
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One of the biggest and easiest ways to save money and reduce debt is by improving health. A report by the World Economic Forum states that 5 non-communicable diseases alone will cost $47 trillion, ~4% of world GDP, in the next 20 years. We know very well how to reduce and stop many diseases in 1st, 2nd and 3rd world nations. When we improve health, it has direct connections to labor efficiency and production as well as reducing costs and improving profits.
Hans Rosling shows how wealth follows health in animated charts here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
If we can deal with this problem effectively, it can go a long way to solving many economic problems and costs. The Bible has ~40 health principles that bring people the healthiest and longest life on the planet. These two links have secular research confirming this and an intro to Bible health principles that greatly impact quality of life as well as economics:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0511/sights_n_sounds/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDF491C31BC08BEE4 (videos 2-4 are confirmations from secular science organizations about how God's health principles add 10+ years to life THESE DAYS. See esp. 11:30. Videos 5-7 are a basic intro to God’s health principles in the Bible that add 10+ years to life.)
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6) WELFARE FOR WORK / PROVISION FOR EMERGENCIES:
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As the above policies takes effect, there will be no more excuse for governments to financially support those who do not work. Most of the welfare budget thus can gradually be reduced and the money reassigned to where it will be better used (education, science, etc.). For the emergency cases that still require assistance and support, there can be two easy solutions:
1) jobs can be assigned to them or
2) they can be required to invent a productive job in order to gain the support of the government.
Those who refuse to work (except if seriously incapacitated), should not be supported by government funds. But, God instituted a welfare system for the emergency cases where people couldn’t make enough to live. People could sell themselves for up to 7 years if they were unable to support themselves and their basic needs would be taken care of without using taxes or funds from others. This was sort of like being an indentured servant. When they were ready, they could go independent again. In this way, no one else was taxed or burdened by the government to support those who had financial problems.
BIBLE VERSE:
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7) INSTILL CORRECT PRIORITIES: AVOID MATERIALISM/REDUCE INCOME GAPS
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Sin is often VERY expensive. Whether it’s divorce, lying, fraud in finance/business/science, the cost of imprisoning criminals, corruption in government or whatever, moral failures cost nations billions and billions of dollars every year in the upkeep of prisons alone. It’s important to find ways to reduce them effectively. Education, religion, media, parental training and education and many other factors can contribute to reducing immorality in significant ways. Research above*** showed how religion was very important in reducing immorality. God designed that part of the tithe (10% of income) should be given to churches. Part was used for religious services, festivals, support of pastors, etc. But, part was used to help the poor. These and other principles above are VERY cheap compared to the alternative costs of war and skyrocketing immorality.
BIBLE VERSES:
Success, happiness, health, self-control, morality and many other important factors that are crucial for life and improving economic progress must be emphasized strongly through education, media, science, religion and other avenues. Governments can respect freedom of choice while strongly promoting what is best for society in a variety of ways.
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CONCLUSION
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BIBLE VERSE:
As you can see above, the Bible’s economic system solves MANY of the economic problems that nations have had throughout history and it can be used to solve many problems in many nations today as well.
In sports, you want all your players productive and healthy. That’s the best way to win. The same is true in economics and this system provides for everyone’s basic needs and opportunities to achieve dreams and be productive better than any other system I’m aware of.
This system works incredibly well because it gives powerful incentives for EVERYONE to be actively working and contributing to society. It does not support laziness (like socialism does), it encourages maximum entrepreneurship (like capitalism) and doesn’t steal from the rich or tax legitimate businesses out of existence. It eliminates extreme poverty in many national and state examples (unlike modern capitalism which causes disastrous tragedies for many poor due to its violation of the basic economic rights to natural resources that so many great leaders have recognized). If Jubilee is followed, there is no need for national health care since people have enough resources to pay for their needs themselves (if Jubilee or land rent are not followed, the only ethical thing is to provide free health care). It also reduces crime, the size of government, and causes the maximum number of people to be gainfully employed. Research has also shown that when women have financial support, they are much less likely to engage in abortions. So, it helps the conservative position in that area as well.
God’s economic plan was designed explicitly to avoid many problems that our world now faces as well as much tragedy, violence and death. His plan creates peace for all people on a scale the world has never seen before. I’m quite sure that Jesus is quite saddened and has often cried because of how people have ignored His wise plans and suffered directly because of it:
“But as he came closer to Jerusalem and saw the city ahead, he began to weep. 42 “How I wish today that you of all people would understand the way to peace.” Luke 19:41,42.
The reason heaven is going to be utopia is not so much because God will make it that way by magic. It will be perfect because people will finally become smart enough to trust God and realize that His plans are the best overall foundation for life that exists. THAT is why heaven will be heaven.
MORE SITES ON THIS CONCEPT:
See many more details here on Bible Jubilee Economics:
http://www.truth-is-life.org/jubileeeconomics.html
Here’s an excerpt from a site that explains how sharing natural resources can help solve an incredible number of problems. These are from these sites:
http://www.answersanswers.com/landrent.html
http://www.answersanswers.com/land_rent_proof.html#history http://www.answersanswers.com/land_rent_proof.html#proof
EXTRA QUOTES
The social reformer Walter Raushenbusch wrote, "History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. It is always hungry for bread, sweaty with labor, struggling to wrest from nature and hostile men enough to feed its children. The welfare of the mass is always at odds with the selfish force of the strong. The exodus of the Roman plebeians and the Pennsylvania coal strike, the agrarian agitation of the Gracchi and the rising of the Russian peasants, - it is all the same tragic human life." from “Christianity and the Social Crisis” by Walter Raushenbusch
And yet this goal of being far wealthier than others is precisely what causes the costs of governing and protecting wealth to rise astronomically. The research points out that it just doesn’t make sense.
Robert Kennedy put it simply,
“I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.”
The most translated woman author in history, Ellen White, pointed out why the Bible (and other religious traditions have similar emphases) emphasized many economic principles in its Jubilee system that were specifically targeted at reducing large income gaps (sharing natural resources equitably with all citizens, banning the charging of interest, laws on gleaning and instructions to be generous to those in trouble as we would to God, tithe given to poor, etc.) and how this was for the good of all. She wrote,
“Great evils would result from the continued accumulation of wealth by one class, and the poverty and degradation of another. Without some restraint the power of the wealthy would become a monopoly, and the poor, though in every respect fully as worthy in God's sight, would be regarded and treated as inferior to their more prosperous brethren. The sense of this oppression would arouse the passions of the poorer class. There would be a feeling of despair and desperation which would tend to demoralize society and open the door to crimes of every description. The regulations that God established were designed to promote social equality. The provisions of the sabbatical year and the jubilee would, in a great measure, set right that which during the interval had gone wrong in the social and political economy of the nation.
These regulations were designed to bless the rich no less than the poor. They would restrain avarice and a disposition for self-exaltation, and would cultivate a noble spirit of benevolence; and by fostering good will and confidence between all classes, they would promote social order, the stability of government. We are all woven together in the great web of humanity, and whatever we can do to benefit and uplift others will reflect in blessing upon ourselves. The law of mutual dependence runs through all classes of society. The poor are not more dependent upon the rich than are the rich upon the poor. While the one class ask a share in the blessings which God has bestowed upon their wealthier neighbors, the other need the faithful service, the strength of brain and bone and muscle, that are the capital of the poor.”
Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 534
Ellen White hit the nail right on the head and now much solid research confirms it and conservatives will approve of this because many religious traditions advocate it strongly. Here are Bible verses for example:
6) MORAL ADVOCACY:
Whether it’s divorce, lying, fraud in finance/business/science, the cost of imprisoning criminals, corruption in government or whatever, moral failures costs billions and billions of Euros every year for society and it is important to find ways to reduce them effectively to solve economic problems that nations are facing. Education, religion and many other factors can contribute to this in important ways.
Marcello Pera, a well known European intellectual and atheist, recently released a titled "Why We Must Call Ourselves Christian". He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pisa and concentrated on the works of Karl Popper. He says Europe must call itself Christian because it's exactly what can bring the continent together. Pera notes that Christianity's concept of the human person as created in the image of God is not something found in other cultures, and said that this exists "prior to the state's intervention." “If we prescind from these Christian principles”, he warned, “we will have destroyed our constitutional heritage”.
In the book's introduction Pera writes: "My position is that of an atheist and a liberal who asks Christianity about the reason for hope." He says that we must ask ourselves "who we are, what do we believe in, what is my identity, our identity; if I do not ask these questions, I do not know how to defend myself from those who attack me and I do not even know what to teach." One of the inspirations for writing the book was realizing that modern civilization and many of its principles, values and ethics, simply would not exist without the influence of Christianity.
There are most definitely atheists who are moral and some who have done admirable work in moral areas and human rights. It’s also a fact that morality is influenced by many factors (education, culture, friends, etc.). But, religion is one of the biggest and most positive factors and needs to be encouraged.
Dr. Guenter Lewy professor emeritus of the Univ. of Massachusetts was a secularist who set out to ridicule the claims of Christians that the crisis of the age is a crisis of unbelief and to prove the attack on secular modernity “to be a danger to individual liberty as well as an affront to people of goodwill who happened to be agnostics or atheists.” He intended to write a book “Why America doesn’t need Religion.” But, the research changed his mind and he wrote the book, “Why America Needs Religion.”
“The fifth chapter, “Religiousness and Moral Conduct: Are Believing Christians Different?,” begs the question of whether the Christian faith transforms the lives of those who take their religion seriously. In particular, Professor Lewy examines the questions of juvenile delinquency, adult crime, prejudice and intolerance, single parenting, and divorce, and concludes that the vast majority of social science research supports the finding that the minority of Christians who take their religion seriously (as opposed to the nominal Christians of the Christmas-and-Easter variety) have significantly lower rates of moral failure and social ills than any other groups studied.
http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-7-number-5/why-america-needs-religion
You can read much of this chapter online. Start on about page 95.
http://books.google.com/books?id=KfxJA_7zG7MC&pg=PA89&dq=Why+America+needs+God&hl=en&ei=tD5LTp2iMo_JmAXXqo3jBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Many liberals speak and care passionately about the human rights of others. While there are good points that both conservatives and liberals make, the facts are that it is conservatives (often religious believers) who are the ones who contribute most to the improvement of quality of life for others. Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism." He found that
• conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).
• Conservatives are more likely to volunteer their time (67% to 44%), and volunteer more of their time (almost twice as much) and give more blood.
• Religious people are statistically more likely to give than secularists (91% to 66%)
• Religious people are even more likely to donate to secular organizations and unknown recipients than secularists.
The single biggest predictor of someone's altruism is religion and America is largely divided between religious givers and secular non-givers although there are some positive improvements happening among secularists.
A survey of 1,600 Canadians asked them what were their beliefs about God and what moral values they considered to be "very important." The results of the survey are shown below:
1. http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads/attachments/Social virtues linked to faith.pdf
Religion’s impact on changing millions of people’s lives every year in extremely positive ways is incalculable and this even on its own justifies it being something that everyone should learn the evidence for and be open minded to. There are some of millions of examples of people’s lives, marriages saved, suicides prevented and addictions ended here for just a few examples:
God Revolutionizes Lives
http://www.youtube.com/user/truthislife7#g/c/0361CAE3DB6FE0D5
It is largely due to Christianity that many criminals, gangsters, drug dealers, etc. have become productive members of society. Atheist sites often lie about how Christianity improves morals using unscientific lists that could just as easily prove that being black or being tall causes you to commit more crime. See this research from the secular University of North Carolina on this:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/religion_as_child_abuse.html
The separation of church and state that many are so concerned about is very important. But, there are several ways this can be done:
1) Encourage the state to assist and promote education about the facts of religion and its benefits to individuals and societies. But, forbid the state to be involved in any form of persecution of people who differ from the state’s view. This is the view that helped many countries in Europe as well as the US develop very rapidly.
2) Amputate all contact between religion and government. The communist nations demonstrated one consequence of doing this in the last century. And negative results usually follow when all connections between government and religion are severed.
The records of history show that #1 is most productive and helpful to society while #2 is damaging.
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1) DISTRIBUTE NATURAL RESOURCES EQUITABLY
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One of the thorniest problems of economics and most important issues in economic justice is how to share natural resources. Geniuses often disagree. But, on this area, many of the greatest philosophers, thinkers and economists in history from all sides agree (Fortune Magazine, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Moses/God, Voltaire, Tom Paine, Confucius, John Locke, Churchill, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Douglas MacArthur, Einstein, Tolstoy, Pliny the Elder, Aristotle and literally 1000s of others). Natural resources were not created by any person (religious people believe God created them. Atheists agree that no person created them) and God has stated that they must be shared equitably by all.
MANY thinkers from all sides agree:
• ABRAHAM LINCOLN: “The land, the earth God gave to man for his home,sustenance and support, should never be the possession of any man,corporation,society or unfriendly government,any more than the air or water”
• VOLTAIRE (atheist): "The fruits of the earth are a common heritage of all, to which each man has equal right."
• ROUSSEAU (atheist): "You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to no one."
• WILLIAM BLACKSTONE (British judge): "The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind from the immediate gift of the Creator."
• THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and with Ben Franklin the most inventive and intellectual of the Founding Fathers, wrote, "The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and to live on... Wherever in any country there are idle lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. Everyone may have land to labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age." (Notes on Virginia, 1791)
• CONFUCIUS (BC 551-479), Chinese philosopher, said, "When the Great Way prevailed, natural resources were fully used for the benefit of all and not appropriated for selfish ends... This was the Age of the Great Commonwealth of peace and prosperity."
The ideal way to do this is in the Bible is explained in the Jubilee system with land divided equally among each family, tribe, nations, etc. But, even pagan nations were responsible to have a basic minimum level for all its citizens. And there’s a second way to do it called Land rent where those who remove natural resources from the community’s use pay a yearly fee to society for doing so, often around 15% of the value of the land/resource per year.
See 100s more thinkers who advocate sharing nature with all in some way here::
http://commongroundorwa.org/index.php/research/research-reports/item/386-http-commongroundorwaorg-famsthnkpdf/386-http-commongroundorwaorg-famsthnkpdf
http://www.cooperative-individualism.org/georgism_01.htm
The Bible advocated these ideas 1000s of years before anyone else.
BIBLE VERSES:
** When Israel entered Canaan, all the land was divided equitably among tribes and families. This land could not ever be sold. It could only be leased for up to 49 years and then it returned to the original family, giving each generation capital to work with to be self-supporting and achieve their dreams. Property in cities COULD be permanently sold, but not ancestral lands. This gave each generation capital to work with and opportunity to achieve their dreams. See Numbers 34:13-15, Leviticus 25:8-30, 2 Kg 8, etc. In 1 Kings 21:1,2, 19; In I Kg 22; 2 Kg 9.7-10, Ahab tried to violate God’s principle and take eventually took ancestral property by force, but was punished severely for this.
** “Moreover the profit of the earth is for all:” Ecclesiastes 5:9
** “The heavens belong to the Lord, but he has given the earth to all humanity.” Psalm 115:16
** “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Enough, you princes of Israel! Stop all your violence and oppression and do what is just and right. Quit robbing and cheating my people out of their land! Stop expelling them from their homes!” Ezekiel 45:9
** “Destruction is certain for you who buy up property so others have no place to live. Your homes are built on great estates so you can be alone in the land.” Isaiah 5:8
God through prophets repeatedly insisted that the government give and protect each family's right to a permanent section of land outside the city as described in Joshua 13-18, Deuteronomy 15, Ezekiel 45-46 (see also Elijah's response to Ahab's attempted violation of this with Naboth). These and other policies simultaneously produce many benefits such as:
a) INCENTIVE: God's principles give a right to land to each family and so protect the right of a family to capital that enables them to have a great chance at being independent and reaching their dreams whatever they may be instead of being stuck in economic slavery with little or no hope of reaching any significant dreams all their lives. If more people have hope and opportunity, then society will be all that more productive and wealthy. If people don't have hope, they won't have passion or dedication to their job and there are many negative consequences that go with that.
These principles of right to land + free market protect incentives to work hard and succeed financially which enables multiple kinds of freedom as well as service to others. Since everyone has equitable opportunities to reach their dreams, the envy and jealousy factors drop dramatically. This creates peace, reduces crime and other societal instability since people have a hope and dreams to work on that are achievable and don't want to waste it in damaging others.
b) LIMIT CONTROL/POVERTY: They limit how much the powerful can concentrate wealth. This is crucial because concentrated wealth inevitably causes corruption with time and often great societal instability. When the rich/poor gap becomes too large (usually when the gini coefficient is above 9:1), it causes all sorts of social ills and enables the wealthy to buy out many businesses which increase their concentration of wealth. Then they turn to buying up media and distracting or indoctrinating most of the public with fiction so they don't pay attention to the exploitation going on. They buy politicians/govt. with bribes and subvert education to hide their graft and how they are cheating the middle class and poor out of their rights. They manipulate economics at the macro level by causing economic catastrophes where they can buy more land/businesses for pennies on the dollar. They exploit the poor by pushing wages down or inflation up, gaining both ways while cheating families out of their rights. These are only a few of the myriad of ways concentration of wealth wreaks havoc for families and national stability.
When people have resources and materials to work with and since the improvements on the land aren’t taxed, just the land itself, there is a strong incentive to make improvements on buildings and a huge natural incentive for people to produce and create more wealth with the resources that they own and have access to.
c) NO LAZINESS: They stop laziness and people eating without working for it. Since people have a decent amount of land capital to work with, the government then has no responsibility to give them welfare (with only rare exceptions). They must be self supporting.
d) BELIEVERS AID POOR: The few who experience injustice can be supported by God's believers at different levels which becomes a great witness of God's care and love for them and attracts them to belief in Him. Regarding this, E. R. Dodds writes that:
"A Christian congregation was from the first a community...Love of one's neighbour is not an exclusively Christian virtue, but in [this] period Christians appear to have practiced it much more effectively than any other group. The Church provided the essentials of social security.... But even more important...was the sense of belonging which the Christian community could give." and of course knowing God.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/why/starksociology.html
See also:
www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
http://creation.com/darwins-critical-influence-on-the-ruthless-extremes-of-capitalism
www.truth-is-life.org/jubileeeconomics.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
4 IMPORTANT REASONS FOR ALL TO ADVOCATE ECONOMIC JUSTICE
1. GREAT WEALTH CONCENTRATION DESTROYS DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM & HUMAN POTENTIAL.
The danger of wealth concentration was explicitly guarded against by NUMEROUS Bible principles and it was also clearly seen by many of the world’s greatest pioneers and thinkers. Republicans/Conservatives often attack Democrats/liberals for trying to engage in redistributing wealth or class warfare. But, the most extreme threat to democracy that is by far the redistribution of wealth that benefits the wealthy. This is the biggest danger by far to our economy. Here are a few thinkers who saw this danger:
• “Our founding fathers knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise, and Republican self-government could succeed only if power was widely distributed, and since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people in the country ..Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few?“--President Ronald Reagan, conservative icon
• Ronald Reagan also said,
“Certainly no thinking American would dispute the idea that there should be an economic floor beneath which no citizen of this land should be allowed to live.” and this is a crucial factor to teach and recognize for the best economic progress of society.
http://www.livedash.com/transcript/reagan/5916/HISTP/Wednesday_February_9_2011/559426/
• "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible, to maintain their control over governments, by controlling money and its issuance." - James Madison
• “The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."Abraham Lincoln
• “I slowly came to realize that political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.” --M Mortimer Adler, former professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago
• Rutherford B. Hayes (19th U.S. President) wrote this in his diary between 1881-1891, “December 4 Sunday. In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”
• Baron M.A. Rothschild understood when he once said: "Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws."
If wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, democracy is pretty much an illusion. America is already VERY VERY far towards democracy being just an illusion and many around the world are in a similar state:
“The rich-man, poor-man gap also widened {in 2008} with the nation's top one percent now collecting 23 percent of total income, the biggest disparity since 1928, according to the Economic Policy Institute.”
66.35.240.8/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/31/EDEC12L3SN.DTL
2. IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO GROW A MILLIONAIRE
Many rich people have worked hard, but most of the rich did not make their fortune alone. Some have rightly said, “It takes a village to grow a millionaire.” Society is seldom compensated for its investment in the creation of wealth. This should be corrected. Buffett points out that he attended a publicly supported state school, the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and is crystal clear that his investment wealth depends on America's social and economic infrastructure.
"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned," Buffett told the folks at http://www.responsiblewealth.org/ "I happen to work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well - disproportionately well."
The creation of wealth depends on a huge number of factors, most paid for by the entire society and because of that the entire society should benefit proportionately:
- Society invests in and pays most of the costs of national security.
- Society invests in and pays most of the costs of transportation systems.
- Society invests in and pays most of the costs of national defense.
- Society invests in and pays most of the costs of the legal system.
- Society invests in and pays most of the costs of the education system.
- Society invests in and pays many of the costs of research.
- Society invests in and pays most of the costs of water, electricity, sewer and other systems.
- Society invests in and pays many of the costs of communication systems.
“Consider the many components of the social framework that enable great wealth to be built in the United States. Among them are a patent system, enforceable contracts, open courts, property ownership records, protection against crime and external threats, and public education. Even the stock market is a form of socially created wealth that provides liquidity to enterprises. David Blitzer, the chief investment strategist at Standard and Poors, recently wrote, ‘Financial markets are as much a social contract as is democratic government.’ When faith in this social system is shaken, as it has been by recent breaches of trust, we see how quickly individual wealth evaporates.”
www.prospect.org/article/tax-wealthy
Responsible Wealth co-director Mike Lapham has a humorous way of putting it. "It takes a village to raise a billionaire. Every taxpayer deserves some credit for Forbes 400 wealth.
(adapted from: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0929-15.htm)
Elizabeth Warren makes it very clear, that there is no wealthy person who got rich on their own. NONE (watch esp. from 0:50).
But, in nearly all these areas above, the wealthy and big corporations receive astronomical benefits from what society has invested in compared to the profit they earn. This is not just or fair in any way, shape or form and many non-Christians, atheists, economists and many of the wealthy themselves fully agree with this. This needs to be changed so society can be run far more efficiently and so it can eliminate its debts and run with fiscal responsibility.
3. TOO MUCH CONCENTRATED WEALTH WASTES TALENT, TIME, ENERGY, CREATIVITY
As they say, it takes money to make money. But, much of the intellectual capital of most nations is wasted precisely because many people with great ideas don’t have the money to implement their creative ideas. But, if some of the profits of natural resources and societal investments are used to promote self-supporting independence for every citizen, this will empower and motivate many people out of their disillusionment and hopelessness into creative production and will directly promote the creation of many more businesses and more jobs. This of course will spur the economy, increase government revenue and create much lower rates of unemployment for the nation’s work force all and these all of course contribute to eliminating national debt.
4. WORLD PEACE & ECONOMIC JUSTICE
When Confucius was sad about the state of the world he said in reply to a question as to why he was "overcome with sighs":
Confucius' Great Harmony
When the Great Way prevailed, the world community was equally shared by all. The worthy and able were chosen as office-holders. Mutual confidence was fostered and good neighborliness cultivated. Therefore people did not regard as parents only their own parents, nor did they treat children only their own children. Provision was made for the aged till their death, the adults were given employment, and the young enabled to grow up. Old widows and widowers, the orphaned, the old and childless, as well as the sick and the disabled were all well taken care of. Men had their proper roles and women their homes. While they hated to see wealth lying about on the ground, they did not necessarily keep it for their own use. While they hated not to exert their effort, they did not necessarily devote it to their own ends. Thus evil schemings were repressed, and robbers, thieves and other lawless elements failed to arise, so that outer doors did not have to be shut. This was called the age of Great Harmony (Ta Tung)
...Now the Great Way has fallen into obscurity, . . . Each one separately loves his own parents; each looks upon his own children only as his children. People take the wealth of natural resources and the fruits of their own labors as their own. . . . Castle walls and outer defenses, moats and ditches, are made strong and secure. . . ."
Noted Confucius: "To implement my principle is nothing more than being honest and just." (sharing natural resources)
Excerpt only of his full reply. Hsiao, Kung-chuan (trans. F. W. Mote). A History of Chinese Political Thought. Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century A.D. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979, p. 125.
ONLY TWO FOUNDATIONS FOR ETHICAL ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
Because of the reasons above, there are only 2 ethical foundations for economic systems:
a) (Jubilee) Distribute natural resources equitably among all citizens as the Biblical Jubilee concept instructed or
b) (Land rent) Recognize that it is the right of the whole society to profit substantially from natural resources. Those who remove natural resources from the community’s use pay a yearly fee to society for doing so, often around 15% of the value of the land/resource per year. This money is used to fund national security, education, health care, infrastructure, etc. and promote self-reliance and independence for all. It can also be distributed as citizen’s dividends as happens in Alaska and certain Arab countries and others.
The profits from natural resources are not a small number. They are in the trillions of dollars annually and many of the biggest companies in the world are making astronomical profits from what belongs to society (Exxon alone for example made a profit of ~$35,000,000,000 in one year). Companies, workers, CEOs, etc. that recover the resources must be rewarded appropriately. But, society must also be compensated fairly for the use of natural resources that objectively belong to it.
Nations Where Sharing Natural Resources Eliminated Extreme Poverty
Many nations and tribes in history have followed this principle with great success. When they followed this idea well, extreme poverty was almost completely unknown. Land Rent and Jubilee have been tested many times in ancient and recent history and have caused Israelis to become some of the wealthiest people on the planet and many economies to skyrocket past the best performances of capitalism. Here are a couple examples of countries following a modification of the biblical concept of sharing natural resources, land rent.
- TAIWAN:
When Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan in the 1940s, people were very
poor and hungry. 20 rich families monopolized the entire island.
General Chiang implemented the system of land rent. The rich soon
realized that owning land that you weren’t using was very unprofitable
and sold it quickly at cheap prices to farmers and businessmen. The new
owners worked hard and within 10 years, the countries debts were paid
off, hunger was ended and the economy began to skyrocket. Taiwan set
world records with 10% per year GDP growth and 20% in their industry.
(Fred Harrison, Power in the Land, 1983) By comparison, Korea’s GDP
growth in 2005 was 3.5%
(http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/biz/200512/kt2005122021361211860.htm).
So land rent can produce an economy three times better than capitalism.
- KOREA/JAPAN/ASIAN TIGERS: In the last few decades
many of the Asian tiger roared to the top of the world economy. These
success stories began on a firm footing of land reform. The city-state
Singapore, founded on Georgist tax principles, reached a tax rate on
land of 16%. Over 80% of Hong Kong’s budget for a long time came from
Land Rent taxes (Yu-Hung Hong, Landlines, 1999 March, Lincoln Inst.,
Cambridge, MA). Hong Kong enjoys low taxes, low prices, high investment,
and often the highest per capita salaries. The city is often voted the
world's best city for business and the freest for residents. Douglas
MacArthur strongly promoted Land Rent concepts in Japan and Korea after
World War 2 and in less than 50 years both countries have risen from
massive devastation to be consistently ranked in the top 15 economies in
the world in spite of their small size!
- CALIFORNIA: In the 1890s in California, one man Henry Miller owned 1,000,000 acres of land. Miller could travel from Mexico to Oregon and spend every night on his own land. California started following land rent and Miller realized he would be poor if he kept all that unused land. He sold the land to over 7,000 independent farms and California became the "bread basket of America" and is equivalent to the 5th largest economy in the world.
www.pipalya.com/rlt/public/taxshift.htm
Here's one example from Korea in some more detail.
WHY KOREA'S ECONOMY SKY ROCKETED--THEY FOLLOWED BIBLE LAND JUSTICE
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There are usually several factors in important positive or negative changes in society. Korean's have an amazing work ethic, Confucian love for education/wisdom helps. Hangeul is the world's #1 best alphabet due to King Sejong (and missionaries who first taught it to people in schools) and there are other factors.
In a lengthy scholarly article, Dr. Luis Bush explains the importance of a Christian revival in Korea and how that influenced Korean Christians such as Kim Yong Ki to follow Bible ideas in a range of areas emphasizing resource management, work ethics, social, health and spiritual improvement in various ways. Kim Yong Ki and others also heavily promoted the Bible's jubilee economic ideas that each family should own and work its own plot of land.
You can see more details of how the Christian Canaan farm movement influenced the nation here:
http://darrowmillerandfriends.com/2013/12/19/disciple-a-nation-the-story-of-the-canaan-farm-school/
http://darrowmillerandfriends.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ABOUT-CANAAN-YONSEI-PROGRAM.pdf
http://www.canaanglc.or.kr/brocher.pdf
This idea of the Bible worked so well that eventually President Park Chung Hee came to see what was happening and was very impressed. His government adapted it into a national law that gave most farmers land and limited ownership to ~3 hectares (US leaders like Douglas MacArthur also promoted this..and North Korea's land policies also influenced it some). President Park said of Kim Yong Gi:
“This home and this farm, have carried out a revolution to advance our nation.”
This Bible idea of sharing land started with Christians and then went nationwide. This increased individual freedom/independence and also reduced concentration of wealth and power which always brings a lot of very massive problems. These also sky rocket economies.
Dr. Bush wrote about how Christians influenced Korea's government.
"Biblical values permeate government policy and have produced the engine that has driven transformational development of Korea as this paper seeks to demonstrate, particularly in regards to its economic development. This phenomenal development of South Korea is often called the "Miracle on the Han River” which is a primary subject of Part II of this presentation as it relates to the developmental phases of the transformation of Korea."
https://www.disciplenations.org/article/pdf-transformation-poor-blessed-korean-case-study/
Combined with the land justice focus, Koreans have a strong sense of concern for the entire community, which is another crucial biblical aspect (Phil. 2:4 says to look out for the interests of others, not only our own, and that's intrinsic in the golden rule as well). A Korean doctor friend of mine says that both conservative and liberal Koreans agree that the basic needs of the poor must be protected somehow, at all levels of society and by the government if necessary. This is also a Bible principle that the prophets repeatedly spoke of, even to foreign nations like Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon and others.
Here's an academic peer reviewed article about how Korea and Taiwan's economies sky rocketed while the Philippines has been very unequal with lots of poverty around the country. The economist shows that it was basically due to 3 reasons:
1) Korea and Taiwan shared land fairly (This happened mostly due to major Christian/Bible influence cited above). The rich in the Philippines prevented this..
2) The war in Korea broke the power of the rich. In Taiwan, General Chiang Kai Shek had a strong army as well as a strong commitment to land justice. So it was easier in those countries to overcome the resistance of the wealthy and make fair land laws. But, in the Philippines, the rich were so powerful that they stopped the fair laws on land justice.
3) American leaders and the military strongly supported land justice in Korea and Taiwan because of nearby communist threats (North Korea and China respectively). But they didn't emphasize it so much in the Philippines since communism wasn't a nearby threat there.
In Korean and Taiwan, land justice reduced corruption enormously and made it very hard to concentrate wealth. It brought a much fairer playing field for all which gave people incentives to work hard. This energized the economies and they rose at record rates that shocked the world. The Philippines failed to share land fairly and still has much grinding poverty because the wealthy exploit the poor. This research basically shows that there is a strong causal mechanism of “inequality→higher corruption→lower growth”. This confirms many other studies on this (such as You and Khagram (2005) and Easterly (2007)).
Inequality and Corruption: The Role of Land Reform in Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines
http://irps.ucsd.edu/assets/001/503066.pdf
This was crucial in the development of Korea.
"In South Korea, the U.S. military authorities and the new postwar government also instituted a land-to-the-tiller reform. Prior to this, most farmland was cultivated by tenant farmers, who paid half or more of their crop to Japanese and Korean landlords. The reform transferred ownership rights to former tenants. The ceiling on land ownership was set at three hectares (about 7.5 acres). Korean landlords (but not their Japanese counterparts) received compensation, nominally equal to the ‘market price’ of the land. In practice, the market price already was deflated by landowner fears of expropriation, and the value of the compensation was further curtailed by stretching payments over time, with no interest or inflation adjustments. The former tenants made in-kind payments (in rice) to the government in return for the land. The government used the income from sale of the rice not only to compensate landlords, but also to invest in rural water supply systems (Jang 2004).
By redistributing rights to the most important rural asset, East Asia’s postwar land reforms did much to reduce poverty in the countryside. At the same time, the land reforms helped to set the stage for the rapid industrialization that one day would be hailed as ‘the East Asian miracle’ (World Bank 1993). Two links between land reform and industrial growth were particularly important. First, farmers’ improved economic security meant that they could afford to send their children to school, providing a skilled workforce for industry (Shin, 1998). Second, compared to the landed oligarchies that dominated political life in the pre-reform era, the reforms brought about a more egalitarian order. This helps to explain why government efforts to promote industrialization did not degenerate into a mere pretext for looting state resources and capturing 5 policy-generated ‘rents,’ as so often happened in countries where traditional landed elites retained their grip on power.10 Analyzing how and why the state succeeded in promoting industrial growth in South Korea and
Taiwan, economist Dani Rodrik (1995, pp. 92-93) concludes that the ‘initial advantage’ conferred by an egalitarian distribution of wealth and income was ‘probably the single most important reason why extensive government intervention could be carried out effectively, without giving rise to rampant rent seeking.’ In other words, land reform was one of the keys – arguably the key – to East Asia’s economic ‘miracle.’"
Land Reform and Sustainable Development http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=peri_workingpapers (and http://countrystudies.us/south-korea/36.htm)
Principles like the above and others have helped protestant Christian missionaries become the #1 source of freedom in human rights, education, health/medicine and other areas. Sometimes they understood the importance of land..sometimes they didn't, but saw the importance of other principles of God that were valuable for human freedom.
Dr. Woodberry recently published exhaustive research showing decisively that protestant missionaries (esp. those not connected to the government) are responsible for over 50% of democracy, higher levels of printing, education, economic development, organizational civil society, protection of private property, the rule of law and lower levels of corruption in modern society. There is a laymen's level article here on this.
https://www.disciplenations.org/media/CT-Article-On-Missionaries-And-Global-Democracy.pdf
Dr. Woodberry writes:
"Protestantism is associated with democracy. In broad comparative historical analyses, CPs consistently initiated and spread factors that past research suggests promote democracy (e.g., mass printing, mass education, civil society, and colonial rule of law). In cross-national statistical analysis Protestant missions are significantly and robustly associated with higher levels of printing, education, economic development, organizational civil society, protection of private property and rule of law and with lower levels of corruption (Woodberry2004a;2004c;2006c;2011b; 2011c and Table 21). Moreover, wherever they have been tested, these patterns repeat at the subnational level (Woodberry 2004a; Gallego and Woodberry 2010; Nunn 2010; Bai and Kung 2010;Lankina and Getachew forthcoming).
Finally, statistical analysis suggests that Protestant missions are strongly and robustly associated with democracy. In fact, missions seem to explain about half the variation in democracy outside Europe and survive dozens of controls and robustness checks."
The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy, Robert D. Woodberry, p. 43.
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic965299.files/Woodberry%20APSR%202011.pdf
In a review, Dr. Robin Greer, professor of economics and international and area studies at the University of Oklahoma says,
"I think it's the best work out there on religion and economic development. It 's incredibly sophisticated and well grounded. I haven't seen anything quite like it."
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2) FOLLOW FAIR TRADE & FREE MARKET
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Once this basic economic right of sharing natural resources is provided to all, then everyone can follow free market economics and if you work hard (or are lucky), you can get rich or do whatever else your dreams are in life (and hopefully follow God’s plans for you which are higher than the highest human thought). So, it provides for the basic needs of ALL and enough for most to have a chance at their dreams as well. But, God gives very stern warnings against cheating in business:
- Leviticus 19:35 "Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity. 36Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt.
- Amos 8:4 “Listen to this, you who rob the poor and trample down the needy! 5 You can’t wait for the Sabbath day to be overand the religious festivals to endso you can get back to cheating the helpless.You measure out grain with dishonest measures and cheat the buyer with dishonest scales. 6 And you mix the grain you sell with chaff swept from the floor.Then you enslave poor people for one piece of silver or a pair of sandals.7 Now the LORD has sworn… I will never forget the wicked things you have done!”
- Psalm 15:5 Those who do not charge interest on the money they lend, and who refuse to accept bribes to testify against the innocent. Such people will stand firm forever.
- Micah 6:11And how can I tolerate all your merchants who use dishonest scales and weights?
- James 5:4 “For listen! Hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay. The wages you held back cry out against you. The cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.” (see also Malachi 3:5)
- Jeremiah 21:13 "Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his countrymen work for nothing, not paying them for their labor….17 "your eyes and your heart are set only on dishonest gain, on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion."
- Amos 5:11 “You trample the poor and steal what little they have through taxes and unfair rent…14Do what is good and run from evil--that you may live! ”
In the land rent system, the government is not allowed to tax anything except natural resources (at a low rate) and then use those for the betterment of the community. Subsidies are also not allowed in Jubilee or Land Rent (these have often resulted in dire market distortions and destroyed millions of jobs). Governments are spending trillions in subsidizing a variety of business ranging from farmers to energy companies***. This distorts the costs consumers pay for products and destroys free and fair markets. Governments may rightfully invest in research that is important for their nation’s security, economy, technology, happiness, etc. But, they should let free market forces prevail for the most part.
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3) BE SELF-SUPPORTING / NO WORK=NO FREE LUNCH
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- **2 Thes. 3:10 “Even while we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘Whoever does not work should not eat.’”
- **1 Timothy 5:8 “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
Once natural resources are distributed fairly among the population of a nation, it will empower independence and the maximum efficiency of the work force and unemployment plummets. Nearly everyone should be able to be self-supporting. No one should be given money by the government, church, etc. if they don’t work.
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4) REDUCE INCOME GAPS—KEEP A BALANCED VIEW OF MONEY
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BIBLE VERSES:
- ** “..it is He {God}who gives you power to get wealth…” Deuteronomy 8:18
- **A party gives laughter, and wine gives happiness, and money gives everything! - Ecclesiastes 10:19
- **“Trust in your money and down you go! But the godly flourish like leaves in spring.” Proverbs 11:28
- ** “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” 1 Timothy 6:10
How can all these verses be unified? Simple. Money is important, but it shouldn’t be the #1 goal.
Many societies measure the success of society by its GDP. But, MUCH research shows that money only improves happiness from poverty to middle class levels***. More wealth after that does very little to improve happiness. A couple nations have measured their society by its gross national happiness (GNH). There are many factors by which we should measure the success of society, not just GDP and we should educate people to understand facts in this area. One of these is that MUCH research shows that money only improves happiness from poverty to middle class levels. More wealth after that does very little to improve happiness.
Research by Richard Wilkinson, professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham (until 2008) shows that high income gaps in a society are not good for anyone, not even the rich. Economic injustice harms all in society, including the richest in causing more crime, mental disease, lower health quality, more school dropouts, higher infant mortality, more teen pregnancy, distrust in society , etc. which result in higher costs for government which are passed on to us in taxes.
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why
There are a basket of crucial areas that are affected by reducing income gaps within a society. Wilkinson reports evidence that suggests that if we halved inequality (in the UK specifically, but it would apply similarly elsewhere):
- - Murder rates could halve
- - Mental illness could reduce by two thirds
- - Obesity could halve
- - Imprisonment could reduce by 80%
- - Teen births could reduce by 80%
- - Levels of trust could increase by 85%
Reducing the income gap has dramatic impacts on the social costs governments have to pay as well as reducing crime, insecurity, terrorism, distrust and violence both within and between societies. If we can cut these costs, it will much more quickly help nations solve their debt problems and be able to fund development, health care, education, science, technology and more. If these facts are promoted, it can encourage people to work for the correct priorities and solve many of our economic problems.
Denmark has done a pretty good job of educating its population to put happiness, relationships, family and other things as higher priorities than being wealthy and other nations could learn much from their example. Watch the short 6 minute video on that here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TruthIsLife7#g/c/985FFAA48DE1801F
In addition to distributing natural resources equitably among all above, God gave several principles of generosity to Israel that would lessen the gap between the rich and the poor, admonishing those well off to donate to those in need or at least lend and NEVER EVER to charge interest for doing so (a great evil in the Bible).
BE GENEROUS
- ** Deut. 15:7"But if there are any poor people in your towns…, do not be hard-hearted or tightfisted toward them. 8Instead, be generous and lend them whatever they need. If you refuse to make the loan and the needy person cries out to the LORD, you will be considered guilty of sin. 10Give freely without begrudging it, and the LORD your God will bless you in everything you do.
- ** 2 Corinthians 8:11 …Give whatever you can according to what you have. 12If you are really eager to give, it isn't important how much you are able to give. God wants you to give what you have, not what you don't have. 13 Of course, I don't mean you should give so much that you suffer from having too little. I only mean that there should be some equality. 14 Right now you have plenty and can help them. Then at some other time they can share with you when you need it. In this way, everyone's needs will be met.
- ** 2 Corinthians 9:7 Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
DON’T CHARGE INTEREST TO THOSE IN NEED:
- Leviticus 25:35 If any of your Israelite relatives fall into poverty and cannot support themselves, support them as you would a resident foreigner and allow them to live with you. Do not demand an advance or charge interest on the money you lend them. Instead, show your fear of God by letting them live with you as your relatives.
ALLOW THE POOR TO GLEAN FROM FIELDS:
In addition to the principles of generosity, God required that the edges of fields not be harvested so that the poor could glean from them what they needed to eat.
- **“When you gather the grapes in your vineyard, don’t glean the vines after they are picked. Leave the remaining grapes for the foreigners, orphans, and widows.” Deuteronomy 24:21
CANCEL DEBTS AFTER 7 YEARS:
- Deuteronomy 15:1 “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.” (Rabbis say this could not be done irresponsibly. Only after diligent effort to repay was it allowed.):
WHY ARE THESE IMPORTANT?
Why are all these principles important? Consider this:
- “There are compelling reasons for paying attention to this potential for catastrophe as, every debt crisis in history since Solon of Athens has ended in inflation, bankruptcy or war, and there is no cause to believe we've solved this one, even if it has been postponed.”(George, Fate Worse Than Debt, p. 196.)
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5) IMPROVE HEALTH=IMPROVE WEALTH=REDUCE DEBT:
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One of the biggest and easiest ways to save money and reduce debt is by improving health. A report by the World Economic Forum states that 5 non-communicable diseases alone will cost $47 trillion, ~4% of world GDP, in the next 20 years. We know very well how to reduce and stop many diseases in 1st, 2nd and 3rd world nations. When we improve health, it has direct connections to labor efficiency and production as well as reducing costs and improving profits.
Hans Rosling shows how wealth follows health in animated charts here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
If we can deal with this problem effectively, it can go a long way to solving many economic problems and costs. The Bible has ~40 health principles that bring people the healthiest and longest life on the planet. These two links have secular research confirming this and an intro to Bible health principles that greatly impact quality of life as well as economics:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0511/sights_n_sounds/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDF491C31BC08BEE4 (videos 2-4 are confirmations from secular science organizations about how God's health principles add 10+ years to life THESE DAYS. See esp. 11:30. Videos 5-7 are a basic intro to God’s health principles in the Bible that add 10+ years to life.)
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6) WELFARE FOR WORK / PROVISION FOR EMERGENCIES:
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As the above policies takes effect, there will be no more excuse for governments to financially support those who do not work. Most of the welfare budget thus can gradually be reduced and the money reassigned to where it will be better used (education, science, etc.). For the emergency cases that still require assistance and support, there can be two easy solutions:
1) jobs can be assigned to them or
2) they can be required to invent a productive job in order to gain the support of the government.
Those who refuse to work (except if seriously incapacitated), should not be supported by government funds. But, God instituted a welfare system for the emergency cases where people couldn’t make enough to live. People could sell themselves for up to 7 years if they were unable to support themselves and their basic needs would be taken care of without using taxes or funds from others. This was sort of like being an indentured servant. When they were ready, they could go independent again. In this way, no one else was taxed or burdened by the government to support those who had financial problems.
BIBLE VERSE:
- **“If one of your fellow Israelites falls into poverty and is forced to sell himself to you, do not treat him as a slave. Treat him instead as a hired worker or as a temporary resident who lives with you, and he will serve you only until the Year of Jubilee. At that time he and his children will no longer be obligated to you, and they will return to their clans and go back to the land originally allotted to their ancestors.” Leviticus 25:39-41
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7) INSTILL CORRECT PRIORITIES: AVOID MATERIALISM/REDUCE INCOME GAPS
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Sin is often VERY expensive. Whether it’s divorce, lying, fraud in finance/business/science, the cost of imprisoning criminals, corruption in government or whatever, moral failures cost nations billions and billions of dollars every year in the upkeep of prisons alone. It’s important to find ways to reduce them effectively. Education, religion, media, parental training and education and many other factors can contribute to reducing immorality in significant ways. Research above*** showed how religion was very important in reducing immorality. God designed that part of the tithe (10% of income) should be given to churches. Part was used for religious services, festivals, support of pastors, etc. But, part was used to help the poor. These and other principles above are VERY cheap compared to the alternative costs of war and skyrocketing immorality.
BIBLE VERSES:
- ** Leviticus 19:9 ”When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.
- ** “At the end of every third year, bring the entire tithe of that year’s harvest … Give it to the Levites, who will receive no allotment of land among you, as well as to the foreigners living among you, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, so they can eat and be satisfied. Then the LORD your God will bless you in all your work.” Deuteronomy 14:28, **Malachi 3:8-12 “10 Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.”
Success, happiness, health, self-control, morality and many other important factors that are crucial for life and improving economic progress must be emphasized strongly through education, media, science, religion and other avenues. Governments can respect freedom of choice while strongly promoting what is best for society in a variety of ways.
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CONCLUSION
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BIBLE VERSE:
- **“Godliness makes a nation great, but sin is a disgrace to any people.” Proverbs 14:34
As you can see above, the Bible’s economic system solves MANY of the economic problems that nations have had throughout history and it can be used to solve many problems in many nations today as well.
In sports, you want all your players productive and healthy. That’s the best way to win. The same is true in economics and this system provides for everyone’s basic needs and opportunities to achieve dreams and be productive better than any other system I’m aware of.
This system works incredibly well because it gives powerful incentives for EVERYONE to be actively working and contributing to society. It does not support laziness (like socialism does), it encourages maximum entrepreneurship (like capitalism) and doesn’t steal from the rich or tax legitimate businesses out of existence. It eliminates extreme poverty in many national and state examples (unlike modern capitalism which causes disastrous tragedies for many poor due to its violation of the basic economic rights to natural resources that so many great leaders have recognized). If Jubilee is followed, there is no need for national health care since people have enough resources to pay for their needs themselves (if Jubilee or land rent are not followed, the only ethical thing is to provide free health care). It also reduces crime, the size of government, and causes the maximum number of people to be gainfully employed. Research has also shown that when women have financial support, they are much less likely to engage in abortions. So, it helps the conservative position in that area as well.
God’s economic plan was designed explicitly to avoid many problems that our world now faces as well as much tragedy, violence and death. His plan creates peace for all people on a scale the world has never seen before. I’m quite sure that Jesus is quite saddened and has often cried because of how people have ignored His wise plans and suffered directly because of it:
“But as he came closer to Jerusalem and saw the city ahead, he began to weep. 42 “How I wish today that you of all people would understand the way to peace.” Luke 19:41,42.
The reason heaven is going to be utopia is not so much because God will make it that way by magic. It will be perfect because people will finally become smart enough to trust God and realize that His plans are the best overall foundation for life that exists. THAT is why heaven will be heaven.
MORE SITES ON THIS CONCEPT:
See many more details here on Bible Jubilee Economics:
http://www.truth-is-life.org/jubileeeconomics.html
Here’s an excerpt from a site that explains how sharing natural resources can help solve an incredible number of problems. These are from these sites:
http://www.answersanswers.com/landrent.html
http://www.answersanswers.com/land_rent_proof.html#history http://www.answersanswers.com/land_rent_proof.html#proof
EXTRA QUOTES
The social reformer Walter Raushenbusch wrote, "History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same. It is always hungry for bread, sweaty with labor, struggling to wrest from nature and hostile men enough to feed its children. The welfare of the mass is always at odds with the selfish force of the strong. The exodus of the Roman plebeians and the Pennsylvania coal strike, the agrarian agitation of the Gracchi and the rising of the Russian peasants, - it is all the same tragic human life." from “Christianity and the Social Crisis” by Walter Raushenbusch
And yet this goal of being far wealthier than others is precisely what causes the costs of governing and protecting wealth to rise astronomically. The research points out that it just doesn’t make sense.
Robert Kennedy put it simply,
“I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.”
The most translated woman author in history, Ellen White, pointed out why the Bible (and other religious traditions have similar emphases) emphasized many economic principles in its Jubilee system that were specifically targeted at reducing large income gaps (sharing natural resources equitably with all citizens, banning the charging of interest, laws on gleaning and instructions to be generous to those in trouble as we would to God, tithe given to poor, etc.) and how this was for the good of all. She wrote,
“Great evils would result from the continued accumulation of wealth by one class, and the poverty and degradation of another. Without some restraint the power of the wealthy would become a monopoly, and the poor, though in every respect fully as worthy in God's sight, would be regarded and treated as inferior to their more prosperous brethren. The sense of this oppression would arouse the passions of the poorer class. There would be a feeling of despair and desperation which would tend to demoralize society and open the door to crimes of every description. The regulations that God established were designed to promote social equality. The provisions of the sabbatical year and the jubilee would, in a great measure, set right that which during the interval had gone wrong in the social and political economy of the nation.
These regulations were designed to bless the rich no less than the poor. They would restrain avarice and a disposition for self-exaltation, and would cultivate a noble spirit of benevolence; and by fostering good will and confidence between all classes, they would promote social order, the stability of government. We are all woven together in the great web of humanity, and whatever we can do to benefit and uplift others will reflect in blessing upon ourselves. The law of mutual dependence runs through all classes of society. The poor are not more dependent upon the rich than are the rich upon the poor. While the one class ask a share in the blessings which God has bestowed upon their wealthier neighbors, the other need the faithful service, the strength of brain and bone and muscle, that are the capital of the poor.”
Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 534
Ellen White hit the nail right on the head and now much solid research confirms it and conservatives will approve of this because many religious traditions advocate it strongly. Here are Bible verses for example:
6) MORAL ADVOCACY:
Whether it’s divorce, lying, fraud in finance/business/science, the cost of imprisoning criminals, corruption in government or whatever, moral failures costs billions and billions of Euros every year for society and it is important to find ways to reduce them effectively to solve economic problems that nations are facing. Education, religion and many other factors can contribute to this in important ways.
Marcello Pera, a well known European intellectual and atheist, recently released a titled "Why We Must Call Ourselves Christian". He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pisa and concentrated on the works of Karl Popper. He says Europe must call itself Christian because it's exactly what can bring the continent together. Pera notes that Christianity's concept of the human person as created in the image of God is not something found in other cultures, and said that this exists "prior to the state's intervention." “If we prescind from these Christian principles”, he warned, “we will have destroyed our constitutional heritage”.
In the book's introduction Pera writes: "My position is that of an atheist and a liberal who asks Christianity about the reason for hope." He says that we must ask ourselves "who we are, what do we believe in, what is my identity, our identity; if I do not ask these questions, I do not know how to defend myself from those who attack me and I do not even know what to teach." One of the inspirations for writing the book was realizing that modern civilization and many of its principles, values and ethics, simply would not exist without the influence of Christianity.
There are most definitely atheists who are moral and some who have done admirable work in moral areas and human rights. It’s also a fact that morality is influenced by many factors (education, culture, friends, etc.). But, religion is one of the biggest and most positive factors and needs to be encouraged.
Dr. Guenter Lewy professor emeritus of the Univ. of Massachusetts was a secularist who set out to ridicule the claims of Christians that the crisis of the age is a crisis of unbelief and to prove the attack on secular modernity “to be a danger to individual liberty as well as an affront to people of goodwill who happened to be agnostics or atheists.” He intended to write a book “Why America doesn’t need Religion.” But, the research changed his mind and he wrote the book, “Why America Needs Religion.”
“The fifth chapter, “Religiousness and Moral Conduct: Are Believing Christians Different?,” begs the question of whether the Christian faith transforms the lives of those who take their religion seriously. In particular, Professor Lewy examines the questions of juvenile delinquency, adult crime, prejudice and intolerance, single parenting, and divorce, and concludes that the vast majority of social science research supports the finding that the minority of Christians who take their religion seriously (as opposed to the nominal Christians of the Christmas-and-Easter variety) have significantly lower rates of moral failure and social ills than any other groups studied.
http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-7-number-5/why-america-needs-religion
You can read much of this chapter online. Start on about page 95.
http://books.google.com/books?id=KfxJA_7zG7MC&pg=PA89&dq=Why+America+needs+God&hl=en&ei=tD5LTp2iMo_JmAXXqo3jBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Many liberals speak and care passionately about the human rights of others. While there are good points that both conservatives and liberals make, the facts are that it is conservatives (often religious believers) who are the ones who contribute most to the improvement of quality of life for others. Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism." He found that
• conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).
• Conservatives are more likely to volunteer their time (67% to 44%), and volunteer more of their time (almost twice as much) and give more blood.
• Religious people are statistically more likely to give than secularists (91% to 66%)
• Religious people are even more likely to donate to secular organizations and unknown recipients than secularists.
The single biggest predictor of someone's altruism is religion and America is largely divided between religious givers and secular non-givers although there are some positive improvements happening among secularists.
A survey of 1,600 Canadians asked them what were their beliefs about God and what moral values they considered to be "very important." The results of the survey are shown below:
1. http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads/attachments/Social virtues linked to faith.pdf
Religion’s impact on changing millions of people’s lives every year in extremely positive ways is incalculable and this even on its own justifies it being something that everyone should learn the evidence for and be open minded to. There are some of millions of examples of people’s lives, marriages saved, suicides prevented and addictions ended here for just a few examples:
God Revolutionizes Lives
http://www.youtube.com/user/truthislife7#g/c/0361CAE3DB6FE0D5
It is largely due to Christianity that many criminals, gangsters, drug dealers, etc. have become productive members of society. Atheist sites often lie about how Christianity improves morals using unscientific lists that could just as easily prove that being black or being tall causes you to commit more crime. See this research from the secular University of North Carolina on this:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/religion_as_child_abuse.html
The separation of church and state that many are so concerned about is very important. But, there are several ways this can be done:
1) Encourage the state to assist and promote education about the facts of religion and its benefits to individuals and societies. But, forbid the state to be involved in any form of persecution of people who differ from the state’s view. This is the view that helped many countries in Europe as well as the US develop very rapidly.
2) Amputate all contact between religion and government. The communist nations demonstrated one consequence of doing this in the last century. And negative results usually follow when all connections between government and religion are severed.
The records of history show that #1 is most productive and helpful to society while #2 is damaging.
14 BIBLICAL ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES & INTELLECTUALS WHO AGREE WITH THEM
Here is a summary of many of the economic principles from the Bible with some brief explanations by me and some quotes by famous thinkers which can solve the problems that perplex the world in a short time (maybe even as little as 10 years according to some).
This is NOT proposing socialism or communism or capitalism. It does not at all demand that all people have equal wealth or equal compensation by the state. It does demand that each person has a somewhat similar amount of God’s resources to work with and then what they do from that point is up to them. They are not coddled and enabled to be lazy. Neither are they made into slaves of the super rich. This is something very different that is not being done by any current economic theory (The only one that comes close is “Land Rent” and cooperative democratic capitalism which I will explain in future messages.).
As you read this, remember this quote from Gandhi: “There is enough in this world for everyone’s need, but NOT everyone’s greed.” His quote could not be more accurate. It is directly because of greed and theft of natural rights that billions are suffering today.
GOD’S ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES SUMMARIZED
1. GOD OWNS EVERYTHING, PEOPLE ARE CARETAKERS & STEWARDS OF GOD’S RESOURCES
2. EVERY PERSON HAS A RIGHT TO LAND (and/or natural resources)
3. JUBILEE SYSTEM (land can’t be permanently sold. It returns to original owners after 49 years, except if it’s in a city. Land and property in cities can be sold permanently.)
4. CHARGING INTEREST IS EVIL (especially to the poor or relatives)
5. CANCEL DEBTS EVERY 7 YEARS
6. TRADE FAIRLY
7. PAY FAIR WAGES
8. CHARGE FAIR TAXES (maximum 1-2%) AND RENT
9. SHARE & BE GENEROUS TO THE POOR
10. GIVE 1/3 OF THE TITHE TO THE POOR
11. BE INDEPENDENT—DON’T SUPPORT DEPENDENCY
12. GIVE TITHES AND OFFERINGS
13. AFTER TITHE, TAKE CARE OF YOUR FAMILY NEEDS (before sharing)
14. SPIRITUAL LEADERS DESERVE FAIR PAY
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1. GOD OWNS EVERYTHING, PEOPLE ARE CARETAKERS & STEWARDS OF GOD’S RESOURCES
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Psalms 24:1 The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him.2 For he laid the earth's foundation on the seas and built it on the ocean depths.
Psalms 50:10 For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.
Haggai 2:8 states "The silver is mine, the gold is mine, saith the Lord of Hosts."
Gen 1:28 God blessed them: "Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge! Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth."
“O our God, we thank you and praise your glorious name! But who am I, and who are my people, that we could give anything to you? Everything we have has come from you, and we give you only what you first gave us! We are here for only a moment, visitors and strangers in the land as our ancestors were before us. Our days on earth are like a passing shadow, gone so soon without a trace.” 1 Chronicles 29:13-15
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: Since God made everything and all people, everything in the world belongs to him. Since we are all God’s children, every person has a natural right to possess at least some part of God’s land and/or resources. This will provide them a way to make their livelihood and to be economically self-sufficient. It will also give each person the chance to use their talents and skills to their full potential. Now many can’t even go to school even though they may be very smart. The skills and talents of millions are wasted and will never benefit others. But, if their natural right was given to them, most people’s natural abilities and usefulness could be maximized.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), said, "You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to no one."
"The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind from the immediate gift of the Creator." - William Blackstone (1732-1780), British judge.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish historian who christened economics 뱓he dismal science� asked, "Who can or who could sell us the earth? Actually the earth belongs to these two: the almighty God and all his children who have ever worked on it or who will ever have worked on it or who will ever have to work on it. No generation of men can or could with even the highest solemnity and exertion sell the earth according to any other principle."
Herbert Spencer (1820-1910), British philosopher and more famous than Marx at the time, said, "Equity does not permit property in land... The world is God's bequest to mankind. All men are joint heirs to it."
Max Hirsch (1877-1968), banker, investor, and author, said, "Abolish special privileges and Government interference in industry. Give to all equal natural opportunities, equal rights to the inexhaustible storehouse of Nature and wealth will distribute itself in exact accordance with justice.”
Tom Paine (1737-1809), who authored Common Sense which catalyzed the American Revolution and coined the phrase "the United States of America", wrote, "Men did not make the earth ... it is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds... from this ground-rent ... I ... propose ... to create a National Fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person ... (a) sum." (Agrarian Justice, 1795-6)
Voltaire (1694-1778), more than a millennium later in the Age of Enlightenment, had his character Candide say, "The fruits of the earth are a common heritage of all, to which each man has equal right." His colleague, (19)
The Mennonite church has a very good approach to this idea of stewardship. It’s at: http://www.mennonitechurch.ca/about/cof/art.21.htm (The Jubilee system mentioned is not at all out of date. Ignoring its principle is a huge factor in poverty today as you will see below):
We acknowledge that God as Creator is owner of all things. In the Old Testament, the Sabbath year and the Jubilee year were practical expressions of the belief that the land is God's and the people of Israel belong to God (Leviticus 25:23, 42, 55). Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, announced the year of the Lord's favor, often identified with Jubilee. Through Jesus, the poor heard good news, captives were released, the blind saw, and the oppressed went free(Luke 4:16-21). The first church in Jerusalem put Jubilee into practice by preaching the gospel, healing the sick, and sharing possessions. Other early churches shared financially with those in need.( Acts 2:44-45; 4:32-37; 2 Corinthians 8:1-15)
As stewards of God's earth, we are called to care for the earth and to bring rest and renewal to the land and everything that lives on it (Psalms 24:1; Genesis 1:26-28). As stewards of money and possessions, we are to live simply, practice mutual aid within the church, uphold economic justice, and give generously and cheerfully (Phillipians 4:11-12; 2 Corinthians 8:13-14; James 5:4; 2 Corinthians 9:7). As persons dependent on God's providence, we are not to be anxious about the necessities of life, but to seek first the kingdom of God (Matthew 6:24-33). We cannot be true servants of God and let our lives be ruled by desire for wealth.
We are called to be stewards in the household of God, set apart for the service of God. We live out now the rest and justice which God has promised (Matthew 11:28-29; Revelation 7:15-17). The church does this while looking forward to the coming of our Master and the restoration of all things in the new heaven and new earth.
new version
We believe that everything belongs to God, who calls us as the church to live as faithful stewards of all that God has entrusted to us…We believe that time also belongs to God and that we are to use with care the time of which we are stewards.4 …In the Old Testament, the seventh day was holy because it was the day God rested from the work of creation.5 The Sabbath was also holy because of God's deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery.6 …We acknowledge that God as Creator is owner of all things. In the Old Testament, the Sabbath year and the Jubilee year were practical expressions of the belief that the land is God's and the people of Israel belong to God.8 Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, announced the year of the Lord's favor, often identified with Jubilee. Through Jesus, the poor heard good news, captives were released, the blind saw, and the oppressed went free.9 The first church in Jerusalem put Jubilee into practice by preaching the gospel, healing the sick, and sharing possessions. Other early churches shared financially with those in need.10
As stewards of God's earth, we are called to care for the earth and to bring rest and renewal to the land and everything that lives on it.11 As stewards of money and possessions, we are to live simply, practice mutual aid within the church, uphold economic justice, and give generously and cheerfully.12 As persons dependent on God's providence, we are not to be anxious about the necessities of life, but to seek first the kingdom of God.13 We cannot be true servants of God and let our lives be ruled by desire for wealth.
We are called to be stewards in the household of God, set apart for the service of God. We live out now the rest and justice which God has promised.14 The church does this while looking forward to the coming of our Master and the restoration of all things in the new heaven and new earth.
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2. EVERY PERSON HAS A RIGHT TO LAND (and/or natural resources)
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Leviticus 25:23 "The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with Me.” (NKJV)
Ecclesiastes 5:9 “9Moreover the profit of the earth is for all: the king himself is served by the field.”
“The heavens belong to the Lord, but he has given the earth to all humanity.” Psalm 115:16
Ezekiel 45:9 “For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Enough, you princes of Israel! Stop all your violence and oppression and do what is just and right. Quit robbing and cheating my people out of their land! Stop expelling them from their homes!
Isaiah 5:8 Destruction is certain for you who buy up property so others have no place to live. Your homes are built on great estates so you can be alone in the land.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: As Karl Marx said and many economists agree, almost all wealth comes from land. There may be a few exceptions, but almost every way to make money depends on land for its operation. Farms need land to grow crops. Supermarkets need land to show their products. Businesses need land for their stores. Schools and institutes need land to give them a place to teach. Doctors need land for their hospitals and etc. Internet is a new phenomenon, but even internet stores need land to store their inventory (such as computers and software), to do research and development, processing and other similar things. These days, land could be expanded to include oil, coal, airwaves (worth billions), space, atoms/nanotechnology and many other parts of our natural world that were originally created by God and so belong to his children.
QUOTES
Adam Smith (1720-1790), the father of economics, wrote in his classic, The Wealth of Nations, that "Both ground rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own... Ground rents seem, in this respect, a more proper subject of peculiar taxation... Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the state should be taxed peculiarly."
"Whenever the ownership of the soil is so engrossed by a small part of the community that the far larger part are compelled to pay whatever the few may see fit to exact for the privilege of occupying and cultivating the Earth, there is something very much like slavery." - Horace Greeley
“I slowly came to realize that political democracy cannot flourish under all economic conditions. Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.” --M Mortimer Adler, a philosopher of politics and economics.
“The land, the earth, God gave to man for his home, sustenance and support, should never be the possession of any man, corporation, society or unfriendly government, any more than the air or water -- if as much. An individual or company, or enterprise, acquiring land should hold no more than is required for their home and sustenance…, and never more than they have in actual use in the prudent management of their legitimate business, and this much should not be permitted when it creates an exclusive monopoly. All that is not so used should be held for the free use of every family to make homesteads and to hold them so long as they are so occupied….But when slavery is over and settled, men should never rest content while oppression, wrongs and iniquities are enforced against them.” Abraham Lincoln
“Take the question of over-crowding; the land question in the towns bears on that. It is all very well to produce "Housing of Working class" bills; they will never be effective until you tackle the taxation of land values.” David Lloyd-George
“It is in vain in a country whose great fund is land to hope to lay the public charge on anything else; there at last it will terminate. The merchant (do what you can) will not bear it, the labourer cannot, and therefore the landholder must: and whether he were best to do it by laying it directly where it will at last settle, or by letting it come to him by the sinking of his rents, which when they are fallen, everyone knows they are not easily raised again, let him consider.” John Locke
“No nation can avoid land reform. All it can do is determine the course it will take: bloody revolution or taxation.” (meaning taxation of the land) General Douglas McArthur
Clarence Darrow (1859-1938), lawyer of Scopes Monkey Trial fame, said, "Henry George was one of the real prophets of the world; one of the seers of the world... His was a wonderful mind; he saw a question from every side... When we learn that the value of land belongs to all of us, then we will be free men �no need to legislate to keep men and women from working themselves to death; no need to legislate against the white slave traffic."
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3. JUBILEE SYSTEM (land can’t be permanently sold. It returns to original owners after 49 years, except if it’s in a city. Land and property in cities can be sold permanently.)
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Numbers 32 4 The LORD has conquered this whole area for the community of Israel, and it is ideally suited for all our livestock. 5 If we have found favor with you, please let us have this land as our property instead of giving us land across the Jordan River. 22 And the land on the east side of the Jordan will be your property from the LORD.”
Numbers 34: 13 Then Moses told the Israelites, “This territory is the homeland you are to divide among yourselves by sacred lot. The LORD has commanded that the land be divided among the nine and a half remaining tribes. 14 The families of the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half the tribe of Manasseh have already received their grants of land 15 on the east side of the Jordan River, across from Jericho toward the sunrise.”
Leviticus 25:8"In addition, you must count off seven Sabbath years, seven years times seven, adding up to forty-nine years in all. 9Then on the Day of Atonement of the fiftieth year,[1] blow the trumpets loud and long throughout the land. 13In the Year of Jubilee each of you must return to the lands that belonged to your ancestors. 14"When you make an agreement with a neighbor to buy or sell property, you must never take advantage of each other. 18"If you want to live securely in the land, keep my laws and obey my regulations. 23And remember, the land must never be sold on a permanent basis because it really belongs to me. You are only foreigners and tenants living with me. 24"With every sale of land there must be a stipulation that the land can be redeemed at any time. 28But if the original owner cannot afford to redeem it, then it will belong to the new owner until the next Year of Jubilee. In the jubilee year, the land will be returned to the original owner. 29"Anyone who sells a house inside a walled city has the right to redeem it for a full year after its sale. During that time, the seller retains the right to buy it back. 30But if it is not redeemed within a year, then the house within the walled city will become the permanent property of the buyer. It will not be returned to the original owner in the Year of Jubilee.
1 Kings 21: When Ahab demanded that Naboth give him his land, Naboth replied, "The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my ancestors!" Under the laws of Omri/Baal, this was blasphemy against Baal and the king. Naboth and his heirs were executed and Ahab then took possession of it. But there was an immediate and severe denunciation of this by the fierce prophet Elijah. Elijah pronounced God's sentence of death on Ahab, Jezebel and his whole dynasty for this crime:
1 Kings 21:19 “Say to him, 'This is what the LORD says: Have you not murdered a man and seized his property?' Then say to him, 'This is what the LORD says: In the place where dogs licked up Naboth's blood, dogs will lick up your blood-yes, yours!'"
In I Kg 22 and 2 Kg 9.7-10, the prophecy was fulfilled and Ahab’s dynasty was completely destroyed. Land seems to have been quite an important issue to God in this case. So important that through his prophet he pronounced a sentence of death because the King was violating the system of land and property that God had set up.
2 Kg 8.6. A Shunamite woman whose son had been raised from the dead had been warned by Elisha of a famine and advised to leave the country. She was gone seven years, and when she returned she found that her land had been confiscated. We are not told by whom or on what pretext. It may be that the influence of the laws of Omri made it impossible for her to receive justice in the lower courts. She appealed to the king and the king, influenced by the prophet Elisha, ordered her land to be restored to her together with the revenues for the time she was away. This would indicate that she had not, as Naomi and Elimelich had done, leased her land, but had intended that it should lie fallow. The king's order that she should be given the revenue from the land indicates that this was not a case of someone refusing the right of redemption (a right unique to the laws of the Lord). Had this been a case of redemption, the revenues up to the time of redemption would have belonged to the lease-holder The land had been seized illegally.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: As above, land is the source of wealth. The extreme poverty systems of today are largely due to monopolies on land. This Jubilee system would make land monopolies impossible and this would eliminate the majority of poverty. Pliny the Elder (23-79) wrote that “Land monopoly ruined Rome.” Tiberius Gracchus, a Roman statesman complained: “The private soldiers fight and die to advance the wealth and luxury of the great and they are called masters of the world, while they have not a foot of ground in their possession.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and with Ben Franklin the most inventive and intellectual of the Founding Fathers, wrote, "The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and to live on... Wherever in any country there are idle lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. Everyone may have land to labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age." (Notes on Virginia, 1791)
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), the steel magnate, noted, "The most comfortable, but also the most unproductive way for a capitalist to increase his fortune, is to put all monies in sites and await that point in time when a society, hungering for land, has to pay his price."
“No human being can live without using land. As long as some people must pay others for the right to use land, there will be poverty. Once all persons have an equal right to use land, poverty cannot exist. Nature is generous, she is the author of love and life, but her gifts must be allowed to flow freely throughout all of society; they must not be held for ransom. If they are, what will flow throughout society will be the opposite of life: pollution, anger, violence, hatred, suffering, confusion, war and death.” Adam Jon Monroe, Jr. Editor of “The Georgist News”
MacArthur,Douglas(1880-1964)
Inspired by Henry George's reform proposals, MacArthur saw to it that during his military governorship of Japan following the Second World War that land rent reform was incorporated in the writing of the Japanese Constitution. The new constitution reversed the portion of agricultural commodities collected as rent between owners (whose portion dropped to one-third of the total), and the tenants farmers who actually did the work (who were then able to retain two-thirds of what they produced).
Read more on this topic at: http://www.landreform.org/reading0.htm and especialy on the Jubilee at:
http://www.landreform.org/wp9.htm
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4. CHARGING INTEREST IS EVIL (to poor or relatives)
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Psalm 15:5 Those who do not charge interest on the money they lend, and who refuse to accept bribes to testify against the innocent. Such people will stand firm forever.
Leviticus 25:35 If any of your Israelite relatives fall into poverty and cannot support themselves, support them as you would a resident foreigner and allow them to live with you. 36Do not demand an advance or charge interest on the money you lend them. Instead, show your fear of God by letting them live with you as your relatives. 37Remember, do not charge your relatives interest on anything you lend them, whether money or food.
Nehemiah 5:7 "You are oppressing your own relatives by charging them interest when they borrow money!" …You are selling them back into slavery again. How often must we redeem them?" And they had nothing to say in their defense. 9Then I pressed further, "What you are doing is not right!
Exodus 22:21"Do not oppress foreigners in any way. Remember, you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. 22"Do not exploit widows or orphans. 23If you do and they cry out to me, then I will surely help them. 24My anger will blaze forth against you, and I will kill you with the sword. Your wives will become widows, and your children will become fatherless. 25"If you lend money to a fellow Hebrew in need, do not be like a money lender, charging interest.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: The charging of interest is the major way that the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. It also enables a person to make money by doing nothing which is very likely the reason that the Bible prohibits it. Below are 2 sections:
1) An article from an Islamic source showing why interest is destructive and
2) An economics professor showing why interest destroys nations and citizen’s futures and is equivalent to slavery.
From: www.islamvision.org/EvilsofInterest.asp
“The collection of an extra amount by the lender at a fixed rate on a loan given by him from the debtor is called Interest. There is a big great deal of difference between business and interest. In a business the individual invests money and gains profit in return. But merely investing his capital is not sufficient.
The person involved in the business venture, be it agriculture or industry, has to work hard day and night even after investing huge sums of money in it. Finally, even after all this monetary risks and hard work there always exists a fear of loss in this venture.
Contrary to this, in interest dealings, the lender lends his money at a fixed rate of interest and collects a regular profit from the borrower in the form of interest without any physical effort or fear of loss and also irrespective of the economical condition of the borrower. “
In a business transaction the entrepreneur gets a profit only once out of a particular deal, whereas in interest dealing, the lender goes on receiving profit for the money that he had once lent, with an increase in it as time goes by. Islam very strictly prohibits all kinds of interest dealings. The impact of interest on the lender as well as the debtor is highly disastrous. The lender becomes extremely materialistic and wild after his greed for money.
He does not bother about the consequences of the system of interest on the society. He forgets human relationships and kindness. He becomes wealthy by pushing innumerable people into the darkness of poverty. That is why the Holy Qur'an has compared them to mad and foolish people in Chapter 2, Verse 275. The borrower on the other hand loses whatever goods he possessed with him in the process of repaying the loan and finally ends up paying an amount that is many times more than what was actually loaned to him.
It is also observed that often, even after the death of the borrower many successive generations come to pass but are still unable to repay the loan taken by their ancestors due this concept of Interest. Interest Free Banking Countering the unjust and unharmonious financial systems, Islam laid down its own economic and financial principals with greater emphasis on interest free banking.
Islamic banking is not merely a business but also a mission for attaining economic equity. This system will not allow concentration of wealth to take root at any cost. The most prominent feature of the Islamic financial system is that, it forbids the charging of Riba (Interest) on money lent.
Islamic banking, based on the Qur'anic prohibition of charging interest, has moved from a theoretical concept to embrace more than 100 banks operating in 40 countries with multi-billion dollar deposits worldwide. Islamic banking is widely regarded as the fastest growing sector in the Middle Eastern financial services market.
Exploding onto the financial scene barely thirty years ago, an estimated $US 70 billion worth of funds are now managed according to Shari'ah (Islamic Law). Deposit and Principles assets held by Islamic banks grew to a whopping 60 billion dollars in 1994 as compared to a meagre 5 billion dollars in 1985.
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From: http://www.ied.info/books/ed/debt.html#_Toc35644544
Third World development has not had serious consideration. Instead, vastly underpriced developing world natural resource commodities and underpaid labor (essentially dictated by IMF/World Bank/GATT/NAFTA/WTO/ MAI/GATS/FTAA structural adjustment policies and unequal currency values) and overpriced developed world manufactures created excessive accumulations of capital in the already wealthy world, which were lent wastefully back to the developing world for purchase of developed world exports (a major share being for arms). This forced the developing world to harvest ever more of their natural resources to pay that debt, which further increased surplus production, which lowered natural resource commodity prices still further, and the process keeps repeating itself. This is the little understood debt trap. Sooner or later the crunch of debt incurred under the massive assault of financial warfare will become unpayable:
A debtor who repeatedly borrows more than the surplus his labor or business enterprise produces will fall further and further behind in his obligations until, sooner or later, the inexorable pressures of compound interest defeat him ... interest [is] usurious when the borrower's rightful share of profit [is] confiscated by the lender.... The creative power of capital [is] reversed and the compounding interest [becomes] destructive. (Greider, Secrets of the Temple , pp. 707, 581-82; Susan George, Fabrizio Sabelli, Faith and Credit (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 80-84, 215.)
Professor Lester Thurow explains:
The fundamental mathematics is clear. To run a trade deficit, a country must borrow from the rest of the world and accumulate international debt. Each year interest must be paid on this accumulated debt. Unless a country is running a trade surplus, it must borrow the funds necessary to make interest payments. Thus the annual amount that must be borrowed gets larger and larger, even if the trade deficit itself does not expand. As debts grow, interest payments grow. As interest payments grow, debt grows. As time passes the rate of debt accumulation speeds up, even if the basic trade deficit remains constant.( Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan , Europe , and America (New York: William Morrow, 1992), p. 232.).
The size of a financial warfare debt trap can be controlled to claim all the surplus production of a society and the magic of compound interest assures those unjust debts are unsustainable. developing world debt climbed from $100-billion in 1973 to $1.7-trillion in 1999, to $2.5-trillion by 2003. With resource prices having dropped 60% the past 40 years and still dropping, obviously that debt cannot be paid.
Most of these debts are incurred without the recipient country receiving any lasting benefits. In fact, only about $500-billion of that $2.5-trillion debt was borrowed finance capital; the rest was runaway compound interest (Michael Barratt Brown, Fair Trade (London: Zed Books, 1993), pp. 43, 113.) The situation is comparable to the loathsome form of slavery known as peonage.
In classic peonage, workers, though nominally free and legally free, are held in servitude by the terms of their indenture to their masters. Because their wages are set too low to buy the necessities, the master grants credit but restricts the worker to buying overpriced goods from the master's own store. As a result, each month the peon goes deeper and deeper into debt. For as long as the arrangement lasts, the peon cannot pay off the mounting debt and leave, and must keep on working for the master. Nigeria [and most other Third World countries] shares three crucial characteristics with a heroin-addicted debt-trap peon. First, both debts are unsecured consumer debts, made up of subsistence and spending-spree expenses, and with future income as the only collateral. Second, both loans are pure peonage loans, that is loans made not because of the potential of the project the loan is to be used for, but simply in order to secure legal control over the economic and political behavior of the debtor. Third, the only way made available for getting out of both debts is by getting into more debt.( Chinweiezu, Debt Trap Peonage, Monthly Review (November 1985): pp. 21-36.)
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5. CANCEL DEBTS EVERY 7 YEARS
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Deuteronomy 15:1 “1At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. 2 This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel the loan he has made to his fellow Israelite. He shall not require payment from his fellow Israelite or brother, because the LORD's time for canceling debts has been proclaimed.3 Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: "The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near," so that you do not show ill will toward your needy brother and give him nothing. He may then appeal to the LORD against you, and you will be found guilty of sin.” (NIV)
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: Debts and especially interest cause the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer very fast. These extremes cause much instability in society. Especially since our societies are not giving people their natural economic rights, debts should be cancelled. In many places burdensome debts destroy people’s futures and they have to spend all their time and energy just in paying off debts. This severely limits the contributions they can make to society and makes it very difficult or impossible for them to follow their passions and dreams and become a useful and creative contributing citizen. This is why debts should be cancelled every 7 years.
From: http://www.ied.info/books/ed/debt.html#_Toc35644544
There are compelling reasons for paying attention to this potential for catastrophe as, every debt crisis in history since Solon of Athens has ended in inflation, bankruptcy or war, and there is no cause to believe we've solved this one, even if it has been postponed.(George, Fate Worse Than Debt, p. 196.)
As much of this imposed debt can never be paid back, most developing world debt is severely discounted. As of June 1990, Argentina's debt traded at a low of 14.75-cents on the $1 while the average price of all developing world debt was 28-cents on the $1.( CNN News (June 28, 1990); David Felix, “Latin America 's Debt Crisis”, World Policy Journal (Fall 1990): p. 734.) Although it is being traded at a 72% discount, the indebted countries must still pay full price. After the financial collapse on the periphery of empire seven years later, discounts for those debts can only trade at a sharply higher discount.
In the 1800s, the United States defaulted on much of its development debt, as did Latin America and others during the crisis of the Great Depression. American managers-of-state knew their nation became wealthy due to avoiding the monopolization of their economy, and their European cousins eventual sharing their industrial capital and markets. America returned that favor by sharing its wealth after WWII to rebuild the ancestral home of their culture.
There was no expectation of that shared wealth being repaid. The rational decision, and one that Professor Lester Thurow and others consider the developed world's only choice, would be to also forgive the developing world's unjustly incurred and unpayable debts. (Thurow, Head to Head , p. 215. See also, Gowan, The Global Gamble; Gray, False Dawn (New York: The Free Press, 1998), and Longworth, Global Squeeze.) The precedent has been set by earlier defaults, by the quickness of decisions to protect trading allies, and an honest accounting would find the developed world owing the developing world for the destruction of their social wealth, the earlier enslavement of their labor, and the long term underpayment for their labor and resources.
Rutherford B. Hayes (19th U.S. President), from his personal diary, year not provided (between 1881-1891) December 4 Sunday. In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many
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6. TRADE FAIRLY
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Leviticus 19:35 "Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity. 36Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt.
Micah 6:11And how can I tolerate all your merchants who use dishonest scales and weights?
Amos 8:4 Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land… skimping the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales, 6 buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: This should be obvious on an individual level. Cheating is not right and neither is price gouging and taking advantage of others. But, consider that it may also apply on an international level (we’ve talked about this before in previous messages). Unfair trades are a kind of economic warfare that destroys people’s abilities to provide for their basic needs. The tenets of capitalism as practiced now are largely opposed to Biblical economic principles. They emphasize greed and selfishness and getting whatever you can no matter who gets hurt or cheated out of their natural rights. They work great for those who want to control others and want to legally confiscate the profits of others work for themselves.
From: http://www.ied.info/books/ed/externaltrade.html
The secret to siphoning away others' wealth is the low-paid labor in the poor nations and high profits and high wages in the rich societies that have dominated global trade for centuries. Arjun Makhijani calculates that, through an imbalance of currency values, equally-productive labor in the world's defeated, dependent nations were paid 20% that of the developed world, a 5-to-1 differential.(Arjun Makhijani, From Global Capitalism to Economic Justice (New York: Apex Press, 1992).) Later currency collapses in the developing world may have doubled that differential to 10-to-1.
Wealth accumulation advantage from unequally-paid but equally-productive labor is not a linear progression, it is exponential. Consider how long the underpaid nation must work to buy one unit of wealth from the high-paid nation and then consider how many units of wealth the high-paid nation can purchase from the underpaid nation with the wages of their equally-productive labor working that same number of hours.
The equally-productive worker in the poorly-paid nation produces a unique widget, is paid $1 an hour, and is producing one widget an hour. The equally-productive worker in the well-paid nation produces another unique widget, is paid $10 an hour, and also produces one widget per hour. Each equally-productive nation likes, and purchases, the other's widgets…The $1 an hour country must work 10 hours to buy one of the widgets of the $10 an hour country but, with the money earned in the same 10 hours, the $10 an hour country can buy 100 of the widgets of the $1 an hour nation. At that 10-times wage differential…there is an exponential 100-times differential in capital accumulation or buying power.
http://www.ied.info/books/ed/freedom.html
Three tenets of capitalism are: pay the lowest possible price, charge all the market will bear, and give nothing to anybody. That is great philosophy for powerbrokers with a subtle monopoly on capital, technology, markets, and military might. It takes no deep thought to realize that these tenets of classical economic philosophy were implanted by an earlier power-structure to maximize its claims to the wealth of others (that feudal residue in our philosophy, laws, and customs).
…French economic students understood that economic theory as taught had no relation to reality and in the fall of 2000 they protested and academic administrators agreed to address what heretofore had been “controversial” subjects. Twenty-seven Ph.D. economic students at the University of Cambridge, UK, signed a similar, but milder, letter of protest in 2001.
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7. PAY FAIR WAGES
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James 5:4 “For listen! Hear the cries of the field workers whom you have cheated of their pay. The wages you held back cry out against you. The cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty.” (see also Malachi 3:5)
Jeremiah 21:13 "Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his countrymen work for nothing, not paying them for their labor….17 "your eyes and your heart are set only on dishonest gain, on shedding innocent blood and on oppression and extortion."
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: Remember the above quotes on the widgets. If fair wages are paid, then extreme inequalities will end and so will poverty because everyone will have enough to pay for what they need. There are several kinds of slavery…and one of them is economic. If a person doesn’t have economic freedom, then it is very likely that he will be forced or oppressed by someone else.
Leo Tolstoy wrote, “The essence of all slavery consists in taking the produce of another's labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.”
From: http://www.ied.info/books/ed/externaltrade.html#_Toc35644427
As we have learned, in direct trades between countries, wealth accumulation advantage compounds in step with the pay differential for equally-productive labor. If the pay differential is 5, the difference in wealth accumulation advantage is 25-to-1. If the pay differential is 10, the wealth accumulation advantage is 100-to-1…If the pay differential is 60 (the pay differential between Russia and the victorious America [23-cents an hour against $14 an hour]), the wealth accumulation advantage is 3,600-to-1…Place a trader between those two unequally-paid nations to claim all surplus value both through outright underpaying in hard currency or through paying in soft currency and selling in hard currency, capitalize those profits by 10-to-20 times, and you have accumulated capital through capitalized value.11�
Inequality in pay creates invisible borders that guide the world's wealth to imperial-centers-of-capital. Equal pay for equally-productive labor instantly eliminates those borders and alleviates world poverty. If unequal pay for equally-productive work were reduced to a 50% pay differential (an equally-productive $5-an-hour nation trading with a $10-an-hour nation), the wealth accumulation advantage of the high-paid nation in direct trades with low-paid nations would be reduced to a 4-times advantage. A $3-an-hour labor nation trading with a $4-an-hour labor nation incurs a doubling (1.77 times) of wealth potentially accumulated (or consumed) for the better-paid nation. When all have access to technology and markets and pay is equal for equally-productive work, the wealth retained (and available for accumulation or consumption) by each nation is equal.
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8. CHARGE FAIR TAXES (maximum 1-2%) AND RENT
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Amos 5:11 “You trample the poor and steal what little they have through taxes and unfair rent…14Do what is good and run from evil--that you may live! ”
Ezekiel 45:8 "My princes will no longer oppress and rob my people; they will assign the rest of the land to the people, giving an allotment to each tribe. 9For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Enough, you princes of Israel! Stop all your violence and oppression and do what is just and right. Quit robbing and cheating my people out of their land! Stop expelling them from their homes! 10You must use only honest weights and scales, honest dry volume measures, and honest liquid volume measures.[c] 11The homer[d] will be your standard unit for measuring volume. The ephah and the bath[e] will each measure one-tenth of a homer. 12The standard unit for weight will be the silver shekel.[f] One shekel consists of twenty gerahs, and sixty shekels are equal to one mina.[g]
Special Offerings and Celebrations
13"This is the tax you must give to the prince: one bushel of wheat or barley for every sixty[h] you harvest, 14one percent of your olive oil,[i] 15and one sheep for every two hundred in your flocks in Israel. These will be the grain offerings, burnt offerings, and peace offerings that will make atonement for the people who bring them, says the Sovereign LORD. 16All the people of Israel must join the prince in bringing their offerings. 17The prince will be required to provide offerings that are given at the religious festivals, the new moon celebrations, the Sabbath days, and all other similar occasions. He will provide the sin offerings, burnt offerings, grain offerings, drink offerings, and peace offerings to make reconciliation for the people of Israel.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: Unfair taxes can be another way for the rich to oppress the poor and siphon off their wealth. We often talk about the “pork” in politics. And many taxes go to pay for “pork” political decisions. Unfair taxation was done in Israel many times and strongly condemned by God. It was also one reason why America rebelled against Britain and fought for her independence. In Ezekiel the tax rate of the prince is only about 1-2% and this rate was tied to how much God had blessed each person in the past year. In addition, a significant proportion of this was to be used in sacrifice and festivals to God.
Charging rent and taxes that are unfair is a kind of theft and makes people unable to pay for their basic necessities. These 2 ideas have been combined in an idea called “land rent”. More on this in future sections, but here are a couple quotes on the idea of land rent which is based on the same principles as the Jubilee system and does work in practice to eliminate poverty.
Henry George (1839-1897), author of Progress and Poverty (1879) which outsold every book of its era but the Bible, distinguished between creation and production and urged us to "abolish all taxation save on the value of land."
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), who kept a photo of George on his desk and whose dying words to passengers on a train were to tax land alone, told the Russian Czar and the world that "people do not argue with the teachings of George, they simply do not know it. And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree."
The Chinese philosopher Mencius (in 2A:5) wrote this about landrent and taxes that will promote the best economy. The wisdom from the Bible and China is still the best advice on taxes for governments today.
"Respect the worthy and employ the capable; put talented people in key positions, then all the shih of the realm will be pleased and will want to be members of your court."
"In the market-places, charge land-rent, but don't tax the goods; or make concise regulations and don't even charge rent. Do this, and all the merchants in the realm will be pleased, and will want to set up shop in your markets."
"At the borders, make inspections but don't charge tariffs, then all the travelers in the realm will be pleased and will want to traverse your highways.
"If the farmers merely have to help each other with the government fields, and do not have to pay an additional tax, then all the farmers in the realm will be pleased, and will want to till your fields.
"If you do not charge fines to the unemployed in your marketplaces, then all the people in the realm will be pleased, and will want to become your subjects."
"If you are really able to put these five points into practice, then the people from the neighboring states will look up to you as a parent. Now, there has never been a case of someone being able to consistently succeed in making children attack their own parents. This being the case, you will have no enemies in the realm. The one who has no enemies in the realm is the vicegerent of Heaven. There is no case of one who attained to this level, and who did not attain to true kingship."
When governments are within their proper limits, they shouldn’t need to have more than 1-2% taxes. This can easily be provided and more by taxing only those who use natural resources. No other tax is necessary or fair. This kind of tax system will enable everyone who is willing to work to take care of their basic needs. When governments become bloated and corrupted, then you need higher taxes. But, this is not right or necessary. It is very possible to operate a nation well according to God’s tax principles.
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9. SHARE & BE GENEROUS TO THE POOR
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Deut. 15:7"But if there are any poor people in your towns…, do not be hard-hearted or tightfisted toward them. 8Instead, be generous and lend them whatever they need. If you refuse to make the loan and the needy person cries out to the LORD, you will be considered guilty of sin. 10Give freely without begrudging it, and the LORD your God will bless you in everything you do.
Leviticus 19:9 ”When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.
Deuteronomy 23: 24 “When you enter your neighbor’s vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes, but you must not carry any away in a basket. 25 And when you enter your neighbor’s field of grain, you may pluck the heads of grain with your hand, but you must not harvest it with a sickle.” 19 “Do not charge interest on the loans you make to a fellow Israelite, whether you loan money, or food, or anything else. 20 You may charge interest to foreigners, but you may not charge interest to Israelites, so that the LORD your God may bless you in everything you do in the land you are about to enter and occupy.
2 Corinthians 8:11 Now you should carry this project through to completion just as enthusiastically as you began it. Give whatever you can according to what you have. 12If you are really eager to give, it isn't important how much you are able to give. God wants you to give what you have, not what you don't have. 13Of course, I don't mean you should give so much that you suffer from having too little. I only mean that there should be some equality. 14Right now you have plenty and can help them. Then at some other time they can share with you when you need it. In this way, everyone's needs will be met.
2 Corinthians 9:6Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. 7Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. 12This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God's people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. 13Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, men will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. 14And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you. 15Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: Emergencies and disasters happen. People need 2nd chances at becoming independent and self-sufficient. If they do become self-sufficient, this will benefit the whole community, not just those who are helped. Sharing with each other, especially the land and it’s resources with everyone working diligently will create something similar to the Age of Great Harmony that Confucius and Mencius in China talked about.
http://www.noogenesis.com/Confucius/harmony.html
When Confucius was sad about the state of the world he said in reply to a question as to why he was "overcome with sighs":
Confucius' Great Harmony
When the Great Way prevailed, the world community was equally shared by all. The worthy and able were chosen as office-holders. Mutual confidence was fostered and good neighborliness cultivated. Therefore people did not regard as parents only their own parents, nor did they treat children only their own children. Provision was made for the aged till their death, the adults were given employment, and the young enabled to grow up. Old widows and widowers, the orphaned, the old and childless, as well as the sick and the disabled were all well taken care of. Men had their proper roles and women their homes. While they hated to see wealth lying about on the ground, they did not necessarily keep it for their own use. While they hated not to exert their effort, they did not necessarily devote it to their own ends. Thus evil schemings were repressed, and robbers, thieves and other lawless elements failed to arise, so that outer doors did not have to be shut. This was called the age of Great Harmony (Ta Tung)
...Now the Great Way has fallen into obscurity, . . . Each one separately loves his own parents; each looks upon his own children only as his children. People take the wealth of natural resources and the fruits of their own labors as their own. . . . Castle walls and outer defenses, moats and ditches, are made strong and secure. . . ."
Excerpt only of his full reply. Hsiao, Kung-chuan (trans. F. W. Mote). A History of Chinese Political Thought. Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Sixth Century A.D. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1979, p. 125.
Noted Confucius: "To implement my principle is nothing more than being honest and just."
Another Chinese philospher Mencius went to see King Hui of Liang:
The King said: "My good man, since you haven't thought one thousand li too far to come and see me, may I presume that you have something with which I can profit my kingdom?"
Mencius said: "Why must you speak of profit? What I have for you is Humanity and Righteousness, and that's all. If you always say 'how can I profit my kingdom?' your top officers will ask, 'how can we profit our clans?' The shih1 and the common people will ask: 'how can we profit ourselves?' Superiors and inferiors will struggle against each other for profit, and the country will be in chaos."
"In a kingdom of ten thousand chariots, the murderer of the sovereign is usually from a clan of one thousand chariots. In a thousand-chariot kingdom, the murderer of the sovereign is usually from a clan of one hundred chariots. Now, to have a thousand in ten thousand, or one hundred in a thousand is not really all that much. But if you put Righteousness last and profit first, no one will be satisfied unless they can grab something."
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10. GIVE 1/3 OF TITHE TO POOR/LEVITES/FOREIGNERS
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“At the end of every third year, bring the entire tithe of that year’s harvest and store it in the nearest town. Give it to the Levites, who will receive no allotment of land among you, as well as to the foreigners living among you, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, so they can eat and be satisfied. Then the LORD your God will bless you in all your work.” Deuteronomoy 14:28,29
The Festival of Harvest: Deut 16:9 “Count off seven weeks from when you first begin to cut the grain at the time of harvest. 10 Then celebrate the Festival of Harvest[b] to honor the LORD your God. Bring him a voluntary offering in proportion to the blessings you have received from him. 11 This is a time to celebrate before the LORD your God at the designated place of worship he will choose for his name to be honored. Celebrate with your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, the Levites from your towns, and the foreigners, orphans, and widows who live among you. 12 Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt, so be careful to obey all these decrees.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: This again reduces the income gap as above.
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11. BE INDEPENDENT—DON’T SUPPORT DEPENDENCY
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2 Thes. 3:10 “Even while we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘Whoever does not work should not eat.’”
1 Thessalonians 4:11 Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, 12so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: When you create dependency in people, you are making them able to avoid the use of their skills and talents and you are causing them to be a drain on others and very likely the church. If there are emergencies or unusual situations like orphans or widows or natural disasters, then help in any way possible is critical and necessary. But, enabling someone to be lazy by getting handouts for free is directly against the Bible principles listed above. A person who refuses to work should not be given food by those who work diligently. We are to assist people to become independent and self-sufficient, NEVER dependent on us and our money.
A missionary in Africa, pastor David Wilkinson, stresses self-reliance this way:
“The Bible teaches that the person who is not willing to work should not eat, he says: ‘If you have 150 people who you feed on a daily basis, and you don't have them lift a finger, you are disobedient to the Bible.’”
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11. GIVE TITHES AND OFFERINGS
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Malachi 3:8-12 “10 Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.”
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: This is the recognition that God created everything and is the due that he asks of those who believe in Him and honor Him. Many great businessmen were and are faithful tithe payers. Some include: Woolworth, J.C. Penny, Hershey, Rockefeller, Colgate and many others.
New York Times best selling author Robert Allen shared his insights on money live on a radio show, The Mike Litman Show. There were 7 skills (see them at: http://www.joshhinds.com/mlitman_articles/litman_rallen.html).
The final skill was “SHARE YOUR MONEY”. He said, “You've got to share your money. Frankly, for me, I pay my sharing first. Out of every dollar I get in, and out of every net profit that I get in, I pay 10% right off the top. It's the first money that I spend and then I live on the rest and I save the next 10%, then I spend the rest on taxes and shelter and cars and whatever else.”
In Israel, tithe was used mostly for 4 things (the tithe in Israel may have been larger than 10%…with offerings it may have reached up to 25% of their income…but God promised that he would bless them if they followed this):
TITHES USES
1) TO SUPPORT PASTORS & BIBLE WORKERS (and by association evangelistic ministries)
Numbers 18:21: "I give to the Levites all the tithes in Israel as their inheritance in return for the work they do while serving at the Tent of Meeting.
"The tithe should go to those who labor in word and doctrine, be they men or women."EGW (MS 149, 1899).
"The tithe is sacred, reserved by God for Himself. It is to be brought into His treasury to be used to sustain the gospel laborers in their work." (GW 226).
2) TITHE IS TO BE EATEN WITH JOY IN THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD with family and friends and co-workers. (this one surprised me actually)
Deuteronomy 12:17 You must not eat in your own towns the tithe of your grain and new wine and oil, or the firstborn of your herds and flocks, or whatever you have vowed to give, or your freewill offerings or special gifts. 18Instead, you are to eat them in the presence of the LORD your God at the place the LORD your God will choose-you, your sons and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, and the Levites from your towns-and you are to rejoice before the LORD your God in everything you put your hand to. 19 Be careful not to neglect the Levites as long as you live in your land.
Deuteronomy 14 (note: the wine here is most likely fresh grape juice since that was the best wine of the ancient peoples)
22 Be sure to set aside a tenth of all that your fields produce each year. 23 Eat the tithe of your grain, new wine and oil, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks in the presence of the LORD your God at the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name, so that you may learn to revere the LORD your God always. 24 But if that place is too distant and you have been blessed by the LORD your God and cannot carry your tithe (because the place where the LORD will choose to put his Name is so far away), 25 then exchange your tithe for silver, and take the silver with you and go to the place the LORD your God will choose. 26 Use the silver to buy whatever you like: cattle, sheep, wine or other drink, or anything you wish. Then you and your household shall eat there in the presence of the LORD your God and rejoice. 27 And do not neglect the Levites living in your towns, for they have no allotment or inheritance of their own.
3) 1/3 OF TITHE IS TO BE USED FOR THE POOR & DISADVANTAGED
Deuteronomy 22:28 At the end of every three years, bring all the tithes of that year's produce and store it in your towns, 29 so that the Levites (who have no allotment or inheritance of their own) and the aliens, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns may come and eat and be satisfied, and so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.
12 When you have finished setting aside a tenth of all your produce in the third year, the year of the tithe, you shall give it to the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow, so that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied. 13 Then say to the LORD your God: "I have removed from my house the sacred portion and have given it to the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow, according to all you commanded. I have not turned aside from your commands nor have I forgotten any of them. 14 I have not eaten any of the sacred portion while I was in mourning, nor have I removed any of it while I was unclean, nor have I offered any of it to the dead. I have obeyed the LORD my God; I have done everything you commanded me. 15 Look down from heaven, your holy dwelling place, and bless your people Israel and the land you have given us as you promised on oath to our forefathers, a land flowing with milk and honey."
4) FESTIVALS ARE SUPPORTED BY THE OFFERINGS TO THE CHURCH AS GOD HAS BLESSED US
Deuteronomy 16
Feast of Weeks
9 Count off seven weeks from the time you begin to put the sickle to the standing grain. 10 Then celebrate the Feast of Weeks to the LORD your God by giving a freewill offering in proportion to the blessings the LORD your God has given you. 11 And rejoice before the LORD your God at the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name-you, your sons and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, the Levites in your towns, and the aliens, the fatherless and the widows living among you. 12 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and follow carefully these decrees.
Feast of Tabernacles
13 Celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress. 14 Be joyful at your Feast-you, your sons and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, and the Levites, the aliens, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns. 15 For seven days celebrate the Feast to the LORD your God at the place the LORD will choose. For the LORD your God will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands, and your joy will be complete.
16 Three times a year all your men must appear before the LORD your God at the place he will choose: at the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles. No man should appear before the LORD empty-handed: 17 Each of you must bring a gift in proportion to the way the LORD your God has blessed you.
So, tithe and offerings are another way to alleviate poverty as well as help people enjoy and celebrate the worship of our creator God who made us.
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12. AFTER TITHE, TAKE CARE OF YOUR FAMILY NEEDS (before sharing)
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1 Corinthians 8:13 Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. 14At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality, 15as it is written: "He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little."[b]
1 Timothy 5:4But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God. 5The widow who is really in need and left all alone puts her hope in God and continues night and day to pray and to ask God for help. 6But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives. 7Give the people these instructions, too, so that no one may be open to blame. 8If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: This verse praises mutual sharing…but it also brings out the point that after paying tithe, believers next most important responsibility is to take care of their own families. It does NOT talk about taking care of wants yet. That comes much later. First we should honor God with tithe, then we need to fulfill our responsibility to our families. After that, we can share with others in need…then later we can pay for our wants and other basic things.
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13. SPIRITUAL LEADERS DESERVE FAIR PAY
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1 Corinthians 9:3 This is my answer to those who question my authority as an apostle.[b] 4Don't we have the right to live in your homes and share your meals? 5Don't we have the right to bring a Christian wife[c] along with us as the other disciples and the Lord's brothers and Peter[d] do? 6Or is it only Barnabas and I who have to work to support ourselves? 7What soldier has to pay his own expenses? And have you ever heard of a farmer who harvests his crop and doesn't have the right to eat some of it? What shepherd takes care of a flock of sheep and isn't allowed to drink some of the milk? 8And this isn't merely human opinion. Doesn't God's law say the same thing? 9For the law of Moses says, "Do not keep an ox from eating as it treads out the grain."[e] Do you suppose God was thinking only about oxen when he said this? 10 Wasn't he also speaking to us? Of course he was. Just as farm workers who plow fields and thresh the grain expect a share of the harvest, Christian workers should be paid by those they serve.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?: Everyone needs to make money to pay for basic expenses. Money represents the value of your work and spiritual work is extremely valuable both for this life and for eternity (1 Timothy 4:8) and so it should be rewarded. A pastor (like a King) must not hoard things and be luxurious. But, he deserves to be paid decently for his work so that he can support his family.
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CONCLUSION
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On the surface, it may appear that this will make people a lot poorer. But, in reality, when you have everyone’s opportunities and abilities maximized as they would be when everyone has all of their natural and God given economic rights, the benefit to the nation and eventually to each individual in the nation will be exponentially increased.
There is no cause for concern if we follow these principles.
I recently read these things from Ellen White and they are quite eloquent as a conclusion to this topic. Prayerfully read and consider these ideas!
No one can give place in his own heart and life for the stream of God's blessing to flow to others, without receiving in himself a rich reward. The hillsides and plains that furnish a channel for the mountain streams to reach the sea suffer no loss thereby. That which they give is repaid a hundredfold. For the stream that goes singing on its way leaves behind its gift of verdure and fruitfulness. The grass on its banks is a fresher green, the trees have a richer verdure, the flowers are more abundant. When the earth lies bare and brown under the summer's parching heat, a line of verdure marks the river's course; and the plain that opened her bosom to bear the mountain's treasure to the sea is clothed with freshness and beauty, a witness to the recompense that God's grace imparts to all who give themselves as a channel for its outflow to the world. {MB 81.3}
This is the blessing of those who show mercy to the poor. The prophet Isaiah says, "Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily. . . . And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought: . . . and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not." Isaiah 58:7-11. {MB 82.1}
The work of beneficence is twice blessed. While he that gives to the needy blesses others, he himself is blessed in a still greater degree. The grace of Christ in the soul is developing traits of character that are the opposite of selfishness,--traits that will refine, ennoble, and enrich the life. Acts of kindness performed in secret will bind hearts together, and will draw them closer to the heart of Him from whom every generous impulse springs. The little attentions, the small acts of love and self-sacrifice, that flow out from the life as quietly as the fragrance from a flower--these constitute no small share of the blessings and happiness of life. And it will be found at last that the denial of self for the good and happiness of others, however humble and uncommended here, is recognized in heaven as the token of our union with Him, the King of glory, who was rich, yet for our sake became poor. {MB 82.2}