nation as a whole is "better off," so the winners can "compensate" the "losers." But while the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act can compensate the workers for lost wages, the government cannot pay out dignity and self-respect.
When earnest Christians ask themselves how best to practice their faith in matters of work and business, finance and political economy, many feel that Christianity calls for a commitment to "social justice," or, among Catholics, "solidarity." These words are taken to signify more efforts to help the poor, through private charity but also through public welfare programs, as against the amoral self-interest and greed that (are assumed to) characterize free-market capitalism. Despite the poor performance record of socialism and social democracy, and despite the way these have usually been the cause and/or consequence of a decline in Christian religiosity, there lingers in many American church congregations an assumption that in economic matters, Christianity implies some sort of welfare state or social democracy. It is true that theoretical free-market economists have a fetish for a rational, profit-maximizing homo economicus who is both morally un-Christian and thoroughly surreal. Nevertheless, John Edwards' insight about work is a clue to why capitalism has a sounder foundation in Christian theology than does welfare-state social democracy, and why, while hardly the Kingdom of God, it provides a framework in which Christians can strive to build it. For the welfare state seeks to satisfy man's material needs, but what matters more is our moral need to serve our fellow men.
A Theology of Labor
On the first day of a typical Econ 101 class, the professor tells a class full of sophomores that human wants are infinite while human means to satisfy these wants, their resources, are finite, and that is called "scarcity." In an introductory theology class, students may learn about the "theodicy" question: why, if God is omnipotent and good, is there so much suffering in the world?
It is natural to conflate the scarcity and theodicy problems, and Genesis seems to give us a basis for it. When Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden, God condemns Adam to a life tilling the soil: "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food." (Gen. 3:19) It is not quite literally true when God told Adam and Eve that "in the day that you eat of [the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil], you shall surely die." They lived out that day and, so the Bible says, over nine hundred years more. But they became vulnerable to death, able to put it off only through the constant intake of food. The human body, deprived of food, is never more than sixty or seventy days away from death. To get food, we must labor. Labor, by this reading, is part of God's curse on rebellious man, thus (it would seem) justifying economists in modeling it as a source of disutility.
2