Category Archives: Economics

charity, Economics, Faith, Holiness

Economics in a Genesis 3 World

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Genesis 3:19 (ESV)

We sometimes assume that the Bible says very little about “non-religious” topics such as economics and politics. Of course, there are many who assume that the Bible says more than it does about these topics, but it is a bit of an overstatement that the truths of scripture have nothing to say about the economics we follow, and more importantly about the economic decisions we need to be making. 

Genesis 3, and especially 3:19 tells us a truth about the world after the coming of sin into the world through Adam’s rebellion to God, namely that in the world we now live, scarcity is a real thing. This is said as God tells Adam that an economic good (food) will have to come about as the result of “the sweat of your face”. Where once the only necessity for finding food was simply reaching out and taking, now in order to produce those economic goods, there was going to need to be work, and as a result, there would be scarcity based on the amount of sweat that was willing to be put into the production of the economic good.

Thomas Sowell, as far as I know not a Christian, but a noted economist puts it this way when he defines the concept of economics itself:

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses

Thomas Sowell Basic Economics p.2

He also expands this into a necessary corollary, that when it comes to economic problems, there aren’t solutions, only trade-offs. If I want bread, I will need to put in work, if I want to be lazy, I can get excessive rest, but I will have the trade off of being hungry. The result is that I will need to balance the level of tiredness I am willing to put up with and the level of hunger I’m willing to deal with. In a land outside of the garden of Eden, we as humans are left making decisions as to how to use our resources to get to the conclusions we want.

This means that as Christians face the world around us, we will have to accept that until Christ returns, there will always be poor around us, there will always be illness, and there will always be death. When we work to love our neighbours (and even our enemies) we will have to accept that our love for them cannot solve all of the problems, because there are simply more needs and wants than there are resources to deal with those needs and wants. Our faithfulness will not save people in the ultimate sense, but only alleviate suffering. It also means that since the resources are limited, we will have to learn how to be faithful with the resources God gives us so as to best provide for the needs of those around us. 

Utopia is not something Christians build, but something that God gives. In the meantime, in the world where we eat beead by the sweat of our brow, we need to be faithful to God’s goodness with what we are given. 

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Economics, Journalism, Politics, Rant

Can government funded media be impartial?

I ask the question because when I debate funding with my Canadian family for the Canadian public broadcasting service (the CBC), it’s often asserted that the government should fund public broadcasting so that it can give the people impartial information.

Now, for the moment we’ll assume that it is possible to have impartial information. Even with that, however, I’m not sure how the government funded broadcaster can be impartial when dealing with the parties to political disputes in Canada, when at least one of the parties to political disputes has as its basis, a belief that public broadcasting should have lesser (or in the case of radical conservatives like myself, eliminated) public funding. Will the publicly funded media be able to treat impartially those who advocate against their existence as an entity? It seems that in such an instance, they become a party to the political disagreement.

Of course it is possible to be impartial in that instance, but not very likely. This is especially true when one realizes that the majority of those working in Public broadcasting believe strongly in public broadcasting… that’s one of the reasons they work there.

Public broadcasting, in the sense of a broadcaster funded by the government, it seems, cannot be impartial to political disputes because they are themselves a party. They may not be officially part of a given political party, but they are an entity with a large vested interest in whatever decisions are made by Canada’s general public, and a vested interest that lies directly with the fact that they are (about 75%) taxpayer funded.

To me, this means that public broadcasting cannot meet its stated goal of providing impartial information to inform an electorate, not because the public broadcaster is evil, but just because they are a public broadcaster.

At this point, my opponents usually switch gears and tell me that the corporate media are no better. To be honest, I agree. Corporations are also biased and will not usually provide impartial information. That said, there is one benefit that the private news media has over the public one from my perspective.

Canadians aren’t forced to pay for the private media.

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Culture, discernment, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Postmodernism, Rant

Humility and the Triumph of (Over)Confidence

So this morning I again ran into the issue of fan death in Korea through a facebook comment, and I had a chance to reflect on my experience…

A quick explanation: Fan death is the belief that if a person on a hot day closes off their room and falls asleep with a fan pointed at him, there is a chance that he will die.

Sounds kinda strange, especially coming from a country with an extremely high level of scientific education. There is no shortage of people who think this is a very stupid belief, and to be honest, I used to be one of them. But then, I actually got past my immediate dismissiveness and looked into it a bit. Now, I’m still not sure I’m fully convinced of the need for timers on fans (which are standard in Korea), but I do have to agree with some climatologists and the American EPA (see appendix B)  that there is at least something to this.

So what happened here? Why was I so convinced that people who believed something that was easily checkable were wrong simply because their belief did not fit into my preconceived ideas. I had forgotten the fact that it is best to not just know THAT something is incorrect, but do the work of finding out why it is incorrect. I think this is one of the reasons

behind the Biblical statement that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. (Ps 111:10, Pr 1:7; 9:10) That is to say, you will be strikingly unable to learn if you believe yourself to be the apex of knowledge and truth (thus have no fear of God).

I think this is common in society at large as well. Reading opinion pieces in the world’s newspapers, you will often find them full of confident assertions (some true, some less so) with little basis in either argumentation or reference to some place where I can go check myself. It seems to be part of almost all debates (climate change, capitalism/socialism, religion, politics, and on and on).

The upshot is that I wonder if the dominant culture has trained people to be so confident of their own beliefs, that very few people are even listening to opposing positions anymore, and even fewer are learning anything.

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Culture, Economics

Why Increasing Minimum Wage is a Bad Idea for Business

This week I read a story about how the Newfoundland minimum wage was going up to $9.50 an hour, and how a local business leader thinks that this is a mistake.

In the interest of inflaming people, I think the guy is right.

For some reason, people think that price controls on things are a good idea, even though there are very few instances where a price control has actually benefitted people.

why do I refer to price controls? Because minimum wage is a price control. It is a minimum price set on a particular resource that businesses must have in order to function. Without employees, most businesses cease to exist, so an increase in the price of labour will increase the costs for all businesses that must have labour.

Like all price controls, this one seems like a good idea on the face of it. After all, who doesn’t want to have more money? The problem is that it is only a good idea in the short term, as there are effects to such a decision.

Businesses make profits by charging customers a slightly higher price than they pay out in costs. Costs include things like the place the business is (rent), the raw materials needed to produce the product, and labour. when the costs increase, the business must make decisions to continue making a profit or go out of business.

The business could charge more to the consumer. This could be possible since consumers have more money now, due to the increased minimum wage (resulting in inflation, and eliminating the benefit to people who got the raise in the first place so that they could afford more). This will not always happen, though, since most businesses have competition. The competition would use a price increase to (if possible) undercut their competition, and so make more money off of increased sales.

This leads to the businesses other option in maintaining profits. The business can cut costs. It can do this in a number of ways, but with an increased minimum wage (which only affects businesses that hire minimum wage, and hence low-skilled, workers), the most obvious ways to lower price is to either hire fewer people or relocate to a place in which there is a lower minimum wage. This increases unemployment.

If the company cannot cut costs or raise prices, they will go bankrupt, also adding to unemployment.

With increased unemployment, the government is forced to pay out more in unemployment benefits, meaning that the government will need to increase the amount they take in from workers, or lower the benefits they get (or borrow more money, putting the problem off on future generations).

The end result is thus simple. An increased minimum wage is simply bad for business.

Of course, it’s also bad for workers, and is simply a bad way of getting to the goal of better wages for people, but I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

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