Money, Greed, and God: Chapter 4
So it has become pretty clear to me that posting to this blog once a week is not realistic given my erratic schedule. I’ll still try to stay fairly consistent, but things might come up like they did between this post and the last.
On a related note, I’m looking for people who might be interested in writing a guest post. If you write it, and I publish it, you can have a short description of yourself at the bottom including a link to your blog/website. You can also put any links in that are relevant to the article. I won’t remove affiliate links, as long as they’re not scammy, and everything makes sense. I’d appreciate if you’re recommending good products if you’re using affiliate links, though. I don’t want to ruin my readers’ trust in this website. The articles have to be related to the content of this blog and DefendingChrist.com. I may make some small edits for space, accuracy, etc. This will help me stay more consistent.
So anyway, back to the book…
If I Become Rich, Won’t Someone else Become Poor?
The Materialist Myth (believing that wealth isn’t created, it’s simply transferred)
In this chapter, Richards argues that “at the very heart of economics…is a reality that exists not in material objects but in our individual and collective minds.” He points out that wealth (or capital) is not a material thing that is simply re-allocated in a fixed pie, but is instead immaterial and can be created in an economy. He traces, as an example, the agricultural industry from the beginning of man. We were hunters and gatherers until a few thousand years ago, when we “began to domesticate sheep and cattle and to cultivate plants like wheat and barley.” Through the years, technology has made it easier and easier for “fewer people [to] produce more with less land.” Now, “the state of California could…grow enough to feed the planet.” Once food was more readily available, and people didn’t have to grow it themselves, they were more free to pursue art, music, philosophy, literature, and the development of more technology.
Later in the chapter, Richards discusses the concept of trying to reduce the gap between the rich and poor. He cites arguments about the wealthy being able to “wield far too much power over the political process,” and reasons through some possible solutions. The most common of these solutions is for the government to tax the rich disproportionately, and redistribute that wealth to the poor. Richards argues that this solution would give the government far more power than the rich would ever have, concentrating a vast amount of power to very few people. So, in other words, it doesn’t solve the problem, it just moves (and possibly increases) it.
Richards concludes the chapter by restating the problem of poverty. He argues that the problem isn’t that some people are rich and others are poor any more than the problem of disease is that some people are healthy and others are diseased. Instead, the problem is simply that some people are poor. I would argue that we as Christians (particularly we affluent American Christians) should be working hard to fix that problem rather than delegating our moral duty to the government. For some information on how to do this, you can visit RememberThePoor.
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by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and 
by Michael Parenti. He left the course believing that “the only way to balance the scales was for the national wealth to be owned and controlled by the people as a whole.”
(also available on 
, I’d recommend both). Naturally, I wondered how Richards–who has a Ph.D. in philosophy and theology, is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, and spends a lot of time talking about cosmology–could also be expert enough to write a book about economics. So I picked up a copy, and have started reading it.
in a Bible study. We recently went through the chapter on world missions. This chapter is specifically about missions outside the country. Piper contends that missions is an important part of Christian life, and that every Christian should be contributing to it in some way (such as training missionaries, becoming missionaries, financially supporting missionaries, etc.). He also points out that Americans are doing this less and less.
