Christians and laissez-faire

Kim at Crossroads has a very thoughtful post about poverty and how Christians should think about government’s role in responding to it.

I left this comment (minor modifications added):

I think it’s difficult to get a political philosophy from the Bible because of the circumstances in which it was written. In the NT in particular, Jesus and the disciples are in a distinctly minority position – both as members of an oppressed people and as part of a despised new religious movement. They’re not exactly in a position to be drafting policy papers for Caesar!

But there is ample precedent in the tradition for seeing the distribution of goods as a matter of justice and not simply charity as we understand the term. The church fathers, the scholastics, and the reformers all seemed to take the view that anything beyond what was necessary to meet our needs was owed to our poor neighbors [i.e. witholding from the needy neighbor was often regarded as theft]. And there is a longstanding tradition of regarding the institution of private property as a kind of concession to sin and, therefore, subject to qualification by those responsible for ensuring justice in the community. So, I think it’s pretty hard to argue for laissez-faire as the “Christian” position.

Two qualifiers, though. First, I think empirically we’ve seen that a relatively free market does a better job at producing wealth than other economic systems. But that still leaves a lot of room for government intervention when it comes to providing basic necessities to those unable to provide for themselves, health care, education, infrastructure, etc. etc.

Secondly, I think our credibility as Christians in arguing for particular policy proposals does depend in part on how we live out those principles in our own lives. We risk looking like hypocrites if we ask the government to enforce principles that we’re unable to live by ourselves! On the other hand, if Christians actually engaged in radical acts of wealth sharing, what kind of impact might that have on our unbelieving neighbors?