Luke 16

The Parable of the Dishonest Steward

16 Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2 So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’

3 “The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— 4 I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’

5 “So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’

6 “‘Nine hundred gallons[a] of olive oil,’ he replied.

“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’

7 “Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’

“‘A thousand bushels[b] of wheat,’ he replied.

“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’

8 “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. 9 I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

10 “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. 11 So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? 12 And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?

13 “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” 

14 The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. 15 He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight. (WEB) 

The Gospel of Luke is hostile to money. Matthew gives the first Beatitude as “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Luke says, “Blessed are the poor.”

You might suppose then that the Gospel of Luke is hostile to capitalism.

But this parable, which only Luke includes, suggests the opposite.

Marxists imagine that business in general is a matter of cheating and exploitation. Luke has no such illusions. In any free exchange—in, that is, a free market—any deal goes through if and only if all parties believe they benefit from it.

That is illustrated here. The manager benefits by making friends he will need when he loses his job. The debtors win by having their debts reduced. And, no, the manager is not cheating his master. He does not conceal his final dealings, and his master praises him for them. Just like a business owner offering his customers a sale price or a loss leader or a free gift, he is building goodwill among his customers. All businesses rely for success on developing the trust of customers that they will be given a good deal.

So in business everybody wins.

And this is why, if you happen to know a successful businessman, you will find that they are generally the first to help anyone in need.

In making the manager dishonest, Jesus is making the point that all this is going to happen even if everyone involved is acting only out of pure self-interest, rather than morality or love of their fellow man. This is exactly the point Adam Smith made: in a free market, if everyone pursues self-interest, the “invisible hand of God” will work to the general benefit.

In other words, Luke’s gospel actually endorses the free market, which Marxists prefer to call “capitalism.” “Capitalism” prevents the excessive love of money.

In the parable, of course, the rich man is God, and we are the dishonest manager. Any money, any material wealth we happen to have, is not ours; it is God’s, and we have it on loan. We are therefore obliged to deal generously with our debtors. We will be asked for an accounting on our death.

Epic Fail

NASA image of the two Koreas at night.

Ben Burgis, in Quillette, offers one point in defending Marxism from the charge that capitalism/free markets is just a more efficient way to help the poor rise out of poverty, which I did not have time to consider in my last post. The school bell was about to ring, and I had to run to teach a class. 

“If one of the primary drivers of the global decline of extreme poverty,” he writes, “is its decline in the People’s Republic, is this a success story for ‘free market’ capitalism or for a modified and liberalized form of state socialism?”

Interesting point. But note that, for all its recent growth, the GDP per capita of China is still below the world average: $10,999 vs. $11,673. It is not that whatever China is doing now is any great success, but that whatever China had been doing before must have been truly awful. And, of course, the difference is that before, they were adhering to Marxist theory, whereas since Deng Xiao Ping they have pushed free-market reforms. Then the growth began, and it has now allowed them to claw their way back to the middle.

Perhaps it will continue. But for a true comparison of systems, the test would be two jurisdictions, similar in culture, which differ as much as possible only on whether their government/economy has been Marxist or capitalist.

Happily, China offers us several comparisons of this sort: how has “Mainland” China done in comparison to Taiwan, resolutely free-market Hong Kong, Macau, or Singapore? Answer: GDP per capita for Taiwan is $26,518; for Hong Kong, $50,567; for Singapore $62,984; for Macau $86,339. It looks as though the choice of Marxist economics has cost China dearly.

There are similar comparisons available elsewhere: for example, North versus South Korea. South Korea $32,766. Statistics for North Korea are not reliable, but even the government figures show it as $1,300. Current news reports are that the nation is again experiencing a severe famine.

We might also compare Venezuela to Colombia. But that would not be an entirely uncontroversial comparison. After all, Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves. And Colombia has only recently emerged from a decades-long civil war. Even so, GDP per capita in Colombia stands at just over $7,000, in Venezuela $3,000. Nobody seems to be starving in Colombia.

Regrettably, we have lost some other possible test cases in Eastern Europe: East with West Germany would have been a good one. But then, there was a reason why the Eastern Bloc collapsed, wasn’t there? And in the absence of either war or revolution? They imploded for economic reasons.

It is hard to imagine where else in the social sciences you could get data that could be clearer.