Why our present economic lockdown is a grave injustice condemned by the prophet James
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
If you think the ongoing economic lockdowns of small businesses are a matter of economic indifference, you’re missing the point. This is a big deal. Lockdowns are the luxury of the ruling and professional class. Lockdowns are easy in one’s McMansion, when you’re getting paid no matter what businesses are deemed “non-essential,” and when you have no disincentives against lockdowns.
The partiality and hypocrisy of the lockdowns were epitomized recently by Saturday Night Live (SNL). SNL pays each member of its live-studio audience $150 in order to classify the audience as “extras” and thus “essential” workers. Huh? Not only this, but SNL thought it great comedy to have Pete Davidson, a Staten Island native and SNL cast member, mock anti-lockdown protests at Mac’s Pub, a Staten Island watering hole.
You can’t make this stuff up. The lack of self-awareness is rich, no pun intended. The celebrity class mocks the working man for trying to earn a living. This is what we’ve come to. While the good and the great of our society lecture small business owners about the morality of the economic lockdowns, owners of gyms, restaurants, pubs, salons, among other small businesses, are trying to eke out a living.
In all of this, the Church may have lost sight of Scripture’s teaching regarding workers and their wage: the worker may not be forcibly separated from his labor nor from the fruit of his labor, that is, his wages (the monetary gain his labor produces). The principle, again: the worker may not be forcibly separated from his labor. Proponents of ongoing economic lockdowns are violating this principle. They are advocating a grave injustice that is pushing small business owners to the brink of ruin and desperation. It is a stench to God, and cries out for His judgment.
THE PRINCIPLE
Look at James 5:1-6.
1 Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you! 2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have heaped up treasure in the last days. 4 Indeed the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. 5 You have lived on the earth in pleasure and luxury; you have fattened your hearts as in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned, you have murdered the just; he does not resist you. (NKJV)
James, a NT prophet reminiscent of OT prophets, calls out the rich and powerful, the landed gentry who hire workers to work their lands. The workers don’t have a lot of wiggle-room in their finances. They don’t have 5 years of cash in reserves saved up in an account at Wells Fargo, Bank of America, or some other multi-national bank.
The boss knows his workers have nowhere else to go. He has a monopoly on their labor and there is not much they can do to protest. He can, in his own eyes, do whatever he wants. As Matthew Henry says, the boss can make a hard bargain with them and refuse to make good on his word. He can withhold their due pay indefinitely. He has, in his own eyes, carte blanche to do whatever he desires with them as economic beings.
But God in heaven sees all things. Nothing escapes His judgment. He judges the hearts and actions of men and He condemns the wicked disposition and wicked decisions of the rich who perpetrate this injustice.
But let’s be clear about what exactly is the injustice of the rich and powerful. God does not condemn wealth nor its accumulation nor contractual agreements per se (between workers and boss). In other words, let’s not get carried away. God is not a socialist. He is not advocating Liberation Theology here.
Verse 4 tells us the sin of the ruling class: Indeed the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.
The powerful have kept workers from collecting their wage. They have lied and defrauded workers by telling them they would get paid after going through all the toil of working, yet they did not pay their hired workers. So grievous is this sin that the wages of the workers, still in the gator-skin pocket books of the rich, are screaming out to the ears of God, described as the “Lord of hosts”— the God of the innumerable armies of heaven, the God who will come back in glory and power, to judge the living and the dead. It is this God with whom the boss will have to deal.
As verse 5 points out, the exploitation of workers has fattened the rich. By continuing to separate the worker from his wage, the powerful have become more powerful. The boss has given the peasants crumbs in order to build another Amazon warehouse in another midwestern city.
As verse 6 points outs, this transfer of wealth is, in fact, murder. The powerful have condemned the righteous person as unworthy of their paycheck (most commentators hold that the rich in James 5 are unbelievers and the workers are Christian believers; although this is not entirely the case in our present economic lockdown, the principle still holds).
To refuse to pay someone their deserved wage is to kill them by slowly squeezing the life out of them. They have no savings, no margins, no cashflow like the powerful. To withhold their wages is to refuse to give them and their families bread, shelter, and a livelihood.
In teaching this Scriptural principle— the worker may not be separated from his wages— James draws upon several OT texts:
Leviticus 19:13: You shall not cheat your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of him who is hired shall not remain with you all night until morning.
Deuteronomy 24:14-15: You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, whether one of your brethren or one of the aliens who is in your land within your gates. Each day you shall give him his wages, and not let the sun go down on it, for he is poor and has set his heart on it; lest he cry out against you to the Lord, and it be sin to you.
Like every faithful prophet, James is not innovative. This has always been a matter of justice for God.
THE MARXIST DISTORTION
Two objections need to be addressed. First, Marx, too, seems to talk about “the alienation of labor.” How is James different from Marx?
In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argued that man suffers alienation and misery from labor because he is forced to work under external compulsion. Marx wrongly believed that man really does not want to work since work, for Marx, is dehumanizing and an assault on human dignity.
The Bible teaches that although work is cursed because of Man’s Fall in sin, work remains a creational good. God made work, and God made it good.
As James 5 tells us, the small business owner in our day is desirous of working, of doing that which brings him pleasure by offering a useful product or service to the buying public (a pleasure which is the lifeblood of the small business in America). However, the small business owner at present finds powerful external forces preventing him from engaging in that labor he has willingly chosen, and thus have prevented him from enjoying the wages of his labor.
See the difference? Marx believed that man was alienated from his labor because he was conscripted to work against his will. The Bible sets us back to reality (and the response of small business owners during this economic lockdown testifies to the Bible’s veracity): it is not that man does not want to work, but that he really does want to labor honestly yet is forced to be separated from his work and wage not by his own internal disposition but by external decision-makers. Hence, there really is an alienation of work, but not as Marx taught.
Ironically, Marx believed more government control would address this alienation of labor (as he defined it). The truth (and again, our present situation testifies to God’s Word) is that more government control only compounds this grave injustice.
Today, state and local governments have arrogated the divine prerogative of deciding which businesses can operate and which cannot. The sin of partiality is evident in their pronouncements that divide businesses into farcical “essential” and “non-essential” categories. No government has the lawful authority to pick economic winners and losers. No government may choose who gets to work and under what conditions.
In a just society, a worker is entitled to the wage his work produces. He is entitled to contractually give his labor to someone else (called an employer). God has given people, even in our desperately sick and depraved world, creativity, industry, motivation, and willingness such that they can choose when to work, how to work, for whom to work, and where to work. Government has no right to intrude upon a man’s lawful work because it is a matter of life or death— a worker’s very life is threatened when any government or governing authority separate him from his work and wages.
WHAT ABOUT FUTURE WAGES?
Which brings us to a second possible objection. James 5:1-6 is clearly talking about the powerful and rich withholding the past wages of a worker. Does this really apply to our present economic lockdowns where workers have not worked and thus have not yet earned money from their labor?
The principle of James 5 prohibits alienating a worker from his past wages and future potential earnings. Those powerful advocates of economic lockdowns are squeezing the future life and livelihood out of small business owners. This is the textbook definition of the injustice in James 5. Lockdowns withhold the possibility of work. As a result, they withhold the fruit of work: wages.
The Bible addresses the injustice of cutting short someone’s future potential, economic and otherwise, in the laws of retribution or retaliation, known as the Lex Talionis (see Exodus 21:23-25 and Leviticus 24:19-20. The Lex Talionis was a compassionate set of divine laws that limited retributive justice in cases of personal injury or manslaughter. In other words, the punishment must fit the crime.
Important for our discussion, the Lex Talionis addresses the maiming of another person’s body or property (intentional or not) which inevitably resulted in economically advantaging the perpetrator. If someone maimed or injured another person’s body or property, the assailant would forfeit from his body or property the same member permanently damaged in the victim (e.g. if I gouge out your eye, my eye is then gouged out). One’s physical body and property were precious to God and highly valued in Israelite society because they were used to worship God, for the sexual reproduction of Israelite children, and for the defense of one’s family and clan, among many things.
Of course, one’s body and property were economically productive, too. To be one arm, one leg, one slave, or one ox short because of someone else’s fault was to have your economic future diminished in ways that could not be fathomed. Your economic potentiality and productivity were forcibly and horribly disadvantaged in innumerable ways.
To be maimed in person or property would affect your marital prospects, limit your service in Israel (a judge could not be blind, a priest could not have crushed testicles), and threaten your very livelihood, to name but a few examples.
Simply put, God prohibited the unjust economic advantages that resulted from maiming someone’s person or property and thus cutting short their future earning power. To maim someone was to not only affect their economic productivity in the present, but to forever injure their potentialities in the future.
ECONOMIC LOCKDOWNS
Which brings us back to the injustice of these abhorrent economic lockdowns. The powerful advocates of lockdowns— whether Big Tech executives, state and local government officials, unelected federal workers, Big Box corporations, or the national chains that have been deemed essential— are maiming thousands of Americans in our day. Small business and “non-essential” business owners are suffering great injury and damage to their personhood, their property, their livelihood, their families, their ability to provide for others, and their ability to live and function as people, as image-bearers of God.
A just society offers few hindrances to an entrepreneur who wants to open a business. The regulations are minimal and entry into the market is straightforward. Oppressive societies, on the other hand, have insurmountable barriers to the market that the entrepreneur could never overcome. Can you imagine all the hundreds of blank forms a non-bureaucrat in China has to fill out in order to open a business?
Yet, who could have thought that America would become such an oppressive and exploitative society, where proponents for economic lockdowns get to choose economic winners and losers?
Who could have foreseen how the high and mighty would hold the “non-essential” class hostage against its will, and create artificial, external, and coercive barriers to the market like mask-wearing and limited occupancy restrictions for a private business?
Who could have imagined that so many millions of Americans would be prevented from working and thus prevented from enjoying the wages they could be earning? The level of tyranny and injustice at work here boggles the mind.
JUDGMENT
If our ruling class ever wanted a country where thousands of American business owners, because of the decisions of the ruling, were driven to economic desperation and resentment, they could do no better than precisely their present course of action.
Ask yourself— who are these lockdowns good for? Who is profiting from them?
Not able nor willing to shop at brick-and-mortar businesses because of the COVID-induced lockdown and panic by the ruling class, Americans have flocked to Amazon. Coincidentally, over the course of the last nine months of lockdowns, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has added more than $50 billion to his net worth.
Why would the head of such a company want an end to lockdowns? Seriously, ask yourself.
Why would those profiting from the lockdowns—either now as executives in corporate America or in the future when pro-lockdown government officials look for lucrative lobbying and corporate advisory roles—ever want to slay this cash cow?
Why stop this massive transfer of wealth when everything is on your side— state governments, the news, social media, and even things that sound scien-cy?
Seriously, ask yourself if this is not precisely the scenario James condemns.
And then remind yourself of this: God promises judgment in James 5:1-6 through His servant, the prophet James. The wicked rich ought to wail and howl because of God’s judgment racing towards them. They have robbed their workers of money and they have trusted in money, but their money is no protective buffer against God. All the wealth they have accumulated as a result of their exploitation of workers will scream out against them on the day of judgment. God will disintegrate the riches of the wicked to dust. He will reverse their status by taking their noses out of the clouds and putting them into the dirt. The wicked are fattened, yes, but for the day of their own slaughter. Their luxury will turn to ash. Their pomp and show of supposed divinity— for this is what the powerful wicked in every generation pretend to possess— will be the emperor’s new clothes before the one, true, living God.
Hear and heed God’s Word.
Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
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