Photo by Pictures of Money. CC BY 2.0
Last week, I was involved in a Twitter discussion that at least implicated questions of economics, government spending, and private spending. A couple of the interlocutors seemed to be arguing under two assumptions: (1) there are only two economic systems, capitalism and socialism, and (2) there’s something quasi-divine about capitalism, and unrestrained capitalism is the only moral or effective economic system.
Now, this post’s purpose isn’t to argue the first of those two points.[fn1] I do, however, want to suggest that we, as Mormons, need to think much more carefully about money than we usually do.
If my experience at church is at all representative, when we talk about money at church, we talk about two things. The first is paying tithing and offerings, and the second is avoiding debt. Online, the discussion usually devolves into the benefits or the evils of capitalism.
Neither is inherently a bad discussion,[fn2] but neither engages with most of our dealings with money. Sure, debt and tithing are relevant, but I spend a lot more of my earning- and spending-money time in situations that involve neither debt nor tithing. Similarly, I’m personally going to have very little impact on whether our economic system is capitalist or socialist or something else. (That’s not to say I can’t engage in that question! It’s just to say that answering that question isn’t my day-to-day relationship with money!)
So let me offer a hot take: neither capitalism nor socialism is the economy of heaven. Capitalism can’t be, because it relies on a selfish, rational natural man, who is, as scripture tells us, the enemy of God. But that’s not to say that a command-and-control economy therefore must be somehow celestial. In fact, there’s no economic system we could currently implement that could replicate celestial economics.
Why not? Because our economic systems necessarily allocate scarce and finite resources. I can’t imagine that, in the next world, resources will be scarce or finite. It should be a post-scarcity economy, something we can imagine, but something we can’t achieve.[fn3]
So our financial system is imperfect, reflecting the imperfect world we live in. That doesn’t give us permission to throw up our hands and abdicate our responsibilities for living economically and financially moral lives.
But we need to figure out what those lives are. See, even if we believe that our current system is too capitalist or too socialist or too third-way or too whatever, it’s the water we swim in. We can work to change it, but until it changes (and even after it changes!) we have to live morally in the system we’re in. And paying our tithing isn’t enough. And paying our taxes isn’t enough. And giving to people on the street isn’t enough. What is enough?
Probably nothing. But earlier this year, the Vatican released an encyclical trying to engage with the idea of a moral financial system. The encyclical fails in many ways, but it succeeds in at least one important way: it represents a real engagement with the idea of morality in economics. It doesn’t try to delegate that responsibility to Capitalism or Socialism. And that’s something we need to do too—it’s not enough to say capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any other economic system, and it’s not enough to say capitalism exacerbates inequality and magnifies poverty. Both are probably true, but neither helps me live a moral economic life.
[fn1] (though both are myopic at best, and almost certainly wrong: having just spent some time in China, there’s a clear alternative to capitalism and socialism, and frankly, that’s not the only system that’s neither fully capitalist nor fully socialist, so if you’re arguing some kind of binary either-or, I’m already bored with your argument)
[fn2] Though both can end up being kind of lame.
[fn3] Note that even the various attempts that the 19th-century church made at implementing some kind of communitarian economics fails in the same way: there’s something fundamental about scarcity in earthly economic systems, and their big job is to allocate those resources. Capitalism theoretically chooses efficiency as its guiding principal, while socialism theoretically chooses equality. Neither necessarily chooses morality or justice.