9 “‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10 Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.
Leviticus 19:9-10
As the COVID-19 crisis expands in scope, I’ve been thinking about the role of government and the market. Once upon a time, I was a free-market purist. The core concept of free-market ideology is that unconstrained markets are most able to satisfy the needs of society. If there is a need, it will be reflected as a market demand. Someone (an individual or company) will respond to the demand and supply the need, motivated solely by a desire to profit.
There are lots of problems with this (oversimplified) view of economics. I’d like to focus on the moral issues. Economists (whether free-market or Marxist) tend to focus on money. Why? Perhaps because it’s easy to measure; perhaps because when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
The first moral issue is that some problems have solutions that take a long time to develop. Pharmaceutical companies may invest years, even decades, in developing a new treatment for a disease. Who has that kind of time? People with deep pockets, perhaps, who then expect a return on that investment. Eventually, someone has to pay for the treatment. I see this with Rhonda’s MS treatment. The list price is on the order of $50,000 per year. I can’t afford that; hardly anyone can. Yet someone has to pay it, or else the manufacturer wouldn’t be able to recover their investment. The alternative is that hard problems just never get solved.
The second, larger moral issue with free-market ideology is this: People are not money. A market can’t care; only a person can. Companies don’t actually care about people, even if their mission statements say they do. They may care some about their own employees, and they care that their customers continue to be their customers, but what they really care about is money. Corporations have boards of directors who have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, NOT to society at large. They are obligated to do what will return the best long-term financial return.
This is a problem as old as civilization. A small, isolated tribe needs to share equally. In a larger community, each person can afford to be self-centered. Consider our passage from Leviticus. Clearly, a farmer would benefit from reaping everything he sows, from getting ALL the crops produced on his land. Yet here, in the middle of a list of rules (after “no idols” and before “do not steal”), landowners were told NOT to do so. They were told to intentionally leave some of the produce in the field, so that the poor and the foreigner could glean it. Why?
Because the health of a society depends on valuing ALL people, not just the wealthy. An individual’s obligation is ultimately to themselves and their dependents, but a government—whether an ancient theocracy or a modern democracy—is ultimately obligated to all of the people. We are all connected.
We start Lent with Ash Wednesday, on which we remember Ecclesiastes 3:20: “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.” Death is the great equalizer. These days, death is lurking around the corner in the form of COVID-19. The free-market approach might be to let pharmaceutical companies develop tests and treatments and then charge their market value. Such an approach, though, would allow the disease to spread rapidly. “Get tested if you’re sick” would protect us all. “Get tested if you can afford it” would allow the disease to thrive among populations that can’t afford to be sick, and then to spread the disease to everyone. “Take time off if you’re sick” works fine if you have sick leave; otherwise, you go to work with a mild cough and spread the disease to your co-workers, your customers, and everyone you pass coming and going.
What is the role of government? To protect its citizens, all of them, no matter the threat. Rich or poor, young or old, any color or ethnicity. Everyone.