When Mercy Goes Wrong…

Last time in our Biblical Anthropology series we talked about the desire that many have to make everyone equal. Now, in certain sense, most people would agree that equality is a good thing. But there’s a lot more built into today’s common narrative.

One of the key things we’ve been talking about it that, in the minds of many, there must be a strong central authority to decide what “equality” involves, and then to take from some and give to others in order to enforce this “equality”.

Author A. D. Robles went through an interesting illustration once to demonstrate some problems with this idea. I won’t quote him exactly, but here’s the general idea as I shared it when I first taught this series.

Robles’ main point was that the supposed “mercy” of evil people often ends up being cruelty. How so?

Well, let’s take an imaginary country. In this country, people are at different economic levels. If you’re poor, survival is a challenge. Maybe you have a couple of jobs, just so that you can get by.

Now, let’s say that the imaginary government of the imaginary country decides to control the economy and help the poor people. Now, I don’t think this is the job of a government, but stay with me. They want to help the poor, so what do they do?

First, they give every poor person $1000. Great. Now, they double the minimum wage. Mercy to the poor, right? The most vulnerable.

Wait – here’s a good question to ask: Where did all this money come from? Well, maybe the government took it from the rich people, through taxes. We might call that theft, but they’re doing it for the poor, so we’ll give them a pass for the moment.

Now, what actually happens?

My friend Jake works down at the corner store. It actually belongs to his cousin – nice. His salary is doubled. Sweet! But now the store is having problems – it can’t really afford to pay Jake. Maybe he’s laid off. Or the store has to close.

No problem! There’s a big business down the street. Now, the big business doesn’t exactly have the same concern for Jake as his cousin did. But at least, for the moment, they can pay him the new minimum wage. And as salaries rise suddenly, many small businesses close, and larger companies take their place.

Their bottom line is money, of course. To pay more, they charge more. Prices rise to match the new typical salaries. But now some former small business owners no longer have their businesses. They’re looking for work – unemployment starts to rise.

With fewer people working, there are fewer products, or less variety available. The larger companies have less competition, and so they can afford to charge more.

Meanwhile, Jake is starting to have problems again. Not only are prices rising, he’s now helping to support his cousin.

So who is benefiting most from this “mercy to the poor”? The rich! Big business gets bigger. The rich, who knew how to prepare for inflation, ride out the storm, or even benefit from it. They knew how to invest. They get richer.

Meanwhile, unemployment rose among the poor, some are working in companies that don’t care about them, the $1000 was spent long ago, and if not it is already worth a lot less.

It looked like such a good idea at first. But government simply is not good at controlling all of culture. As we learned in our study of The Authorities, they have their responsibilities and their limits. And sometimes what seems good to us at first can end up as a disaster. The mercy of the wicked can be cruel.

So what’s the answer to a bad government? A new one with more control than the former one? That’s certainly the way we’re moving in our non-imaginary world. “We just need new and better laws! We just need more power to enforce these laws! And then we can finally help the poor children!”

But Jim, I don’t understand – aren’t we in favour of helping the poor? You bet. Absolutely.

So next time we’ll take a deep breath and get back to what the Bible actually says about justice for all.