Wealth and Poverty

Four Christian thinkers battle each other over the causes of wealth and poverty and none of them ends up looking remotely biblical. Gary North talks the best talk, being the only one of the four thinkers committed to a biblical-based worldview, but his libertarian prescriptions fall woefully short of the biblical law he claims such a regard for (see: biblical laws about Jubilee). At least with his views one can at least agree on the need to follow the Bible's prescriptions and follow a shared biblical worldview, which the rest of the writers fall far short of. The other three writers offer a passive acceptance of our present welfare-state model (Diehl's "Guided Market"), offer a pietistic retreat from involvement in the world (Art Gish's decentralism, which does at least offer hostility to the corrupt systems of power present in the world, even if it does nothing to deal with them), or an unabashed praise of inflexible bureaucratic thinking (John Gladwin's centralism). We need to junk the three relativists, find some other thinkers whose biblical worldviews have different conclusions, and repeat this exercise in the hope of actually getting somewhere.