Ask questions? Sure. Comment? Okay. Provide guidelines for consideration? Alright. Direct? No.

Economics – the complex self-interested interactions of myriad people – has shown itself far too complex for even the smartest people in the world to “manage”; every significant effort has produced unintended consequences, often with increased moral hazard and amplified dislocations in distribution rather than the intended solutions. The most widespread efforts have consistently wreaked untold havoc. Yet humility remains in short supply. For some reason this seems especially the case among academics who know little about economics and have certainly never had to meet a payroll. (Of course, to a novice, all problems have easy solutions.)

Three comments from Thomas Sowell’s recent article apply:

Poverty is obscene. It is poverty that needs to be reduced–and increasing a country’s productivity has done that far more widely than redistributing income by targeting “the rich.”
. . .

The assumption that what A pays B is any business of C is an assumption that means a dangerous power being transferred to politicians to tell us all what incomes we can and cannot receive. . . . the power to say what incomes people can be allowed to make will inevitably move down the income scale to make us all dependents and supplicants of politicians.

The phrase “public servants” is increasingly misleading. They are well on their way to becoming public masters– like aptly named White House “czars.”

As a general rule (and I am NOT saying this necessarily applied to the AC or this conference), it is always more compelling when leaders who warn against the excesses of materialism do so first by example. Yet this plea inevitably offends when it comes from those who will be asking for more money in the tray to meet their own operation’s material needs. The business owners in the pews rightly recognize that the sermon and the behavior don’t match and – not surprisingly – know which of the two really matters, especially when our leaders (whether ecclesiastic or political doesn’t matter) espouse “one for thee and another for me.” A living witness, however, can accomplish far more with far less.

One good thing about this event is that it allowed someone like Lee to respond. My reading agrees with John’s (above): Lee seems to be the better theologian, not least because he seems to be approaching the issue with some humility.

Unfortunately in the case of the Church of England, recklessness investment has impoverished the Pension Fund on an unimaginable scale (see story in the Financial Times). Maybe the concern and balance is shifted not due to genuine theological development, but due to errors which created untold needs. A more conservative financial practice would have avoided this.