The Evil Rich and Righteous Poor?

‘Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’; so says the Luke version of the beatitudes (Luke 6:20). The Matthew version says ‘blessed are the poor in spirit…’ and I suspect that Jesus used both versions. I was reminded of this recently in thinking about the current economic recession and as a result of seeing a PBS program a couple of days ago about the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression in which my parents grew up. This verse on the poor is in contrast to the passage on how difficult it is for the rich to be saved, like a camel going through the eye of a needle. A result of this contrast has been a teaching, especially of the social gospel proponents, of the ‘righteous poor and the evil rich’.

There is some basis in common experience for this, of course. Many rich have gained their wealth in unrighteous ways, whether from usury, trafficking in drugs or sex, extortion, slavery or any number of other evils including armed conquest. Until the industrial revolution, producing more than what you consumed was a difficult task indeed, which limited the ability to create wealth. As a result, when wealth was accumulated it quite often was due to unethical, if not illegal, means. We now have far more opportunity to create wealth than in most of history, but there is still much evil. The PBS program on the 1929 crash spent considerable time on how the market was manipulated by a few rich speculators who would collude to drive up a stock price, then sell after it went up by a multiple of 2 to 10x, and watch as other investors suffered huge losses when the price plummeted back down. This was not illegal at the time but it clearly was dishonest, literally stealing from those who were unaware of the collusion going on. This was so rampant for as much as 50 years before 1929 that it contributed to the severity of the crash. This was clearly an ‘evil rich ‘ scenario. Historically, the rich have indeed often stolen from the poor.

The current recession and the crash that started it has also been attributed to the evil rich, as bond rating agencies ignored the risk in the ratings they gave to bundled sub-prime loans and the banks excessively leveraged their balance sheets with subprime loans, resulting in collapse as the default rate rose. There is plenty of blame for the rich in this, but there is also plenty of blame for the poor. Those who took on home loans they clearly could not afford hoping to flip the house quickly, the enormous credit card debt buildup over the last decade, the negative savings rate: all of those were in the lower income groups. To me one of the differences in this current economic mess is that it is much more egalitarian in its causes than the Great Depression. I personally think the government’s pressure to make more subprime loans was the most serious root of the problem, but there was so much get-rich-quick mentality everywhere that rich and poor both have plenty of blame to go around. Of course, those we call ‘low income’ in the U.S. are not all that poor compared to those living on less than $5 per day in some parts of the world. But in the U.S. at least, the lesson in this current mess is not that the evil rich brought this onto the righteous poor; it is that ‘all have sinned and fallen short’.