While efforts to explain the financial crisis will continue for years (historians are still debating the causes of the Great Depression, eight decades later), it seems certain that its genesis cannot be fully understood without some recourse to the moral dimension of human action in the economy. Acton Institute commentators—Jonathan Witt, David Milroy, Sam Gregg—have already weighed in on the question.
Economists have long deplored the poor savings rate in the United States, arguing that our ever-increasing debt load (national and personal) would eventually come back to haunt us. British intellectual Peter Heslam points out that this problem is essentially moral, a failure to value the traditional virtue of thrift.
He writes:
Hebrew and Christian scriptures support a theology of thrift. Literally, thrift means ‘prosperity’ or ‘well-being’, meanings encompassed in the Hebrew notion of shalom, which is central to the biblical theme of redemption. True, Jesus warned against laying up treasure on earth. But his warning is against greed and miserliness, which undermine thrift.
The only puzzling note Heslam hits is his final exhortation for government to push the sale of bonds. Granted that treasury bonds represent savings on the part of their buyers and granted that this is a better use of income than gambling, the other side of the coin is that bonds represent government borrowing from its people—not a good strategy for decreasing national indebtedness.
Better to put the money into stocks, corporate bonds, even passbook savings and certificates of deposit. This kind of saving is investment, the lifeblood of the market economy.
(The point here dovetails with Jordan Ballor’s endorsement of stewardship, posted as I typed this.)
