“Economic activity is one of the most common and basic forms of human interaction and the Bible has much to say about it,” says Dale Arand. “However, it takes time to understand the complexities of our modern economy so that we can better apply God’s principles to our everyday activity.”
Arand offer five reasons it’s worthwhile to understand economics, including:
3) We want our government to restrain evil, not enable it.
We know stealing and lying are wrong, but in our economy there are legal ways to get something for nothing and deceive others on a grand scale. Economists refer to one such practice as “rent seeking” which has been popularly described as an effort to grab a bigger slice of the economic pie rather than make the pie bigger. One familiar form of rent seeking is lobbying to gain an unfair advantage. Those with more money have more opportunity to obtain rents from the government. Thus these transfers of wealth tend to be from the majority of taxpayers to the rich, though sometimes, economic equals compete for rents.
Also, when government fails to properly restrain evil in financial markets, wealth is transferred by deceptive or fraudulent practices simply because people can do so without consequences. Quite the contrary, they often can expect the government to bail them out.
