13 PROTECTING THE WEAKEST PARTY Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning. Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the LORD (Lev. 19:13-14).
The theocentric meaning of this passage is two-fold. First, God pays us what He has agreed to pay us, and He pays us on time; therefore, so should His people. Second, God is a protector of those who cannot protect themselves; therefore, so should His people.
What does a three-part law against fraud, robbery, and the withholding of wages have to do with a two-part law prohibiting an unheard curse against a deaf person and tripping the blind? The connection is not grammatical. These laws are judicially and economically linked. The link is two-fold, as I hope to prove: 1) God's desire to protect the weakest members of society; 2) God's establishment of ways to overcome the inherent limits on men's knowledge, especially limits on judges' knowledge.
This raises an important question. If we are to defend the deaf and the blind because they cannot defend themselves, isn't this a violation of the fundamental judicial principle of Leviticus 19:15, namely, that God does not respect persons? On the contrary, this case law affirms that the deaf and the blind are entitled to the same protection from cursing and tripping that anyone is. But because they cannot bring a lawsuit on their own behalf, a righteous person must do it for them. This upholds the universal authority of God's law.
I. Withholding Wages The previous section of Leviticus 19 deals with theft through fraud: the deliberately deceptive use of words (vv. 11-12).(1) The first half of verse 13 repeats this warning. The second half adds another form of fraudulent wealth transfer: the withholding of a worker's wages overnight. This act is specified as fraud, and it is also specified as robbery. The question is: Why? If the worker agrees in advance to wait longer than a day for his pay, why should the law of God prohibit the arrangement? Or does it?
It is always helpful in understanding a case law if we can first identify the theocentric principle that undergirds it. Verse 13 deals with paying a debt. The employer-employee relationship reflects God's relationship to man. God provides us with an arena: life and capital. Similarly, the employer supplies an employee with capital that makes the employee more productive. Man is dependent on God. Similarly, the laborer has worked for a full day; the employer is required to pay to him at the end of the work day. The context is clear: rapid payment for services received. God employs us as His stewards. He gives us the tools that we need to serve Him and thereby serve ourselves. He always pays us on time. So should the employer.
The employer who withholds wages from his employees is making a symbolic statement about God's relationship to man: God supposedly delays paying man what is rightfully owed to him. This symbolism is incorrect. It testifies falsely about God's character. This case law makes it plain that the employer owes payment before the sun goes down, a reference back to the creation: the division of day and night (Gen. 1:16-18; cf. Matt. 20:8).
God delays settling all accounts with mankind until the end of man's week in history, the final Day of the Lord.(2) Man is definitively in debt to God, for God did not slay Adam on the day of transgression. Man is progressively in debt to God, for God has given to man far more than man has given God. God's refusal to settle accounts with men in this life is testimony of His grace to each man -- an undeserved extension of credit -- and also of a final judgment to come. Man is finally in debt to God.
God graciously gives gifts to all men until the day of judgment: common grace to all and special grace to His elect.(3) So, by implication, it is legitimate for an employer to pay his workers in advance, for this testifies to the true debt relationship of man to God. Man, the employee, owes much to God, the employer, who has advanced wages to man so that man may work out his salvation or damnation in fear and trembling. Understand: this grace on God's part places mankind increasingly in God's debt -- a debt that is growing ever larger as time extends and God's common grace compounds. If men do not repent, there will be hell to pay, i.e., there will be God to pay in the ultimate debtor's prison (Matt 18:23-35).
A Position of Weakness The wage earner in verse 13 is in a position of comparative weakness. He is assumed by God to be in a weaker economic position than the individual who is paying his wages. This employer-employee relationship reflects God's supremacy as the sovereign employer and man's subordination as a dependent employee.
If the wage earner is not paid immediately, then he is being asked by the employer to extend credit to the employer. The employer gains a benefit -- the value of the labor services performed -- without having to pay for this benefit at the end of the work day. The Bible allows this extension of such credit during daylight hours, but not overnight.(4) This law teaches that the weaker party should not be forced as part of his terms of employment to extend credit to the stronger party. God acknowledges that there are differences in bargaining power and bargaining skills, and He intervenes here to protect the weaker party. This is one of the rare cases in Scripture where God does prohibit a voluntary economic contract.
What if the worker says that he is willing to wait for his pay if he is given an extra payment at the end of the period to compensate him for the time value of his money (i.e., interest)? This would be an unusual transaction. The extra money earned from two weeks of interest would be minimal in comparison to the amount of the wage. In any case, to abide by the terms of this law, such a voluntary agreement would have to be a legal transaction publicly separate from wage earning as such. There would have to be a public record of its conditions. It would constitute an investment by the worker. But the worker would have to pay his tithe and taxes on this money before he could legally lend it to the employer. There is no biblical law that prohibits a poor man from earning interest on his money. Usury is defined as the taking of interest from a poor man who has requested a zero-interest charitable loan.(5) Usury is not the same as an interest-paying loan to a rich man from a poor man who wants to make some extra money.
The law here specifies that an employer who hires an individual to work for a period of time has to have the money available to pay that individual on a daily basis at the end of each work day. This is the employer's standard requirement. There would be no confusion about this in a Christian covenanted society. There is no doubt that in the modern world, such an arrangement is not economically efficient. Checks must be written, checks must be delivered to individuals, account books must be kept, and so forth. If this had to be done daily, it would add to the expense of running a firm.(6) The larger the firm, the more difficult such an arrangement would be. Nevertheless, the employer is required by God to abide by this law. The question is: Can he lawfully substitute a more convenient payment scheme and still meet the requirements of this law?
Debt and Credit: Inescapable Concepts If the employer decides that it is too much trouble to pay each worker at the end of each work day, he must advance the funds for the period of employment prior to the next payday. Thus, if the average period of employment between paydays is two weeks, the employer must bear the risk of paying an individual for work not yet received. The employer must extend credit to the worker. This is another way of saying that the worker must assume a debt obligation: two weeks of agreed-upon labor services.
Payments for a stream of continuous services cannot be simultaneous, although this limitation will change when the use of electronic cash becomes widespread.(7) Therefore, one of the two parties in this transaction must go into debt in this system, while the other must extend credit. There is no escape from debt and credit without the technology of continuous payments. What this law authorizes is an extension of credit by the worker to the employer for a maximum of one work day. At the end of the work day, the account must be settled; credit is no longer extended by the worker, so he receives his day's wage.
What if the transaction is different? What if the worker is paid in advance for a week or two of labor? He then necessarily becomes a debtor to the employer. He is required to deliver the work that he has been paid to perform. This places the worker in a debt position, but it is not a long-term debt. It is not considered a form of slavery, but there is no doubt that the worker has voluntarily accepted payment in advance, and this creates an obligation on his part. This debt position is limited, however. The law's presumption is that the employer is not going to pay a person in advance for months of work except in very rare circumstances.(8)
It is clear that debt and credit are inevitable in an economy that is based on the division of labor. One party must extend credit to the other for some period of time. The other party therefore must become a debtor. The period of the debt in a labor contract may be brief, but it does exist. The inescapable questions are: 1) who will be the creditor, 2) who will be the debtor, and 3) for how long a period of time? The idea of a debt-free economy is utterly utopian. It is not economically possible to establish such an economy unless payments are simultaneous, moment by moment.(9) Such a payment system is too expensive for any organization to establish today. It would destroy the labor market if it were required by law.
The Bible teaches that we are not to become indebted to others: "Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law" (Rom. 13:8). This must not be interpreted in an absolutist fashion. We know this because every person is in debt to God, and also to the perfect man, Jesus Christ, as a result of Christ's atoning work at Calvary.(10) This rule of debt-free living should be interpreted in a non-utopian sense. It means that we are to avoid debt contracts that threaten our continuing legal status as free men. It does not mean that we are to become hermits who separate ourselves from a division-of-labor economy. (It surely does not mean that we are required to become household slaves.)(11) Free men in Mosaic Israel were those who had not been sold into slavery to repay a debt. Free men had an inheritance in the land. This means that large debts today should be collateralized, e.g., a mortgage. A man can lose his home if he defaults on the mortgage, but he does not lose his freedom. The creditor reclaims the collateral rather than placing the debtor in bondage or selling him into bondage.
The restraining factor against the extension of too much credit by the stronger party is the employer's fear that the worker will either quit before his term of service ends or else not produce competent work. It is too expensive for the employer to sue the average worker for damages; court expenses plus his own time in court exceed the money owed.(12) The economic judgment of the employer is the restraining factor. He suspects that he will not be repaid if he extends too much credit. Nevertheless, there is no biblical law that says that the employer must not extend credit in the form of wages paid in advance. He has to make the decision whether it is worth the risk to do this, given the organizational difficulties of making payments at the end of every work day.
What this text does specify is that the worker must not be asked to work for a week or two in order to receive his wage. There is always a risk of default on the part of the debtor, whether he is the employer or the worker. This law specifies that the risk of default for this form of debt beyond one work day must be born by the employer, not by the worker.
This law specifies that the risk of default for this form of debt -- wages beyond one work day -- day must be born by the employer, not by the worker. This law prohibits robbery: by the employer and also by the employer's accomplice, i.e., the worker who can afford to accept a delayed-payment contract, thereby excluding the poorest workers from the labor market.
The employer must not become a thief by withholding anyone's wages. By forcing the employer to make restitution to his employed workers who had seen their wages withheld, the law reduces the amount of oppression of those unseen by the judges: future workers who are too weak even to compete for the delayed-payment job.
Worker vs. Worker There are some workers who might be willing to work for a period longer than a day before receiving their pay. In a modern capitalist economy, this procedure is accepted by all concerned, since it is the policy of most employers to offer severance pay to dismissed workers.(13) The worker who plans to quit usually informs his employer of the fact that he will soon be leaving. The employer knows that the worker may become somewhat distracted in the final days of employment. The employer may decide to allow the worker to take his paid vacation at the end of his term of employment. So, the modern worker is paid by the employer for services not rendered when he leaves the job, not at the beginning of the term of employment. At the beginning of the contractual relationship, the modern worker renders services to the employer for which he is not paid at the end of the work day. This practice is what the Bible prohibits.
In a poor nation, which the whole world was until the nineteenth century, an offer to accept delayed payment would have given these capital-owning workers a competitive advantage over destitute workers who needed payment immediately. This law establishes that competition among workers must not involve the employer's acceptance of such an offer by any worker. The biblical standard of payment is specified: payment at the end of the day. There may be payment in advance but not delayed payment, unless there is an interest-paying savings plan involved, as mentioned earlier.
Where this law is enforced, destitute workers in the community are not replaced in the labor force by less destitute workers who can afford to forego immediate payment. All workers are to be allowed to compete for jobs, irrespective of any worker's possession of reserves sufficient to tide him over until the next payday. So, one idea behind this law is to make job opportunities available to the destitute workers in the community. Everyone who is physically able to work is to be allowed to compete for a job on a basis independent of his asset reserves. The destitute man's poverty is not to become the basis of his exclusion from the labor market. His competitors are not allowed to use their ability to extend credit to an employer as a way to offset his only assets: his willingness and ability to work.
It should be clear that this law is far more applicable to a poor society than to a modern capitalist one. Very few people in a modern capitalist society are so poor that they cannot wait for a paycheck in two weeks. But the principle should still be honored. It is unfair for an employer to force workers to extend him credit as the price of getting that first job assignment. To do so is to offer the robber's option: "Your money or the job!"
A Case of Theft and Indirect, Non-Criminal Oppression Whenever we analyze a voluntary contract from the point of view of the ethical question of "oppressor and oppressed," we need to ask the economic question: Who wins and who loses? Few moral analysts have had training in economic analysis. This is why they often miss the point. They incorrectly identify the oppressors and the oppressed.
This law prohibits two parties from profiting from delayed payment: the employer and the worker who possesses sufficient assets to survive a delay in payment. Why does the employer delay payment? One reason is that he is trying to avoid risk. He wants to be able to fire the worker without losing the value of the labor that the worker still owes him because of the money that he paid the worker in advance. God grants the employer the legal right to avoid this risk of default, but only if he pays wages daily. The employer may lawfully assess the worker's net productivity, work day by work day. If the worker is producing unacceptably low output, the employer does not have to hire him the next day. The worker's contract is good for only one day or less, depending on what he agreed to in advance. But when the employer seeks to retain the worker for a longer period than one work day, he must pay the worker in advance. This is what God's law teaches.
The Weaker Party
The worker needs protection. An employer might hire him for a period and then dismiss him without pay. Jacob's complaint against Laban was that Laban had changed his wages repeatedly, meaning retroactively (Gen. 31:7). To protect the worker from this sort of robbery, the Bible requires the employer to bear the risk of longer-term default. He bears the risk that the worker may turn out to be inefficient and will have to be fired before he has fulfilled his contract. The worker may even cheat the employer by walking off the job before his term of employment is over. That is the employer's problem. He can minimize this risk by paying workers at the end of each day. In doing so, he does not allow them to become indebted to him. If he chooses to have more infrequent pay periods, then he must bear the risk of paying people in advance who turn out to be inefficient or corrupt workers.
There are workers who are willing and able to bear the risk that they will be cheated by an employer. They will accept delayed wage payments. If there were not such workers, this law would not be necessary. The employer could not rationally expect to be able to pass on this risk of hiring people to the people being hired unless he believed that there were workers who were willing to accept a delayed payment work contract. We know that such workers exist by the millions today. They have always existed.
This case law prohibits such an arrangement, whether initiated by an employer or a worker. The law specifies in advance exactly what each worker should expect: payment at the end of the work day. This law discriminates against all those workers who are willing and able to compete against other workers by accepting delayed wages. It is not simply a law against the robbery of destitute workers by employers; it is also a law against the indirect, non-criminal oppression of destitute workers by other workers.
The Weakest Party
It is not immediately apparent that this law deals with the robbery of the poor by the somewhat less poor. This law seems to have only the employer in mind as the agent of theft. But the employer cannot act alone in this act of theft. He needs accomplices, even if they are unaware of their economic status as accomplices. An employer who wants to discriminate against destitute workers in this way cannot do so without the voluntary cooperation of other workers. He cannot hire people to work without daily wage payments unless some workers are willing to work on these terms. The text identifies this practice as illegal, but it is not merely the robbery of those workers who voluntarily agree to accept the terms of the contract; it is also the oppression of those workers who cannot afford to offer their labor services on these terms. It is above all the oppression of those who are excluded from the employer's work force, not those who are included. But it requires some knowledge of basic economics to discover this fact. This law's protection of the destitute worker's ability to bid for jobs is implicit in the text, not explicit.
On what legal basis does this law apply to the free market? Why should a voluntary contract -- delayed payment -- be prohibited by civil law? What makes the practice of delaying payment judicially unique, and therefore legitimately subject to interference by the civil government?
The Priestly Factor
It is the vulnerability of the weakest seller of labor that makes this law necessary. God imposes this law because of what I call the priestly factor in free market pricing. This factor is seldom if ever discussed by free market economists. When human life is at stake -- beyond the modern economic principle of marginalism -- unrestricted free market competition is in some instances not morally valid. All real-world societies recognize this fact, but free market economists rarely do, since they are committed to a supposedly value-free (ethically neutral) analysis.
Here is an example of priestly pricing: a physician who bargains sharply with a seriously injured man at the scene of an accident. He cannot lawfully charge "all the traffic will bear" under such conditions. He is not allowed to charge significantly more than what is customary for treating that kind of injury in cases where the patient can be taken to any of several emergency treatment facilities. If he does drastically overcharge the victim, a civil court will not enforce the contract. The medical profession has ethical rules against such uninhibited pricing practices. Most people, unlike trained economists, have at least a vague understanding that human life, like eternal salvation, is not to be sold to a dying man on the basis of the free market's familiar auction principle of "high bid wins" unless there is sufficient time for the injured person to seek a second opinion and negotiate a second price quote.(14)
The law against delaying the payment of wages is an application of the ethics of priestly pricing. A destitute worker is not to be excluded from any labor market by an employer's policy of delaying payment. Delayed payment is a policy of excluding workers.
Why would an employer want to exclude workers from bidding for a job, i.e., lowering his labor costs? Normally, he would not want to exclude them, but it takes considerable familiarity with economics to understand why this policy discriminates against destitute workers. This law prohibits such a practice. God expects men to obey His law even when they do not understand all of its ramifications. Obedience is primary, not intellectual understanding. Men are to show good faith to God by obeying God's law as best they can, so that He will reward them. One of these rewards is greater understanding, thereby enabling men to obey God even better.
Competition: Discrimination = Exclusion This law does not prohibit other forms of competition among workers. It prohibits only this one, which reflects the character of God in his gracious dealings with men in history. There is no law in the Bible against one worker's willingness and ability to offer to work for less per day or less per hour than another worker presently does. Any offer to serve another person on terms that are better for him than the terms presently being offered is an offer to discriminate: an act of exclusion. The offer discriminates against the person who has previously benefitted from the arrangement under the existing terms. The right(15) to make a better offer is inherent in the biblical requirement that we become more profitable servants. This right is basic to human freedom. It is also basic to economic growth and advancement.
The Economics of Persuasion
We never know all of the available alternatives in life. We learn about better ways of achieving our goals through better offers that are made to us. We frequently need to be persuaded to do the wise thing. Wisdom is not automatic. Neither is accurate knowledge automatically acted upon.(16) This is an epistemological application of Paul's ethical principle that knowing the good is not the same as doing it: "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Rom. 7:19). This is why advertising must be persuasive; in fact, persuasiveness is more important for successful advertising than conveying technically accurate information.(17)
There is market competition for accurate information and for effective persuasion (i.e., motivation). Neither information nor persuasion is a free good. Both parties to a voluntary transaction are buyers of both information and persuasion. While we do not normally think of persuasion as something that buyers purchase, it must be purchased. We reward those who provide it by buying whatever it is they are selling. Advertisers pay for specialized courses on how to become more persuasive.(18) Consumers act when they are persuaded to act. This indicates that they want to be persuaded to take action. Their spending patterns reflect this desire on their part. Advertisers therefore respond accordingly: they adopt techniques of persuasion -- what scholars have for millennia called rhetoric. Persuasion is not a free good. It must be paid for by those consumers who want it.
The structure of competition for information and persuasion is no different from any other form of market competition: buyers vs. buyers and sellers vs. sellers. A person who thinks he can sell me an alternative approach to solving my problem comes to me and says, in effect: "Include me in your production process. Exclude someone else. I have discovered a better way." The offer to include him is inevitably an offer to exclude his competitors. There can be no possibility of inclusion inside a boundary without the possibility of exclusion; otherwise, there would be no boundary.
Competition Without Oppression
This should alert us to a biblical fact of economic life: economic oppression is in fact a form of discrimination. Economic oppression can also be used as a means of competition. Most forms of discrimination are morally valid and legal.(19) Therefore, so are most forms of competition. This case is an exception. Why does God prohibit this form of competition among workers? I think it must be the all-or-nothing aspect of this form of competition. An excluded worker may be too destitute to survive easily without pay. He is at the bottom of the barrel financially. He might be able to work for a bit less money per day, but he cannot afford to work for nothing for several days or weeks. He is in a desperate situation, so God intervenes and gives him what he needs to compete: time. His skills are not to be removed permanently from the marketplace just because he is too destitute to accept a job that delays payment for work completed beyond one work day.
The Bible correctly assumes that the employer is in a stronger bargaining position than the destitute employee in the community. God's law therefore places limits on the time that the employer can withhold the wages of the employee. It says specifically that withholding wages beyond the end of the work day constitutes oppression. God establishes this formal standard, and Christians should acknowledge its existence and obey it. There are biblical judicial limits on voluntarism.(20) No employment contract contrary to this law is legal in God's eyes. The civil laws of every nation should prohibit such delays in the payment of wages.
Bargainers: Strong, Weak, and Weakest Because so few people are trained to think economically, they do not perceive the "things hidden": in this case, the identification of the primary victim and the primary beneficiary of this prohibited labor contract. We need to think through the effects of such a contract by means of "Levitical" reasoning, meaning boundary reasoning: inclusion and exclusion. The traditional pair of questions posed by economists -- "Who wins?" and "Who loses?" -- becomes: "Who is included?" and "Who is excluded?"
In the absence of this law, there is an implied threat to the potential worker who is unwilling or unable to extend this credit. If he refuses to extend credit to the employer, he will not get the job. This is a major threat. By contrast, the employer suffers very little by paying wages in advance. He loses a small interest return on his money. This interest presumably is not worth a great deal to him, especially if he is a small-scale employer, which most employers in history are.
Why only presumably? Because of an inescapable epistemological limit on economic science. Technically, the economist cannot make interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility, so he cannot say scientifically that the employer's gain is psychologically smaller than the worker's loss. The psychological loss or gain of the two individuals cannot be computed. There is no scientific way to measure the psychological loss to the worker of forfeiting the interest by extending credit, nor is there a way to compute the psychological loss to the employer if he is required by law to forfeit the interest by extending credit.(21) It is not necessary for us to make such a numerical computation; we can still identify the primary victim and the primary beneficiary whenever this law is violated.
We need to consider three parties in our economic analysis: the employer, the employed worker, and the excluded worker. The text does not speak of the excluded worker, nor is the average Bible commentator likely to consider him, but he is crucial to the analysis. A less destitute worker may decide to accept the terms of employment: delayed payment. A destitute worker cannot afford to accept it. The excluded worker becomes the primary victim of a delayed-wages contract. He cannot afford to take the job. The less destitute worker takes the job. He would of course rather be paid early, but his willingness to accept delayed payment is a form of competition on his part that gives him an advantage over very poor people in the community. The Bible calls this form of competition oppression.
The primary economic beneficiary of this form of oppression is not the employer, for whom the interest gained by delaying payment is minimal, but rather the worker who can afford to have his wages delayed, and who therefore gets the job. He excludes his competition through oppression. The employer here acts as the economic agent of the employed worker. This representational relationship is not readily understood. No one without economic training will blame the employed worker for the unemployment of the destitute worker. If anyone is blamed, it will be the employer. The employer is to blame, judicially speaking: he imposes the illegal terms of employment: robbery. God's law designates the employer as the initiator of an evil contract, and hence judicially liable, as we shall see. The fact remains, however, that the worker who takes the job on these terms becomes the agent of economic oppression, while the excluded worker is the primary economic victim.(22) The person who appears to be the victim -- the worker who takes the job -- is in fact the primary economic beneficiary of this labor contract. He obtains what both of the competing workers needed: the job.
What Did the Employer Steal? The appropriate civil sanction is not specified, as is also the case in other laws governing oppression. But in most other cases, the absence of any civil sanction points to the absence of civil jurisdiction because of excessive limits on the judges' knowledge. Not so in this instance. Restitution in this case is technically possible to compute. If victims prosecute and the courts convict, the practice will disappear from public view.
The primary judicial question is: How much does the convicted employer owe the victim? Answer: the victim's costs of prosecution plus the restitution penalty.(23) There are two approaches to establishing what restitution payment is owed by the employer: 1) by considering the forfeited interest; 2) by considering the forfeited daily wage. I believe the second approach is valid. We must examine the first approach in detail in order to see why it is not valid. The key question that we need to answer is this: What constitutes the thing stolen? Is it the interest or the wage?
Interest
A withheld wage requires a worker to extend credit to his employer. For a week or two, or perhaps even a month, the worker has extended credit, day by day, to the person employing him. The employee has therefore forfeited the interest that he might have earned day by day, had he been able to put this money in the bank rather than spending it on necessities. It is obvious that the interest payments foregone would not be very much money; nevertheless, it is possible to compute what double restitution of that forfeited interest would be. However, only a very skilled person could have made this computation prior to the widespread knowledge of mathematics.(24) The average employer could not have computed this payment easily in Moses' time, let alone the average employee.
The cost to the worker of this forfeited interest would be higher to him than the cost to the employer. I am speaking here of the actual rate of interest, not psychological cost. The worker has to forfeit goods that the wages would have bought in the interim. There is no doubt that a modern worker can borrow the money to buy these goods, repaying the loan at the end of the working period. (Prior to World War I, small consumer loans from banks were unavailable to workers.) The difficulty is, a worker is not in a position to borrow money at the same low rate of interest that the employer can obtain. The poverty-stricken worker is a high-risk borrower. He can easily be trapped in a cycle of debt. When this law is honored, an employer has greater difficulty in forcing the employee into debt servitude.
Computing the forfeited interest would be difficult even today. In Moses' day, it would have been very difficult. How many judges would have been able to establish this implied forfeited payment? Not many. So, we must look for a better solution. We must turn from the technical economic concept of forfeited interest to the concept of forfeited wages.
Wages
It is not implied in the text that double restitution of the forfeited interest should be paid, since this is not what is specified as the thing stolen. In fact, the text does not specify the thing stolen. What is identified in the text as an act of theft is the refusal of the employer to pay the agreed-upon wages in a timely manner. We conclude that the withheld wage is the thing stolen. Thus, a civil judge can rightfully impose a much higher penalty on the employer than double the employer's forfeited interest. The thief would not simply pay double restitution on the forfeited interest; he would pay double restitution on any wages unpaid at the end of each work day.
Why so high a penalty? After all, the worker forfeited only the interest that his money might have earned. Why impose double restitution based on the entire daily wage multiplied by the number of days of delayed payment? Because God's law defines the act as theft.
The act is also a form of oppression, but the oppressor here is the worker who accepts the contract. He is not identified as a thief. He is not subject to criminal charges by the invisible excluded workers who cannot afford to wait to be paid.
We need to examine the employer's motivation. If his primary goal is not to earn a little extra interest be delaying wages, then what is it? Most employers adopt a policy of delaying wages today because their rivals do. This policy is almost universal in modern advanced economies. Employers give little or no thought to the practice. But what if they did give thought to it? What would their primary motivation likely be?
The Limits of Economic Knowledge The Marxist would probably argue that the employer's goal is to place local workers in a totally dependent position. The poorer they are, the more desperate their economic condition. The more desperate their economic condition, the cheaper they are willing to work. If the employer can maintain what Karl Marx once called the industrial reserve army,(25) i.e., the unemployed, he can force down local wages. His theft is therefore deliberate. One problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that the employer understands a complex chain of economic reasoning. He probably doesn't. Another problem is that employers like to have qualified workers competing against each other.
The key word here is qualified. As an employer, I believe that the typical employer is trying to minimize his risk when he hires competent workers rather than substandard workers. He delays payment because he wants to see each new worker prove himself before getting paid. This delay in payment pressures workers with little capital to quit early or never even apply for the job. The practice of delaying wages is therefore primarily a screening device. It favors workers who have capital in reserve. These capital reserves serve the employer as a substitute for other screening techniques. The employer's economic problem is the his lack of knowledge about the competence of the new worker. The employer uses a delayed payment scheme in order to minimize his search costs in estimating the competence of new workers. Accurate knowledge is not a zero-price resource. Employers try to obtain such knowledge as cheaply as possible. They use the new worker's willingness to accept delayed payments as a cost-effective substitute for more detailed information regarding the worker's abilities and his willingness to work.
The Limits of Judicial Knowledge Here we have a situation where the law seems unjust. I have argued that the primary economic beneficiary of delayed payments is the worker who can afford to extend the credit and therefore gets the job. I have identified the primary economic victim as the excluded destitute worker. Yet the law identifies the employer as the robber, and the only way for a judge to impose negative sanctions is for him to require the employer to pay the employee. In other words, the judicial victim is not the primary economic victim. Why does God give the employee a lawful claim against the employer? Because this worker is the only judicially visible victim. He is a weak bargainer when compared to the employer. He is stronger than the destitute excluded workers, but he is still weak compared to the employer. This law is meant to protect the weak from the strong. It protects the weakest party only indirectly: by threatening the employer with penalties for robbing the weaker. Judges are not omniscient; they cannot identify the weakest workers, i.e., those who never even bothered to apply for the job because of their lack of capital. Judges provide protection to the weakest only indirectly.
The judicial problem is this: How can the judges identify the actual victims of this form of discrimination? The primary economic victim of a delayed-wage contract was the excluded worker who could not afford to take the job. He has been oppressed by the worker who took the job on the illegal terms. Exactly which workers were the excluded ones? That is to say, which workers would have gained employment had the delayed-payment system not been in force? This is virtually impossible for civil judges to determine. Knowing the harsh terms of employment, some destitute workers may not have bothered to apply. Any seemingly destitute worker might later complain to the civil authorities that he had never bothered to apply for the job because of the delayed payment feature. So, by what means can such a law be enforced? How can legitimate, predictable sanctions be imposed? What, if anything, should be done to indemnify the primary victim? This is why economic oppression is rarely a crime. The civil magistrate cannot specify the illegal criteria, the victims, or the appropriate restitution.
How can a restitution payment to the employed worker help a destitute worker who was too poor to accept the terms of employment in the first place? The judge does not restore anything to him. Nevertheless, the penalty does help the excluded worker: not as a payment to compensate him for past oppression but as a threat against future oppression. This law reduces future injustice to the weakest members of the work force by forcing the oppressing employer to pay the visible victim -- the worker whose wages were withheld -- instead of paying the invisible victims whose claims cannot be precisely identified or resolved judicially. The agent of oppression, namely, the worker who took the job, is rewarded by the court, not for being an oppressor (which he was) but because he was the victim of a criminal act.
II. The Deaf and the Blind Verse 14 deals with the deaf man and the blind man: "Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the LORD" (v. 14). Neither one of them can defend himself against the specified evil. The deaf man cannot hear the curse; the blind man cannot see the stumbling block. The person who takes advantage of their condition of weakness has broken the law of God.
These are case laws. They are specific applications of more general principles. We are supposed to deduce the general law from the specific conditions described in the case law. What are these conditions? Let us consider the easiest case first.
Tripping the Blind
The blind man must not be tripped, since there is no way that he can adjust for the obstacle. It is not his fault that he cannot see. There is nothing that he can do about his condition. It is not a moral weakness on his part that he is blind (John 9:1-3).
The context of this law is the payment of wages (v. 13). The case law of verse 14 means that the stronger party must not use another person's inherent weakness in order to pay him less than a market wage. By implication, he must not cheat the illiterate man or the mentally retarded person. He must acknowledge the existence of the other person's weakness and not use it to take advantage of him. Where the other person is biologically unable to compensate for his weakness, the employer is not to profit from the other person's incapacity.
Why would anyone deliberately trip a blind man? Children do such things to the handicapped outsiders among them, but why? Why is it that handicapped children -- even blind children(26) -- seem to draw persecution from other children? Why do we expect our children to stop doing such things as they grow older? Why do adults regard such acts as immoral?
Or do they? The mental image of a small group taunting the village idiot is not so very foreign to us. We can imagine a group of lower-class people laughing at the distress of some poor handicapped wretch. Someone in the group might gain a few laughs by tripping a blind man. The motivation is not clear, but God's law does acknowledge the existence of the temptation. The person who trips a blind person has broken God's law.
Cursing the Deaf
A curse under the terms of the Mosaic law was an act of assault.(27) It still is. Modern societies still have laws on the books identifying curses as illegal, although these laws are rarely prosecuted by victims in our day. The Bible regards a verbal curse as a judicial act with consequences in history, just as it regards a verbal blessing.
This outlook is foreign to modern man, both humanist and pietist. Modern man does not believe that God's blessings or curses are called down on others in history because a representative covenantal agent pronounces blessings or curses. The third commandment is clear: God's name must not be taken in vain. The frame of reference is the misuse of God's holy name -- a boundary violation -- by someone who is not authorized to invoke that name judicially.
Cursing a deaf man is a double violation: calling down God's curses illegitimately, and cursing someone who cannot respond judicially. The deaf man is unaware of the boundary violation. Because God's name has been misused, or at least the violator has judicially misused language, society is at risk. The agent who has been authorized by God to press charges in God's name in an earthly court -- the victim -- is unaware of the violation. This transfers responsibility for invoking a lawsuit from the victim to the witness.
Pressing Charges
The deaf victim must be informed of the infraction, and the blind person must be informed of the identity of the person who tripped him. The blind person cannot press charges. He did not see who tripped him. Similarly, a deaf person cannot respond to a curse against him, since he did not hear it. Through no fault of their own, these victims cannot bring a lawsuit against the evil-doers who have broken God's law.
But God can. So can His lawfully appointed courts if a representative of the victim either informs the victim or, if the victim cannot press charges himself (e.g., a mental defective), the representative presses charges in the name of the victim.
Victims in these cases need spokesmen to act in their behalf. As in the case of a crime, God is the primary victim.(28) The witness serves as a spokesman for both God and the victim. This law makes it plain that God expects others in the community to take action and serve as covenant agents in the name of the victims. How else could such public infractions of this law be prosecuted? A verbal curse is a public act in defiance of God's law. Such public acts must be prosecuted, not just because they are morally wrong -- many immoral acts cannot legitimately be prosecuted under biblical law -- but because they are public. The public character of this form of cursing places the integrity of the society on trial, for the victim cannot hear and respond as God's designated agent. If no witness intervenes to bring formal charges, then God will take action against the evil-doer and the society that has failed to protect the handicapped victim from his persecutor.
The General Legal Principle: Protecting the Weakest Party I argue that verses 13 and 14 are linked. This link is not grammatical. Then what is the link? It is two-fold. First, God wishes to protect the weakest parties in society. Second, there are limits on men's knowledge. Courts are not omniscient. Both of these laws implicitly call for agents to bring civil lawsuits against law-breakers who harm the very weakest members of society. The private prosecutors must have incentives to bring their lawsuits if the evil practices are to be minimized. Because the nature of the crimes is different, the incentives are different: positive in the case of weak but employed workers, negative in the case of fearful witnesses.
To trip a blind person or curse a deaf person is to commit an active assault, either physically or verbally. The law-breaker has actively assaulted a victim who cannot prosecute. This was a public act. Thus, the crime is relatively easy to prove if two witnesses testify that someone committed the crime. The weakest victim is easy to identify.
Not so in the case of an employer who withholds wages beyond one day. First, there is no active assault. There is only a refusal to pay. Second, the very weakest worker is the unemployed person who cannot afford to live without wages. He is being oppressed by both the employer and his employee. Judicially, it is not possible for a court to identify the specific worker who would have taken the job had the employer paid in advance. Therefore, in order to remove this form of indirect oppression from society, God grants to the weaker worker -- the employed worker, who himself is an oppressor (though probably unknowingly) -- the authority to press a covenant lawsuit in the courts on his own behalf. A small portion of the wealth of the weak worker had been transferred to the employer. This wealth transfer can be calculated for purposes of judicial restitution. Because the defrauded worker presses charges, the weakest worker is indirectly protected. The weaker worker, acting on his own behalf judicially and economically, acts as an economic agent for the weakest workers. He probably does not perceive that he is in fact acting as the economic agent of his competition. A more economically sophisticated worker would probably not press charges against his employer, since the delayed payment system excludes his competition, but there are never very many economically sophisticated workers (or anyone else, for that matter). Some workers will press charges, so the oppressive practice will be reduced.
Like the weakest excluded worker, the blind or deaf victim needs a legal agent to press charges. No one benefits economically for serving as this agent. Therefore, God warns the potential agents to press charges. How? By announcing His name: "I am the LORD" (14b). Their fear of God and their desire to uphold His law provide the motivation to press charges, not their personal economic gain. They desire to avoid God's wrath. The threatened sanction is negative.
The reason why these two passages are linked is this: the inability of the courts to protect the weakest victims. The courts can take action only when someone brings a lawsuit against a perceived law-breaker. The weakest victims cannot act on their own behalf in these two types of cases. The excluded worker cannot prove that he was a victim. Similarly, the victimized blind or deaf cannot prove that the crime took place. A biblical court system requires an agent to bring a lawsuit against the law-breaker. These case laws provide the necessary incentives for agents to bring these lawsuits.
Conclusion Grammatically, verses 13 and 14 are not linked; ethically and judicially, they are. The links are: 1) God's protection of the weakest members in society; 2) ways to overcome the limits on men's knowledge, especially the limits on the judges' knowledge. So, the judicial cases are different -- theft vs. public assault -- but the general prohibition is the same: do not harm the weakest parties.
These case laws prohibit the victimization of the poorest and weakest members of the community. The case law in verse 13 deals with theft from economically weak workers and also indirect economic oppression of the most impoverished workers in the community. The most impoverished workers are those who cannot afford to extend credit to their employer. They need to be paid at the end of the work day. The employer is required to do this or else pay them in advance for a longer term of service.
This law proves that Mosaic Israel was not a debt-free society. There were creditors and debtors. A legitimate biblical goal is to reduce long-term debt, but God's civil law does not mandate absolutely debt-free living. Debt is basic to society, for society implies a division of labor. Debt will exist in a division of labor economy until such time as an economically efficient means of making moment-by-moment wage payments becomes universal.
The employer who delays payment to his workers is defrauding them. Verse 13 says this. But to do this, he is inescapably providing an opportunity for some workers to oppress their competitors. The worker who can afford to work without pay for a period is given an opportunity by the employer to steal a job away from a worker so poverty-stricken that he cannot survive without payment at the end of the day. This form of competition is illegitimate, this passage says ("fraud, robbery"). It is unfair competition. God's civil law makes it illegal for an employer to act as the economic agent of any employee against a destitute competitor. There are very few cases of unfair competition specified in the Bible, but this is one of them.
Verse 14 prohibits the active assault on the deaf and blind. We are not to attack defenseless people. The text specifies this. This case law also implicitly condemns all those who sit idly by when others publicly assault these defenseless people. We are required by God to become covenantal agents of those victimized people in our presence who are inherently incapable of defending themselves judicially: the deaf and the blind. We are to act as the ears of the deaf and the eyes of the blind whenever we hear or see others assault them. In short, we are to accept our role as covenantal witnesses. God reminds us of who He is: "I am the LORD" (14b).
The State has no means of imposing sanctions against those who see but do not report the crime, unless it can establish that the silent witnesses were accomplices or conspirators. God's civil law cannot legitimately compel men to do good things. Its role is exclusively to keep people from doing evil things. But God is not bound by the laws that bind the State. He can bring His sanctions against silent witnesses. He can act as an agent of the victims. He will act as their agent on judgment day, and perhaps in the lives of those who refuse to act as His agents in history.
Leviticus 9:14 is not a biblical injunction for the State to become a welfare agent: a dispenser of positive sanctions. The State is not to provide free hearing aids for the deaf or free seeing-eye dogs for the blind. This law legislates against assault (cursing the deaf) and battery (tripping the blind). It implicitly commands witnesses to become legal agents of the defenseless person when someone actively, verbally assaults or physically batters him. Cursing a man is an act of assault; tripping a man is an act of battery. These acts are unquestionably illegal. It is every person's task to defend in court those who are inherently incapable of prosecuting their assailants.
The delay of payment overnight is described in the text as robbery: a crime. A judge can impose a restitution penalty on the perpetrator. There is also a hidden element of oppression: the excluded workers. To become subject to civil law, oppression must be identifuable as a criminal offense. There must be definable criteria that make the act a crime. The indirectly oppressed, excluded worker is not the victim of a crime. Ironically, the one who has oppressed him, the employed worker, is the victim of a crime: delayed payment. Even more ironically, if the oppressor brings a lawsuit against his assailant, the employer, he thereby makes it less likely that he and his employer will be able to oppress the weakest party: the excluded worker. This is why I think the excluded worker or the State acting on his behalf can bring a lawsuit against the employer to have the practice stopped.
If it is immoral to discriminate against the weakest worker, then what of trade union practices that exclude these same low-bidding weak parties -- referred to by union members as "scabs"? Can this case law legitimately be extended to make all exclusionary trade union screening practices illegal?(29) That is, should we define indirect economic oppression in such a way that all exclusionary hiring practices become crimes? If we do, then we violate a fundamental biblical principle: the predictability of the civil law. The law identified as criminal -- robbery -- an easily specified act: delaying payment overnight. Only when such oppressive acts are easily speficied and prosecution becomes predictable by all parties should this case law be extended to the civil law.
But the oppressive character of the contract should be recognized, and no legislation should ever be passed that imitates the "delayed payment" contract, with its exclusionary side effects. This would surely include laws mandating that employers deal with trade unions. The element of State coercion should not be imposed for the benefit of the oppressors, i.e., workers who are members of unions, which gain above-market wages for their members only by excluding other workers from becoming members.
Summary Employers are not to delay the payment of wages.
We are not to curse the deaf and trip the blind.
These laws are linked: 1) God wants society to protect its weakest members; 2) God has established ways for judges to overcome their imperfect knowledge.
The employer-employee relationship manifests the God-human relationship.
The employer provides the employee with the means of productivity and wealth.
The employee is dependent on the employer for his pay.
God pays on time; so should an employer.
The wage earner is in a weaker condition than the employer.
For the employer to delay payment is to demand that the employee extend credit to the employer.
The employee is allowed to accept delayed payment in order to make additional income: interest.
A modern business cannot afford to pay wages daily.
The employer should advance credit to the employee when the work period begins, just as God advances payment to men.
The employee becomes a debtor to his employer rather than the employer becoming a debtor to the employee.
There can be no credit-free, debt-free, division-of-labor economy until moment-by-moment payments are economically possible.
We are to avoid debt contracts that threaten our legal status as free men.
We should avoid debts that might force us into bankruptcy.
Large debts should therefore be collateralized: mortgage, etc.
We are in debt to God; He is not in debt to us.
This law prohibits capital-owning new employees to displace poverty-stricken new employees by means of a delayed-wage system.
The economically weakest potential employee is given grace: prohibiting another worker's competitive advantage.
This law discriminates against stronger workers who can wait for payment.
This law identifies as an exploiter the employer who delays payment.
Economic analysis identifies as a beneficiary of this exploitation the stronger worker who agrees to delayed payments in order to remove competition from weaker workers.
The priestly factor -- providing life and death decisions -- is removed by biblical law from pure supply and demand considerations.
All economic offers are offers for buyers to discriminate (exclude).
Competition: buyers vs. buyers, sellers vs. sellers.
This law prohibits all-or-nothing competition among sellers of labor: no delayed payment of wages.
Levitical reasoning is boundary reasoning: inclusion and exclusion.
It is a form of oppression to exclude the poorest workers by allowing employers to delay paying wages.
The employer who delays paying wages is acting as the economic agent of oppression by the employed worker.
Restitution is capable of being estimated; hence, this is a civil law: a prohibition of immoral activity.
The wage withheld is the item stolen.
The time period per violation (theft) is one day.
Double restitution would be paid for each day's violation.
The payment must be paid to the worker who suffered the delay, not the workers excluded by the policy of delaying payment.
Judges cannot easily identify the excluded workers.
The threat of the penalty helps the judicially invisible worker who might otherwise be excluded.
The principle of protecting the weakest party applies to tripping the blind and cursing the deaf.
Cursing the deaf is an act of assault: a judicial curse.
It is a double violation: 1) the misuse of God's name; 2) the victim cannot hear and therefore cannot prosecute.
The blind person also cannot press charges.
The witness must serve as their spokesman.
Silence by the witness leads to God's curse of the society.
These laws are linked because of the limits on the court's knowledge.
A surrogate must bring charges against the violator: 1) the employed worker; 2) the witness.
The State is not to become a welfare State.
The State must protect the weak against this specific case of unlawful economic exploitation and also assault.
The State may prosecute an employer in the name of an excluded worker if no employee brings charges: the protection of the oppressed.
Legislation extending this case law must retain the element of legal predictability: acts definable tightly as crimes.
This case law should be honored negatively: no civil laws that make mandatory any exclusionary hiring practices, i.e., laws mandating employers to deal with trade unions.
Footnotes:
1. See Chapter 12.
2. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 5: "God's Week and Man's Week."
3. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).
4. By implication, the night laborer is under the same protection: he must be paid before the sun rises. The idea is that he must be paid by the end of the work day.
5. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 23.
6. In the final stages of the German inflation in 1923, workers were sometimes paid cash in the morning. Wives would accompany them to work, take the cash, and rush to spend it on anything tangible before it depreciated during the day. This inflation devastated workers and employers alike. On the daily payment of wages in the second half of 1923, see Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse (London: William Kimber, 1975), pp. 149, 191.
7. It is technically possible today to deposit money electronically into a worker's account on a moment-by-moment basis, just as it is possible for him to spend it on the same basis, but the cost of doing so is too high to make it feasible. This cost constraint will probably change in the near future as computer technology and the cost of using computer networks both decrease. Kevin Kelly, "Cypherpunks, E-money, and the Techniques of Disconnection," Whole Earth Review (Summer 1993).
8. One of these circumstances is found in the book publishing industry. An individual is sometimes paid in advance to write a book manuscript. This is one of the highest-risk transactions in the business world. The best way to keep an author from finishing a manuscript is to pay him in advance. As a publisher, I learned this lesson after much experience.
9. I am reminded of the scene in the film America, America where the suspicious Greek buys passage on a ship to the United States. He holds out his money to the ticket salesman behind the counter, but he refuses to release his grip until the salesman places the ticket in his other hand. They let go simultaneously.
10. This debt always involves common grace; sometimes it also involves special grace. North, Dominion and Common Grace, op. cit.
11. A Christian perfectionist, as a result of reading tracts against fractional reserve banking, once offered me the opportunity to hire him as a permanent indentured servant if I would agree to feed, clothe, and house him on a zero-cash basis. He recognized that Federal Reserve Notes and checking accounts are both money and debt instruments, and he wanted to be totally separated from any contact with either cash or checks. He felt too guilty to continue as a free man. He was willing to become a household slave to someone who was not equally concerned morally about using Federal Reserve Notes or checking accounts, and who would pay him in kind (i.e., goods). In short, he was willing to subordinate himself for life to someone whom he perceived as not being equally moral, so that he himself could live in technical moral purity. He wanted a protective boundary around him, and he was willing to give up his freedom to attain this. But this brought him into conflict with Paul's injunction to indentured servants to take freedom whenever it is offered (I Cor. 7:21).
12. God does sue workers who default on His advance payments. Some are sued in history; all are sued on the day of judgment. Court costs are irrelevant to God.
13. There are also State-run compulsory programs of workers' compensation; any worker who is fired can receive payments from the State. Employers are required to pay taxes into these insurance funds. This is a morally corrupt system that penalizes employers who want fire inefficient workers in order to improve customer service and/or increase profits that can be used to reward its investors. It also subsidizes unemployed workers to stay out of work until the benefits run out.
14. Priestly pricing is based on ability to pay, e.g., the tithe. Economists call this practice price discrimination: one monetary price charged to members of one group; another price charged to members of a different group. The economist's standard explanation for this phenomenon is that there are government-imposed barriers to entry, e.g., licensing. The classic presentation of this view is Reuben A. Kessel, "Price Discrimination in Medicine," Journal of Law and Economics, I (Oct. 1958). I wrote to Kessel in the mid-1970's and suggested the priestly role of physicians as another factor in price discrimination. He wrote back politely and said this had never occurred to him. He did not say that he thought I had discovered anything significant.
A legitimate question is this one: Why do civil governments create such barriers to entry? The political self-interest of the legislators is not the only possible explanation. Legislators and judges seem to recognize the priestly role of physicians. Some kinds of voluntary but life-and-death contracts are not enforceable in the courts, and should not be.
15. By "right," I mean "immunity from legal challenge."
16. Israel M. Kirzner, Perception, Opportunity, and Profit: Studies in the Theory of Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press, 1979), ch. 9.
17. Israel M. Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 159-80.
18. The components of an effective direct-marketing advertisement are the same as the components of biblical hermeneutics and the medieval trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The ad must have a promise (grammar), proof (logic), and persuasion (rhetoric). In 1992, I presented this thesis before two conferences on direct-marketing techniques, and the professionals in attendance told me that they agree with my analysis. Biblical hermeneutics employs the same methodology: grammatico-historical (grammar), theology (logic), and symbol (rhetoric). I presented this thesis at the Colleyville Presbyterian Church, Colleyville, Texas, on June 29, 1992. A tape of this lecture is available from the ICE. On the medieval trivium, see Dorothy Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning" (1947); reprinted in Douglas Wilson, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1991), Appendix A.
19. Economist Walter Williams likes to say that when he married his wife, he discriminated against all other single women. He would not be so naïve as to say that he thereby oppressed all other single women.
20. This fact does not constitute a legitimizing of an open-ended socialism, including some modernized version of medieval guild socialism. Biblical law, not socialist slogans, is the source of our knowledge of such limits on voluntary exchange.
21. On the question of interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility, see North, Dominion Covenant, ch. 4. Cf. Gary North, The Coase Theorem: A Study in Epistemology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992).
22. One more time: the employer gains a small interest return and a small risk-avoidance return. The worker gains the promise of a wage, bears some risk of not being paid, and forfeits a small interest payment. The excluded worker, too poor to accept the contract, gains nothing.
23. If the victim's court costs are not paid by the convicted criminal, very few victims will be able to sue, so the practice of discrimination will not be reduced.
24. Consider how difficult this would be apart from the use of the zero (a decimal point followed by a zero is needed to compute percentages under 10 percent), which came to the medieval West only through contact with Islam. The Arabs in turn learned of it in India. There is no evidence that the zero was known to any culture prior to the ninth century, A.D. -- the West's era of Charlemagne. The Mayans and the Indians discovered it independently or else were in contact with each other.
25. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), XXV:3 (New York: Modern Library, [1906] n.d.), pp. 689-703.
26. Robert V. Hine, Second Sight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 84. He cites the youthful experience of Robert Russell: To Catch an Angel: Adventures in the World I Cannot See (New York: Vanguard, 1962).
27. The curse in this case means "make light," which connotes deliberate humiliation or abuse. Herbert C. Brichto, The Problem of "Curse" in the Hebrew Bible (Philadelphia: Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, 1963), pp. 120-22. James Jordan provided me with this reference.
28. North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 279, 296, 300.
29. Should it also be extended to make it illegal for firms to require job applicants to have college degrees when the jobs, technically speaking, do not require such formal training?
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