20 OVERCOMING POVERTY A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass (Deut. 8:9).
This description appeared in a passage devoted to the dominion. It related to Israel's inheritance of the land, but its ethical intention was universal: "Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him" (Deut. 8:6). It was not a seed law or land law.
This description of a land without scarcity seems consistent with the sabbatical year of release from debt: "At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the LORD'S release. Of a foreigner thou mayest exact it again: but that which is thine with thy brother thine hand shall release; Save when there shall be no poor among you; for the LORD shall greatly bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it" (Deut. 15:1-4). But it seems inconsistent with Deuteronomy 15:11: "For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land." God's affirmation that they would eat bread without scarceness -- the abolition of poverty -- did not negate the sabbatical year law, which implied that this law would cease when there was no more poverty in the land. But He also promised that there would always be poverty in the land. How can all this be sorted out biblically?
Biblical Scarceness vs. Economic Scarcity The word translated here as "scarceness" occurs only once in the Old Testament. It is derived from a Hebrew word, miskeluth, meaning poverty, which is found only in Ecclesiastes. "Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king, who will no more be admonished" (Eccl. 4:13). "Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard" (Eccl. 9:15-16). Miskeluth in turn derives from the Hebrew word translated as "folly": siklooth. This word is also confined exclusively to verses in Ecclesiastes, such as in Ecclesiastes 2:13: "Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness." Siklooth is derived from sawkal': silliness. "And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not kept the commandment of the LORD thy God, which he commanded thee: for now would the LORD have established thy kingdom upon Israel for ever" (I Sam. 13:13).
By tracing the origins of these words, we see a connection: scarceness, poverty, folly, silliness. The essence of silliness is that men refuse to keep God's commandments, as Samuel told Saul. Obedience brings wealth. This is the core meaning of Moses' description of the Promised Land. The land contains a sufficient supply of scarce economic resources to enable a covenant-keeper to eat bread. This concept is different from the economists' concept of scarcity.
The economist defines scarcity in terms of price. At zero price, the demand for a scarce economic resource will be greater than its supply. This was surely not what Moses had in mind: ". . . a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass" (Deut. 8:9b). Any expenditure of labor is a payment. The copper of Israel was not obtainable apart from labor.(1)
The Promised Land was not outside of history and its cursed scarcity. It was a place with sufficient resources that a folly-avoiding person who obeyed God's commandments would not suffer poverty. David observed: "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread" (Ps. 37:25). Poverty in Israel would be abnormal for covenant-keepers if Israel remained faithful to God. This wealth principle was not confined to Mosaic Israel.
The Ultimate Resource The ultimate resource is not human creativity, contrary to Julian Simon's book.(2) Rather, it is God's covenant. Not creativity as such but adherence to God's law is what brings forth the positive creativity that sustains long-term economic growth. Human creativity can sometimes be perverse, and it then brings forth not wealth but poverty. Warfare is sometimes such a counter-productive endeavor.
Covenant-keeping is the key to wealth. It is the wealth formula. A society does not need resources other than liberty, a willingness to work hard and wisely in terms of God's moral standards, and some way to transport products to and from the world outside. The tiny community of Hong Kong since 1945 has become a formidable economic competitor in several fields, most notably in textiles and financial services.(3) The United States government has long been pressured by American textile and clothing manufacturers to legislate import quotas against clothing exported by this geographically tiny (a little over 400 square miles) society of six million hard-working people,(4) so competitive are Hong Kong's manufacturers. Hong Kong has almost no natural resources. It has to import at least 90% of everything it consumes. Only one-seventh of its land is arable.(5) Its only natural resource of any consequence is its harbor. Meanwhile, other parts of the world are awash in natural resources, but they are also awash in envy, crime, government regulations on the economy, and present-oriented people who choose not to save. These societies are marked by their poverty.
Israel's Natural Resources
Israel had many natural resources. It also had access to the Mediterranean Sea. It was "A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey" (Deut. 8:8). The threat to Israel's prosperity was not the threat of natural resource depletion. God did not warn them to use civil government coercion to conserve resources. He warned them against forgetting where they had received these resources:
Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage (Deut. 8:11-14).
Covenantal forgetfulness would eventually produce covenantal faithlessness. This would lead to God's corporate negative sanctions against them (vv. 19-20). If they enjoyed the gifts without remembering and worshipping the Giver, then their prosperity would not survive. It was God's covenantal administration that would enable them to prosper in the Promised Land.
Land and Labor The list of resources emphasized agriculture, herding, and mining. These were traditional occupations in the ancient world, along with seafaring, trade, and textiles. The Promised Land's geography offered all of them. The economist generally refers to these resources as land.(6) The Promised Land was filled with resources. The Israelites could therefore look forward to prosperity. They were not expected by God to believe in Hong Kong economics: compounding creativity that makes land valuable mainly as a consumer good rather than land that supplies raw materials. Even today, Hong Kong's economic success is almost beyond the willingness of university-educated people to understand, accept, or believe. This was especially true prior to 1980. As Rabushka wrote in 1979, "One can, I think, count the number of American economists who study Hong Kong's political economy on the fingers of one hand, or at most two."(7)
The idea that widespread prosperity can be attained without the natural resource of land is not readily believed. This was especially true before Bill Gates became the richest man in America at age 30 by owning and improving software code. To go from about $50,000 in 1981 to $36 billion in 1997 by means of magnetic ones and zeros embedded on pieces of plastic -- plus the ability to persuade millions of buyers that these inexpensive pieces of plastic are useful -- would have appeared impossible in 1981. Today, however, creating this kind of personal wealth seems possible only by doing highly creative things with magnetic ones and zeros.
Nevertheless, a great deal has changed in people's thinking since 1980. This change accelerated rapidly among the West's intellectual elite after the highly popular (in the Western media, but not in the USSR) Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev publicly admitted the collapse of the Soviet economy in 1989, which in fact had not collapsed at all, since it had never been sufficiently productive to have collapsed. The Soviet Union had always been little more than a Third World country, i.e., dependent on government aid and loans from Western banks. It had an insane economic system, a fact made hilariously clear in Leopold Tyrmand's 1972 book, The Rosa Luxemburg Contraceptive Cooperative. Communist nations' poverty had been visible to anyone who visited them with open eyes and no socialist presuppositions, i.e., people other than Western intellectuals.(8) What collapsed in 1989 was Western intellectuals' faith in the productivity of the State's direct ownership of the means of production. This collapse was seen within a few months in America's book stores: $24.95 books written by Marxist college professors were being sold in discount bins for a dollar or two. After the failed Communist coup in late August of 1991, such books became very difficult to find except for a few titles in university book stores, where tenured Marxist professors who pretend that their worldview hasn't become a joke, even among their liberal academic colleagues, still assign them to students who have no way to escape. Yet new Marxist book titles had filled whole bookcases annually prior to 1989.
The Wealth Formula
What God told Israel was this: the maintenance of the kingdom grant was conditional. They had to keep God's commandments. He did not tell them that He would miraculously add new supplies of iron and copper if they proved to be obedient. He would multiply them and their flocks. He would multiply their vines. They would get wealthier, step by step. The heart of this system of economic growth was the covenant: law, positive corporate sanctions, and compound economic growth. God gave them the wealth formula. They did not adopt it. This had to wait until the late eighteenth century. When men at long last accepted it, they entered into the world of compound economic growth, where growth in output of two percent per year for two centuries brings personal wealth beyond the dreams of kings in 1800. Computer technology has converted silicon -- sand -- into wealth beyond anything ever dreamed by the ancient and medieval magicians and alchemists. But the modern world has reversed the covenantal imagery of blessing. "That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies" (Gen. 22:17). God views sand as cheap and children as valuable. The modern world sees children as a liability and sand as an asset.(9) This is why the modern world is headed for judgment. A good, old fashioned plague would change modern man's imputation of economic value. So would the bankruptcy of government-funded pension plans.
What the Land Might Lack Trade is the voluntary, non-coercive means by which a person who has more of some item than he wants, compared to how much he wants what someone else has, is able legally to get his hands on the other person's goods. Each person enters into an exchange believing that he will be better off after the exchange.
This is as true statistically of nations as of individuals. Residents of a nation that lacks some resource can buy it from residents in another nation. For example, in the late 1970's, Hong Kong imported 85 percent of its food and exported 90 percent of its manufactures.(10) Meanwhile, some nation grew the food that it sold to Hong Kong. Hong Kong residents wanted food more than extra clothing; the other nation's residents wanted clothing more than extra food. Hong Kong was in effect manufacturing food; its trading partner was in effect growing clothing. The same sort of arrangement categorizes trade between the United States and Japan.(11)
It was not necessary that God fill the Promised Land with every conceivable natural resource. It was only necessary that He give them His law and the grace to obey it, which allows men's creativity to flourish. This creativity is the basis of most economic growth. Raw materials have always been available. What makes them valuable is men's knowledge of productive, consumer-satisfying things to do with them. What makes them worth searching for and digging up is the income potential provided by other men with other things to exchange. He who has the productive skills that produce the finished products that consumers desire to buy will not lack anything in whatever land God places him, but only for as long as there is freedom.
Conclusion The Promised Land was not a land literally flowing with milk and honey. It was a land that possessed great advantages, not the least of which was its location on a widely used trade route. It had minerals. It had room for sheep. It had a climate fit for agricultural production. It had not yet been stripped of its fertility by millennia of ecological exploitation and neglect.
The key to prosperity in the land of Israel was covenantal faithfulness, not government-planned resource conservation. To continue to eat bread without scarceness, Israel would have to avoid the folly of covenant-breaking. The land was bountiful, which was appropriate for an inheritance. But the land was to be understood as a manifestation of God's grace. Subordination follows grace; law follows subordination; sanctions follow law; and an inheritance either multiplies, stagnates, or contracts in terms of men's sanctions and God's. For those who kept the covenant, the land would lack nothing, even as Hong Kong lacks nothing. When a nation is productive, it can buy whatever it does not have. When God said "thou shalt not lack any thing in it," He did not mean that the land contained everything they needed. It would contain the people of the covenant. Covenantal faithfulness, not minerals and climate as such, would enable them to escape the burden of poverty.
Footnotes:
1. The King James translators always translated the Hebrew word for copper as brass, an alloy of copper and zinc.
2. Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).
3. I am reviewing this passage in August of 1997, a few weeks after political authority over Hong Kong was transferred by Great Britain to Communist China.
4. In 1945, about 600,000 lived there. Alvin Rabushka, Hong Kong: A Study in Economic Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 11.
5. Ibid., p. 12.
6. In this technical sense, the sea is land. Because of its liquid status, the sea and rivers present problems for assigning ownership. That which flows is difficult to isolate; that which cannot be isolated is difficult to own and disown. It is this problem which leads to pollution, both liquid and air-borne: using water and air as free resources to reduce production costs.
7. Rabushka, Hong Kong, p. 2.
8. Sylvia R. Margulies, The Pilgrimage to Russia: The Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners, 1924-1937 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
9. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973. Two years later, beachfront property in southern California began to soar in value even faster than other southern California real estate did. Sand was now seen as being both scarce and desirable. A beach bum's lifestyle -- clinging, irritating sand and blinding sun, with its cancer-causing, wrinkle-producing, "skin like leather by age 35" tanning -- became the lifestyle of choice for present-oriented rich people. They became willing to pay extreme price premiums for truly mediocre housing to gain easy access to this unproductive, responsibility-avoiding lifestyle. I grew up in that once middle-income environment, 1953-59, and was happy to leave. The now middle-aged kid brother of one of my best friends in high school remains one of the ever-popular Beach Boys, still singing for Rhonda to help him. But for me, "Surf's up!" meant "I'm gone!"
10. Rabushka, Hong Kong, pp. 2-3.
11. See Gary North, "Growing Toyotas, Manufacturing Soybeans," The Freeman (Jan. 1993).
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