“When good people triumph, there is great happiness, but when the wicked get control, everybody hides” - Pr 28:12

On January 11, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered what some on the political left have called the greatest speech of the century. It was an important speech because in the words of political science professor John Marini it is “probably the most far-reaching attempt by an American president to legitimize the…welfare state, based on the idea that government must guarantee social and economic security for all.”

When Roosevelt spoke to the nation that January night, he was looking beyond the end of the threat of gangster rule posed by Nazi Germany during World War II. “I do not think that any of us Americans,” he said, “can be content with mere survival. … The one supreme objective for the future…can be summed up in one word: Security. And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security…”

Roosevelt understood what he was advocating was a departure from the limited role of government established by the Constitution: “This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights… As our Nation has grown… [w]e have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security… People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

The result of this ‘new deal,’ according to Marini, was the creation of a powerful welfare state. Roosevelt believed that “selfish behavior on the part of corporations must give way to rational social action informed by a benevolent government.” To solve the problem of what Roosevelt saw as economic tyranny, “government itself would become a tool of benevolence working on behalf of the people.” And it did.

However, in his First Inaugural Address on January 20, 1981, President Ronald Reagan attempted to turn the tide. He argued that government cannot guarantee economic security without usurping American liberty: “…the full power of centralized government was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments…can’t control the economy without controlling people.”

While most of us would I think agree that government ought to be the servant of the people and not the other way around, there is still the very real problem of economic tyranny. Take for example Circuit City’s recent decision to lay off 3400 employees, which had “nothing to do with [employees’] skills or whether they were a good worker or not.” Instead, “it was a function of their salary relative to the market.” In other words, Circuit City, which is not alone in this practice, is firing its people in order to replace them with workers who will make less. Surely, corporations have a social responsibility beyond the bottom line.

In fact, as Charles Colson points out, “Michael Novak has written about what he calls the ‘three-legged stool’ that makes democratic capitalism possible: economic freedom, political freedom, and moral restraint. Take away any of these three and the system collapses.”

My point? I would suggest to you that the Christian faith’s teachings about the necessity for moral restraint in the marketplace, rooted in the Old Testament concerns for social justice and human dignity, provided capitalism with a moral dimension that it could not provide for itself. This, in my view, makes Christianity’s diminished cultural influence all the more troubling and the restoration of its influence all the more urgent. “When good people triumph, there is great happiness, but when the wicked get control, everybody hides.”

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