I try to keep this blog as free from politics as possible, which may be hard to believe given its title refers to the political spectrum, but nonetheless I do try. Again having said that, a motivation to set this up was friends of mine who are Conservative voters suggesting to me it was the "Christian" thing to do, much to my consternation.
I think the main reason I try and keep away from politics and government action is that I don't think that governments should be forcing people to do "Christian" things; so I don't think abortion should be outlawed, and I think all other government actions that discriminate unfairly against people made in God's image is wrong.
I believe Christians vote Conservative because they believe that small governments better enable people to get on in life; bigger governments stifle effort and creativity, crowding out small business and entrepreneurship. But this involves a healthy level of confidence in market mechanisms to deliver, and I believe too high a view of the goodness of man - particularly too high for Christians aware of how sinful man is.
Why do I say this when from Adam Smith onwards, economists have espoused the virtues of the market in mitigating man's own greed and enabling it to contribute towards the greater good? Because there are plenty of situations in which the price mechanism fails. It doesn't need government intervention for the price mechanism to stop doing its job of revealing relative scarcity and relative abundance, it just needs unscrupulous men and women.
I've mentioned in previous posts how a "nice equilibrium" where everyone does a good honest job and hence everyone trusts everyone to do a good honest job - the incentive is there for someone to deviate and do a bad job, and get out while they can (and even if they fail, their actions will succeed in destroying the good equilibrium since now people know with non-zero probability there are some bad people about).
All this by means of an introduction to what I was planning to write about - recent Tory announcements regarding the economy. In particular repeated comments on the 50% tax band, and also recent talk about abolishing all employment protection. The bottom line of these is a trust that despite bosses being unscrupulous, the end product is a much better, clean, shining functioning economy because of competition - the bad bosses, the nasty ones, will be weeded out and left on the scrapheap if they don't become nice shiny bosses.
If I sound a little sarcastic there, it's because I don't buy it. Those proposing it probably think it has basic economics on side, but it may do: Very classical economics that hasn't considered much recent economic study into areas such as industrial organisation, game theory and behavioural economics. There's no point in me repeating what Chris Dillow writes about much more elegantly, but if you want some demolitions, here are a couple.
Now the question is, as Christians, what should we be doing? James 1:27 says "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
I seriously wonder how scrapping the 50% tax rate on those earning above £150k (polluted by the world?!), and stripping away all employment rights of workers (usually pretty low paid - widows and orphans in their disress?!), counts here. The hardest of hard Tories would say "Charity should do the hard work", yet this again ignores some basic economics: If there's a positive externality (net social benefits greater than net private ones) the market (charity) will underprovide it. As was evident before the Welfare state.
Of course, I'm proposing little positive in this post, just getting some things off my chest. The main one being this idea that a small government is what we need, and that it's somehow more Christian, if that were possible.
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