Hilton Head Island, SC – October 30, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 2:1-5; 6-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures; their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots. – Isaiah 2:7
The mid-eighth century BCE was a boom time in the land of Judah. The Judean Dow-Jones Industrial Average was at 24,853 points one Friday afternoon in 745 in the month of Aviv, and it never again got any higher, though it didn’t go down quickly either. Hedge fund managers were making money faster than they could bank it. The CEOs of the banks had huge town homes on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem and vacations homes on the Mediterranean beaches and also among the date palm trees of Jericho. Times were never better.
Most people were delighted with their national prosperity, but there was one man who was not thrilled. His name was Isaiah, the son of Amoz. However, it wasn’t that he opposed prosperity, per se, but he opposed what he thought it was doing to the communal spirit of the people of Judah. Their values were being distorted, and their relationship with God was being negatively altered because of it.
Isaiah ominously declared, “Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land” (Isa. 5:8). Some sections of suburban Jerusalem had covenants requiring fifteen acre lots so that people wouldn’t be able to see their neighbors’ homes. I trust you realize I am making this up as I go along here, but I also trust that you get the picture I am attempting to paint. As the acerbic writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9).
In the early part of the modern development of Hilton Head Island starting in the early Sixties, most of the original homes were built on the beach in North and South Forest Beach and in Sea Pines. Some were permanent residents, but many people also had second homes here. Then homes were built on the second-, third-, fourth- and fifth rows back from the beach. But they were relatively modest homes, and some of them were almost cottages.
As time went on, homes got bigger, and then bigger and bigger. “McMansions,” we called them. Eventually two or three beachside houses would be purchased and torn down, and a very large home would be built. What was happening on Hilton Head Island was symbolic of what was happening in the USA and around the world. More and more people seemed to have acquired huge amounts of assets, and the castles by the sea were illustrative of that trend.
Affluence doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time: almost always, over many years. Because that is so, its results are not immediately apparent, especially to the great majority of people. The more the affluence is spread around, the more everyone approves of it. But inevitably the distribution of wealth becomes skewed, and it happens under every economic system ever devised, from the most rigid kinds of socialism to the most expansive forms of capitalism. This phenomenon is encapsulated in an old saying which gained currency shortly after the Neanderthals emerged from their caves in Germany, France, and Spain 75,000 years ago, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” they said, and folks have been saying it ever since. There never has been a relatively equal distribution of wealth in any nation under any economic system. In most countries there is a very small percentage of very wealthy people, often a sizeable percentage of middle-income people, and a large percentage of poor people.
In the US, however, virtually everyone with lower incomes than that of the top 1% have declining incomes relative to the top 1%. According to The Times of London, the 62 wealthiest individuals or families in the world have as many assets as the combined wealth of the lower half of the population of the entire world. Twenty-nine of the wealthiest 62 are Americans, as are seven out of the top ten.
Those with gargantuan wealth can invest and increase their wealth much more effectively than people with average wealth, because they have so very much more to invest. Billionaires could never conscientiously spend their all their money on goods or services; they wouldn’t have either the time or the inclination to do so. But they can keep investing it, and they do. It would be foolhardy not to do so, to say nothing of it being very poor stewardship of their wealth.
Victor Fleischer is a law professor at the University of California at San Diego, whose expertise is in tax policy and inequality. In a New York Times article, he was quoted as saying, “We do have two different tax systems, one for normal wage-earners and another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice. At the very top of the income distribution, the effective rate of tax goes down, contrary to the principles of a progressive income tax system.”
People complain about a tax code of 20,000 pages. It doesn’t need to be 20,000 pages for anyone in this room this morning, but it does for most of the people at the very top, who made the campaign contributions to candidates of both parties as an inducement for them to write very complicated and arcane tax laws for people with very complicated and arcane assets.
Here’s an amateur’s proposal for a new income tax system for the USA. Cut the tax code down to a mere hundred pages. Have a graduated tax with several percentages rising up to a maximum of one, three, or five million dollars of income a year. (I will graciously allow Congress to decide the actual amount.) Then charge a flat 90% tax on all income over five million dollars per year. The extremely wealthy will still be able to increase their wealth if they are careful, which by nature almost all of them are. And the enormously increased government revenue shall enable everyone to live more equitably. Needless to say, this idea requires much more discussion than the short paragraph it takes to explain it, but nevertheless it is a somewhat serious proposal.
Months ago The Island Packet had a story in its business section about several new apartment buildings surrounding the southern end of Central Park in New York City. For $250,000,000, which as I calculate it is a quarter of a billion dollars, you can snap up a 23,000 square foot, four-storey penthouse with 16 bedrooms, 17 bathrooms, five balconies, and a massive roof terrace. I daresay you’d be the first person on your block to own such an abode. The very tall, very skinny building presumably gives many of its residents a 360-degree view of Manhattan. That seems like an ingenious joining of house-to-house and floor-to-floor, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell in solitary splendor far above the madding crowd.
“Their land is filled with silver and gold,” said the prophet Isaiah, “and there is no end to their treasures. Their garages are filled with automobiles, and there is no end to the size of their estates.” (Isaiah didn’t actually say that last part.)
If there is too great a disparity between what have become known as the “uber-rich” and everyone else, rich nations have a harder time maintaining widespread social and political solidarity over the long haul. Sooner or later people come along who claim that God is peeved, (the prophets), or that “I alone can fix it,” (the anti-politician politicians). Too great a disparity in wealth invites uprisings or revolutions. When the natives get too restless, all hell is likely to break loose, either from within or without.
Peter Drucker was a management maven years ago who studied businesses and business practices. He said that if CEOs were paid more than twenty times the income of the average workers in a corporation, it would cause company morale to suffer. In Japan the percentage is still close to that, but currently in the USA in the largest corporations, the CEOs make 140 to 350 times as much as the average worker. Not only that, but when large companies fire their CEOs, they give them astronomical amounts of cash and other compensation to depart the head chair in the boardroom. In the past few months, according to USA Today, eight corporations have given a golden boot to eight CEOs, paying out from a high of $358 million to a low of $131 million.
Certain kinds of people, especially prophets and politicians, notice figures like that. They ruminate on such inequities a lot. And they try to figure out how to mitigate the injustice of it all. Back in biblical days, the kings taxed the people, but we don’t know at what percentage. It wasn’t a tithe, or ten per cent, even though there are contemporary politicians who suggest a biblical flat 10% tax for everyone. In the Bible, though, the tithe was used to cover the expenses of the religious establishment, particularly the priests, whose sole vocation it was to sacrifice animals in the temple in Jerusalem. They were forbidden to engage in other gainful employment, although some might question whether killing animals and throwing them on a roaring altar fire is either gainful or a valid form of employment.
It is probably easier for mammoth disparities of wealth to evolve in democracies than in efficiently operating monarchies or autocracies, although there aren’t many examples of monarchies to be found anywhere anymore. But in democracies, the votes of the legislators who make the tax laws can be openly or clandestinely purchased to give large tax breaks to the already-very-wealthy. In the few monarchies still in existence or in the many extant autocracies, the Main Man (or Lady) can charge any taxes at any rates to anyone he/she chooses, and the autocrat can prevent major disparities of wealth, if so inclined, which he/she probably isn’t.
Nevertheless, Isaiah lived in a monarchy under four separate monarchs, as he informed us in the first verse of his first chapter, but houses were being joined to houses and fields to fields. Isaiah, who noticed such things, spoke up, saying God was not pleased. Nor is God pleased in the 21st century that a very small group have far too many assets and far too many people have far too few assets. It is unjust. It is unfair. And furthermore it is politically and sociologically unwise. It creates anger, bitterness, apathy, and/or despondency in the body politic.
According to Robert Putnam of Harvard University, a not-very-bright wealthy student is far more likely to graduate from college than an extraordinarily bright poor student. Further, he states that the 20 richest Americans are worth as much in wealth as the entire lower-half of the American population. (I don’t know how anybody comes up with any of these numbers, but if they support my case, I am happy to repeat them.) Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times wrote that the pharmaceutical industry contributed an average of $272,000 in campaign contributions to all 535 Congressional and Senatorial candidates in 2014. They want the Members of Congress to prevent Medicare from bargaining for lower drug prices. As it is now, the Social Security Administration in effect gratuitously contributes $50 billion to Big-Pharma every year by accepting drug prices that are clearly too high because they are unregulated.
Lord Acton said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Money can’t be far behind power in the Corruption Category. But then, money and power often go hand in hand, don’t they? “Money corrupts, and the more of it anyone has, the more absolutely it corrupts.”
Isaiah was a nudzh more often than not, but at the beginning of the 2nd chapter of his prophecy, he writes one of the most beautiful and optimistic pieces of poetry in the entire Bible. “It shall come to pass in the latter days” (when God will straighten out everything, but when and how no one knows) “that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, …and all the nations shall flow to it….For out of Zion shall go forth the law” (the Torah) “and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He [my italics] shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples” (Isa. 2:1-4; selected lines).
Then Isaiah wrote one of the most lyrical and inspiring verses to be found anywhere in scripture: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (2:4). And that verse is so spectacular that it is also found verbatim in Micah 4:3. Micah was a prophet who was contemporary of Isaiah, and either the one copied the other or God inspired both men to say exactly the same thing, and I will leave that up to you to decide which it is.
What a magnificent vision! Soldiers will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks! There will be no more war, with all the collateral damage, and all the people dead, and all the homes destroyed, and the survivors forced to live on little or nothing for months or years! The Rev. Dr. Andrew Tempelman and I were colleagues on the staff of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago almost fifty years ago. Somewhere Andy had found an old single-shot twelve gauge shotgun, and he had somebody saw the barrel down the middle lengthwise and bend the two barrel pieces into an artistic v-shape, and he hung it on his wall in his apartment at 1350 Lake Shore Drive, and I think he had inscribed in the stock of the shotgun, “Isaiah 2:1.” I remember everything clearly, including his address, except for the “Isaiah 2:4” part, which actually also could have said “Micah 4:3.” But it was a typically Andy Tempelman thing to do, and a splendid symbol of what happens when nations strive to follow the law of God rather than exclusively the laws of human beings apart from God’s Torah.
This sermon is called The Poverty of Rich Nations, but what, more precisely, does that mean? It means that national affluence for any nation inevitably produces a growing percentage of people who are getting poorer and poorer, relative to the small but growing percentage of extremely wealthy people. Very wealthy people will always become more wealthy compared to everyone else, because they have the investments which guarantee that outcome.
But “The Poverty of Rich Nations” also connotes something else. It means that widening wealth disparity creates a national mentality of poverty, because far too many people become poor compared to the few who are very affluent. Furthermore, it makes it more difficult for governments to redress the widening income gap, because tax laws tend to be written by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Unless politicians recognize the problem and all of them are determined to overcome it, rich nations shall continue to have millions of discontented people living in poverty, and millions of middle class citizens envious of the rich, and the poverty of rich nations shall continue until the discontent brings them down.
So what was Isaiah’s solution for overcoming this problem? “Come now, let us reason together, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord” (Isaiah 1:18; 2:3).