The Morality of Income Inequality

Income inequality is one of those pseudo-political issues that no one really thinks is an important issue. If anyone were truly concerned about unequal distributions of income they’d be willing to do something about it. But they aren’t. I’ve never met anyone who earns $40,000 a year express a desire to redistribute half their income to someone making only $20,000 a year so that we can help fix this immoral inequality problem. What people mean when they say that income inequality is a problem is that they think its a problem that someone who makes more than they do. “Income inequality” is merely the politically correct term for covetousness.

Since God considers covetousness important enough to include in his Ten Commandments you’d think we Christians would take it more seriously. Sadly, we’re more likely to justify it as a matter of “social justice” or “concern for the poor” or whatever the fashionable phrase is for taking money from other people and giving it to people we think are more worthy (like us).

But we need to stop this nonsense. Worrying about income inequality, as J. E. Dyer notes, involves us in things the Bible frowns on :

A key reason for that is that “income inequality” is a construct of the human brain. God doesn’t talk about it as a problem. The Bible addresses many social pathologies directly, from the burdens imposed by kings to the societal dangers of slothful young men and wanton women, but has nothing to say about income inequality. His Law assumes that it exists, but contains no requirements to punish it or atone for it. Nor does the Law predict that dysfunction or curses will arise from income inequality, as it does in the cases of arrogance, disobedience, hard-heartedness, and sexual sin.

God addresses the topics of income and wealth as matters of personal virtue, not social morality. The only thing He explicitly says about other people’s incomes and wealth is that we are not to covet them. Jesus goes further than that, implying in the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) that we have no business even noticing other people’s incomes. In the parable, he specifically rebukes the human tendency to compare our wages with the wages of others. He does so, in fact, in the context of an expressly unequal situation in which some workers are paid the same amount for less work. Even in that case, according to the parable, we are not justified in making comparisons and drawing resentful conclusions.

Worrying about income inequality is, inherently, worrying about other people’s incomes, and the Bible frowns upon it.