A biblical approach to attaining equality does not entail squashing the mighty, but rather, in strengthening the weak...
‘Children Are Not Deserving Solely Because They Got Lucky and Came From a Rich Womb’: Confronting the Argument Against Inherited Wealth
R. ALBERT MOHLER, JR.
But now let's turn to something very different. I'm speaking to you from Scotland today. And even as I left London, England and York to go north into Scotland, I picked up The Observer, which is that left-wing London newspaper, largely associated with Labor Party and in many ways with socialism, and found a comment and analysis piece that ran in Sunday's edition of the paper by Will Hutton, the columnist.
Here's the title, the headline, "Passing on Great Wealth to our Children spells the End of Society. Just Ask Aristotle." Now, the political cause of this is the fact that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called for an elimination of the death tax. So the Labor Party and the left in England, they're very addicted to virtually every kind of tax. They want to see more taxation, particularly of those they identify as the rich. The reason why the death tax is vastly unpopular in Great Britain is because there are a lot of people who say, "Look, this is not just about plutocrats. I'm afraid this is going to hit my hard-earned savings, which I was trying to pass on to my own children." Well, what's really interesting in this article is how you have this kind of socialist thinking that is reflected in the fact that as Will Hutton writes, "He's calling for a state that will basically end the possibility of transferring wealth on generation to generation."
Now, before I take one further step in this analysis, let me point out that that's directly contrary to the wisdom of the Old Testament that suggests that it is a responsibility of one generation to pass on to the next generation. As a matter of fact, the Biblical worldview says we are to have a multi-generational perspective that should affect our moral behavior, it should affect our financial behavior, it should affect our work ethic.
Where the water hits the wheel in this article is found late in the first column when he says this, "Children are not deserving solely because they got lucky and came from a rich womb," not an argument accepted by today's conservative right and their media outriders. "As one Daily Telegraph," that's a conservative paper, "one Daily Telegraph columnist wrote late last week, inveighing against inheritance tax, 'At the stroke of a HRMC pen, the tax commission, the fruits of a lifetime of love and labor is diverted to a propagate and ungrateful state. No wonder the levy is so bitterly resented'." And then he goes on to say, "This pernicious tax should just be abolished." That's the conservative position. He wants the opposite.
But what I want to point to is the sentence in which he said, "Children are not deserving solely because they got lucky and came from a rich womb." Now, you know that's one of those arguments that it might strike a bit of populist outrage on the populist left. Children shouldn't win the lottery simply because they had rich parents. But I want you to understand a couple of definitional issues. Number one, what does rich mean in this case? Morally by the way, that's a problematic statement regardless of how much money you're talking about.
But it's important to recognize that as socialism looks at this particular question and big state government looks at this particular question, you're really talking about middle America or middle Britain in this case. You're talking about families, couples that work hard to buy real estate, to buy a home and to improve that home and to save so their children can go to college and perhaps they can be very careful in the stewardship of, say, retirement funds and there'd be something not only for their retirement, something left over for their children and grandchildren. That's very much an Old Testament pattern.
But as you're looking at this, you recognize that this is bigger than an inheritance tax. I want us to look at the moral argument that is made by this left-wing columnist in this liberal newspaper and understand what we're really looking at. Again, "Children are not deserving because they got lucky and came from a rich womb." I want you to note that recently we've seen some other arguments which come down to this. Children shouldn't be privileged simply because they come from an intact family with a mother and a father married to one another. Children should not be privileged merely because they have parents who give them devoted attention. And in one argument that came out during COVID I covered on The Briefing, you had people saying it's unjust that some children have parents who are helping with, say, home instruction under the lockdown of COVID. Those children have an advantage over other children, and that advantage is unfair.
That, again, is the violation of a biblical logic. We need to understand something. The Bible is big on justice, but the justice that the Bible is very clear and affirming is a justice that is rooted in obedience to God's law and obedience to creation order. And that means actually that we are very concerned about children who do not have the advantages that come with having a mother and a father in the home. We're very concerned. We're very concerned with children who do not have enough to eat or have other disadvantages. And clearly, we are a society that has tried over the course of, say, especially the last century, to develop and fund vast social spending programs to try to make up for brokenness in families and brokenness in communities and brokenness in finances.
But here's something else that's just clearly Biblical, and this is deeply rooted in the Christian worldview in the principle which we come back to again and again known as subsidiarity. That is the Christian theological and moral principle that says when something is broken at the most basic level, nothing at a higher or more abstract level can really fix it.
Now, that doesn't mean that those higher level structures don't have a responsibility, but they can't fix it. If you have a broken home, society may have very good intentions, but it cannot raise a child. If you have parents who are not engaged or one parent in a home, and we talked about the two-parent privilege issue as it's been coming out in the media discussion over a book that's engendering a lot of controversy, but as I pointed out just a few weeks ago, even days ago now, there are some people even on the left who are saying that the math here is not adding up. You simply look at the numbers of children who are falling behind educationally and you look at one parent homes versus two-parent homes, there's a very clear pattern here. But this is where the left says, "Okay, so the child who is ahead because of the investment of his or her parents, that should be a privilege that is checked by society."
A recent proposal I saw was talking about college admissions and said, "Colleges need to watch how many children they are accepting." And by children here, I mean young people, 17 year olds who are being approved for admission and acceptances into these colleges and universities because the disproportionate of those who are doing well in the tests and who are able to write compelling essays for college acceptance, they tend to come from very stable, middle-class families with a mother and a father married to one another. Well, we as Christians understand those things really do go together. That's not some kind of capitalist conspiracy. This is actually creation order. This is actually obedience to the pattern that God has given us.
Now, again, you look at the Old Testament, guess what? There's also a concern for the widow and the orphan and the alien in your midst. The Bible doesn't say that we as a society, we as a church, we as Christians have no responsibility for those who are disadvantaged. But here's where Christians need to press back and say, "Here's what we want. We want every child to have that same privilege." The answer from the left, and no one expressed this more pithily than Ronald Reagan when he was president of the United States, and he told the story. This isn't an exact analogy, but he told the story, and I'll never forget him telling it. He said that there's a difference between an American standing on a curb when a limousine passes and a Soviet citizen standing on the curb when the limousine passes. He said, "The difference is this. The Soviet sees the limousine pass and says, 'No one should ride in a car like that'." He said, "The American looking at the limousine passes said, 'Everyone should ride in a car like that'."
It's not an exact parallel, but it is to say that we as Christians want to strengthen where there is weakness. We want to shore up where there is the need for the defense of the family and for the defense of marriage. And yes, we want to help children who are disadvantaged, but the way to do that is not in the name of social engineering to try to artificially reduce the advantage or the so-called privilege, to use the common language, in the culture these days of children who come from intact two-parent homes where you have parents investing mightily in their children. The way this works shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
One of the perplexing realities of our age is that so many on the cultural left actually think that some abstraction like society or some particularity like government can resolve these issues and make all things well. This is where Christians understand government has a responsibility, but the one thing government is incompetent to do is to raise a child. Government has a responsibility, but what it is unable to do is in the truest sense, educate a child. And going back to that story in which you had this figure in the left arguing that we should simply eliminate inheritance from one generation to another, has anyone paused to think about what that would do to the work ethic in the United States of America? Why should you work so hard if your children and grandchildren will never have the, yes, strength and benefit and advantage of your labor?
I think the 20th century should be enough to prove what a society that follows that kind of logic eventually looks like. Just think the Soviet Union in 1988. And if that doesn't scare you, I don't know what will.
