Money and the "value of a person."

And here we come to the third myth that must be given up if one is to have a Christian attitude toward money: the myth that somehow one's income, or the money one can get for his services, is a reflection of the "objective value" of the service, and indirectly of the person who is performing it. Income is supposed to be a measure, somehow, of human dignity.

This kind of materialism is extremely prevalent in our world; and it perverts the notion of what money is and makes a mockery of it. People demand enormous incomes, not because they have any intention of doing anything with the money, but just to show that they are "worth that much" to the people who pay these incomes. Pete Rose, the present manager of the Cincinnati Reds, demanded while he was playing baseball some years back a salary of millions of dollars a year, because, as he said in effect, he was the best baseball player in the business, and he wasn't going to get a salary less than the top one in the business.

I hasten to say that I don't think that it is morally wrong for someone like Pete Rose to demand such an exorbitant salary and take it if he can get it; because no one has to watch the Reds play baseball; and if they don't want to pay the higher price for tickets, then they can spend their money on something they value more; and if Pete prices himself out of the market, then he just doesn't play baseball--as almost happened a couple of years ago, upon which his asking price came down.

I will get into supply and demand shortly; but at the moment, what I want to stress is that the Christian is simply not interested in his "value as a person," especially in comparison to the "value" of other people, least of all in this "value" expressed in such a way that you can put a number on it--as if our personhood could be bought and sold. This is what Marx sees as the evil of capitalism, this business of assessing the "value" of a person because the person is defined as "the one who is defined by what he does to be useful for others."

Thus, the housewife, who wishes to be a housewife, and who works for no income at all, is not degraded, unless we take the "value" of herself or the "value" of her service as how much money she can command by it. But insofar as she is Christian, she is simply not interested in "how much" she is "worth" to the family; in the first place, she is necessary to it rather than "valuable"; and in the second place, what the members of the family think of her services is relevant to her only insofar as she is trying to make them happy, not in trying to look good in their eyes.

Similarly, the person who is working and whose salary is less than the person who is doing "equal work" and equal work not as well beside him is not, if he is Christian, going to be interested in what his salary is in comparison with the other person's, but in what his salary is in comparison with the income he needs to live according to the goals he has set for himself. This, I think, is the economic lesson of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, whose general lesson is that one should not be comparing oneself to others, but to what the Master is giving oneself in relation to one's own needs and desires.

In fact, this Christian attitude can help solve a severe problem in our economic reality nowadays. In the first place, the economic realities of "equal pay for equal work" (which in practice means "equal job description" and has little to do with equal productivity, equal effort, or other such inequalities) has meant, now that women have entered the work force in large numbers, not that women's salaries have risen to meet men's, but that men's salary increases have slowed down so that they have dropped in the direction of the women's.

The result is that it is increasingly difficult to maintain a reasonable standard of living on one salary. Now, both partners in a marriage have to work. If the family has many children, then the amount of "disposable income" (that used for goals rather than necessities) becomes smaller and smaller. For those who would answer that "you have the choice of having or not having children," I would counter that children are not like compact disk players or computers: things that are "chosen" to advance one's own goals in life. They are not economic values, leading to ends in oneself, and must not be categorized with such ends. Whether to have children and how many to have involves economic considerations, to be sure, and rational thought, and must not be left up to "God will provide" and irrational sexuality; but the children themselves must not be looked at as a kind of "economic value" that is chosen or rejected in terms of how they fit into one's life style.

Thus, salaries, and especially minimum salaries, should be adjusted in terms of how many people are to be supported on the salary, not in terms of what "the job" in the abstract is "worth" to the employer. Money is not a "measure of value," really; it is a means of exchange of freedom. And if a single person receives the same amount of money as a person who must support six people, then the single person has the freedom to go to Europe, while the other has no freedom at all, since everything he earns is used up just keeping everyone breathing.

I don't want to spend a lot of time on the economic analysis behind this, which I have gone into in my book on economic ethics. But briefly, it is this: First, those "absolute values" such as the "value of life" or the "value of honesty" are not "values" in this economic sense, but aspects of reality which must be respected. I think it is a mistake to call them "values," as if they were in the same class as economically valuable objects.

Now in the economic sense of what is "valuable," there is no such thing as the "objective value" of any object or service, simply because a "value" is a means toward someone's goal, and so is relative to the goal, which is subjectively created. Goals are ranked in importance in a given person's mind insofar as he considers which goals he will give up or postpone in order to achieve others. Values (the things that lead to goals) are ranked by the person according to two criteria: (a) how important the goal is that they lead to, and (b) how efficiently they get you there.

Thus, what one person considers valuable (e.g. a compact disk player) another may consider of no value at all: he is not interested in what it can do for him. Or one person may consider the player of much greater value than another, who sees that it can make the sound clearer, which would be nice; but not as nice as having a good steak dinner once a week for the next few weeks.

So from the buyer's point of view, the value of an object varies greatly, from zero to the most valuable of all values. There is no "real value" it has, because the goal it leads to is not a goal for anyone who does not choose to have it as a goal.

We are talking about values, now, not necessities; that is for the next section; values lead to freely-chosen goals; necessities must be had, or one cannot live even a minimally human life. With this distinction in mind, there is simply no such thing as the "real value" of something, even from the buyer's point of view.

And from the seller's point of view, the value of the product or service is always the value of his service. And this in turn is what he could be doing with his time if he were not performing the service (either the direct service or the service of making and supplying the product to the buyer)--it is what he is giving up in order to supply the value to the buyer.

But of course, what the seller is giving up depends on what his freely chosen goals are, which he coud now be pursuing, and they vary from seller to seller. One seller is giving up a symphony concert; another is giving up beer and television; but both are providing the same service to the buyer. Thus, the seller-value of the service is not something that is "objectively there" in the product or service either; it is no more the "real" value than any given buyer's assessment of its value is the "real" value.

But then what is the real value of the product or service? It has none.

But then what is the price? The price is the compromise between the buyer's assessment of the value and the seller's assessment of the value. The seller knows how much he has given up in providing the product--the cost of the materials and so on plus his time--and this gives him a "floor" beneath which he is selling at a loss; the buyer knows how important the goal this product leads to is in relation to other goals; and so this gives him a ceiling above which he will spend his money for something else.

Between these extremes, the buyer and seller must come to an agreement, one offering a certain amount of money or demanding a certain amount, and the other accepting or rejecting, depending on the view each has of where the floor or ceiling is, and how far one should be above or below it to satisfy both parties.

When the price is agreed on, this does not mean that the price reflects the "real" value of the product; the buyer in all probability would have been willing, if pressed, to pay more, and the seller, if the haggling had been severe enough, would have taken less. It is just the compromise of the moment.

That's all well and good in haggling between individuals, but what of the "market price"? This, to make a long story very short, is because of manufacturing, where huge numbers of products are produced, and haggling over each item is not possible. Hence, the seller tries to figure out what price enough people are willing to pay so that he can sell all the products he makes; he then names that price and offers the product on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

Thus, this price is not the "real" value of the product or service either; it is simply the seller's setting of some figure above his floor such that he can sell all he makes, based on his guess as to the fact that there are in fact twenty million people out there who are willing to pay that price--who value it this much.

But this is subjective on two different levels; it is the seller's subjective evaluation of the number of buyers who have subjectively evaluated the product at this level. And ten tons of subjectivity do not weigh in at one ounce of objectivity. The price of a product or service does not reflect any real value of that product or service. It only apparently does so, because it's on the tag, and if you want it, this is the price you have to pay, or do without it.

Competition affects the price of things; but not even competition and supply and demand makes the price reflect any real value that the objects have. But let me not prolong this.

So the fact that money apparently measures the "value" of something (but doesn't, really), is part of its fallenness; and the Christian must see through this and accept money for what it is: a means toward achieving one's goals, not a means of assessing relative human dignity.

Note that what this analysis implies for businessmen trying to set prices on things is that there is no necessity for setting the price as high as possible, consistent with selling all that is made, or with working full time. One knows the amount of money that is necessary for oneself to live the kind of life one wants to live; and beyond that, the money made is superfluous. Why, then, deprive the potential buyers of this extra amount of money just because you can do it and they will not be unwilling to pay it?

The point of demanding or asking for money is that the amount should be based on what the money is, not how much you can get. And what the money is is the ability to do something, using the freely offered services of others. Well, what do you want to do with it? If you are already doing all that you want to do, then all you want is enough money to enable you to keep doing it.

So there is nothing either economically unsound or immoral or anti-Christian in a person's simply making a "decent living" by his business, even though if he engaged in aggressive marketing, he could make more. Why make more? There is nothing wrong with trying to make more, if you have something definite you want to do with the "more." But if not, then, as John advised the soldiers, "be content with your pay."

It is, in other words, permissible to enjoy life in this economic world we live in; not to be guilty for having possessions that make your activities the kinds of activities you find most proper to yourself, and not to be running the ratrace of always trying to get more, to "advance" to levels you have no interest in, and so to wind up doing what you hate so that you can get an income that gives you more money than you know what to do with. Leave that sort of thing to the modern pagans; they think because they can afford two Ferraris that they are really somebody; if it makes them happy to be able to put themselves above others because of this, then don't begrudge them the little satisfaction they have in all their frenetic striving. But you do what it is you want to do, first and foremost, you make your contribution to the world as the person you really are; and if your income is small, and you are doing what is your real activity, then what more can you ask?

Once again, the Christian can be happy in a way that the atheist can only with difficulty. The atheist can be happy too in this sense, if he knows himself and what his goals are, and does not compare his "worth" with others in economic terms. But the Christian, not being interested in his "worth" to others anyhow, has a tremendous advantage over him.