#STRask - Do Christian Business Owners Have a Moral Responsibility to Provide a Livable Wage?

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

Questions about whether Christian business owners should provide a livable wage, whether doing a corporate sponsorship that promotes one’s business contradicts Matthew 6:3, and whether the parable of the rich fool refutes America’s approach to retirement.   Do Christian business owners have a moral responsibility to provide a livable wage? Would doing a corporate sponsorship with an organization we have been working with and financially supporting contradict Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:3 about giving in secret since part of the motivation would be to promote our business? Is the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12:13–21 a direct refutation of America’s approach to retirement?

Welcome. This is Amy Hall. I'm here again with Greg Kokel to take your questions on the hashtag STRASK podcast. And we're going to start today with a question from DJ. Do Christian business owners have a moral responsibility to provide a livable wage? No. What would oblige them to do that? And I'm not sure exactly how to make sense out of a livable wage, you know. It's kind of interesting this discussion, I mean this question, because it presumes a view of this whole project that is not workable, I think, that it's somehow Now, an individual kind of out of the gate deserves something that they have not yet earned, all right? And these are called positive rights, by the way, as opposed to negative rights.

And what's interesting in the case of the Declaration and the Bill of Rights, these are all negative rights. They are obligations to leave people alone, something like that. And I always wondered about the positive rights. Oh, I have a right to health care. I've got a right to a living wage. I have a right to this, that, the other thing. People, where do they get this idea that they have a right, first of all? A right is a just claim to something.

So you have to have some standard of justice that's objective and definable before you could say I have an entitlement to that kind of thing. but I don't know of any standard of justice that justifies that kind of thing. You know, there's nothing in the Gospels or anything that I could think of that suggests that. And it's interesting in the Mosaic law that people were required to, when they owned a field and they harvested, to leave some behind the edges so that others could glean. If somebody wanted to work and get something just for themselves, there was. an availability for that. I don't know if you'd call that a living wage or not, but that's the way that was expressed in the context of that agrarian culture.

I don't see the obligation, frankly, and I don't even know what a living wage is. What about all the job owners? I mean, all of these, aren't they entitled to something as well? Well, where does this idea come from that everybody has obliged to get it? What I always wondered about, about what's called positive rights, we all have a right to health care, okay? So let's just say here is the whole country, every individual has a right to health care. Okay, nobody's doing anything. Where is that going to come from?

If everybody has a right to receive it, then where is it going to come from? it's got to come from somewhere. And, well, then often this is just characterized as, well, the rich pay their fair share. But that's a Marxist notion. I mean, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, that's Karl Marx. But this is the way this is played out here. And it just doesn't work. It does not work.

All right. Here in California, if you flip burgers, you get to do. $20 an hour. Whoa. That's great. I'd love to work here. What if you work at one of those thousands of places that closed down when that minimum wage was put in place because they couldn't afford it? You know, my daughter worked scooping ice cream.

She was glad to get it. I said, what about if you were working down the road or if somebody else closed down because of that? Lots of restaurants have closed down into California. It just shows that it seems well-intentioned, but it has a much more deliote. a deleterious effect. Much more can be said about this. There's a book called, not a Christian book than what I'm thinking of. I know you're thinking of it by Jay Richards, but it's called economics in. One lesson? One lesson. Is that it? Is that Hazlet? Pardon me? I think it might be by

Hazlet. I don't know. I think this also was written in the 20s or 30s, but it deals with a lot of these kinds of things. It shows they just don't work. Economics is a single lesson. It's really great. But I know you have some thoughts about this, too. Yes. Henry Hazlitt is the author of economics in one lesson. Economics is so interesting. I love it because it's all based on human nature and how we make decisions and so many interesting things. And I wish more people understood how it works.

I think people have some kind of magical thinking when it comes. Like, all you have to do is declare, like Michael Scott declaring, I declare bankruptcy. All I have to do is declare our wage is going to be $20 an hour, which I think it's even more than that now. I'm not sure. And then it's fine. And if that's the case, well, then why don't we just declare we all have wonderful houses and we all have this and that? But that's just, it doesn't work. And the book that I want to recommend is Jay Wesley Richards' Money, Greeting God.

If you want to understand the basics of economics and how the free market works and why it works, that book is, it's a page turner. That's the book I read when I realized, oh, economics is actually really interesting. So the thing here is that, and you hit right on this, Greg, you can't just give anybody any amount. You have to give them what their job is worth because wages and prices are real. things. They're a measure of the economic worth of whatever it is that you're doing. They're not just random. They actually mean something. So when you mess with them, when you change them artificially, what you end up with is a lot of problems. Right. So you have shortages or you put people out of business. Another consequence of raising the minimum wage for fast food is that,

that a lot of people can't get jobs because now you have the people entering the market where they can't get a job because the people who are farther along are getting these higher-paying jobs. If you had a choice to hire somebody who was not a high school graduate versus somebody who was a high school graduate at $20 an hour, you're not going to hire the uneducated person. And this squeeze, now you might hire them up as $15 an hour, but not a 20. And so this ended up squeezing a whole bunch of poor people, uneducated people, out of the job market, or at least one section of it. And that's the kind of consequence.

Who is it, calls this stage one thinking economically. The Brookings Institute guy is that the plug? Oh, Thomas Soul. Thomas Soul, yeah. Stage one thinking. You're just thinking about what it feels like to declare everybody's going to get this good thing. And you're not looking at the ramifications. has all around that are damaging to people, especially poor people.

So rather than looking to provide a, quote, livable wage, what you should be providing is a just wage, a wage that's suitable for the work. And what plays into this is how many people are willing to do the job for that amount. This is the same thing with prices. Prices are the amount that people are willing to pay for that item. If the price is too high, not enough people buy it, so the price comes down. If the price is too low, you run out, so you raise the prices. This is the way that you manage the distribution of goods. It goes based on what people are willing to pay. And the same thing is true for wages. What people are willing to do that job for is what that job is the just wage for that job. You know, we've talked about this a little bit before the show started. And one of the things you pointed out was the same. significance of liberty in this whole process. Because really, basically, what's going on here is

two people making a choice to exchange goods and services for a certain price. And people have a choice. Do you want it or no? No. Okay. Then if it turns out that the boss can't hire anybody at this one thing, then he has to raise it. Right. But it comes down to the liberty of people to make transactions between each other to buy and to sell to work, et cetera. And that's the only way this will work. That's the way that you properly find the workers. But once you have someone coming in and declaring that this is the price it will be, well, now you get shortages, you get all sorts of problems, or you get people not willing

to work. Let's say somebody came in and said, okay, the wage is now $5 an hour. Well, then they're just not going to get people to work for that. them. And the business isn't going to be run. Right. You have to have the liberty of the free market where people will do what they're willing to do. And that's how you come to agreements and discover what the just wage and what the just price is. So it's amazing how all of this works. And this is why the free market has built up so much wealth and all over the world because this is how you properly distribute. things. Now, I'm not saying this is the only aspects of society. The free market is not the only aspect of society. There are also other institutions. There are churches. There are families. So if there are people who are having trouble, you have people to help them. You have charity. You have all sorts of ways that people are helped. But that's not, you can't misuse the market

as a charity because then you mess up the market. And now you've got problems with people finding jobs or buying things or whatever it is. So when you see a mess about the market, it's another way of putting it, is the market has a mind of its own and you can't control it. And so if you mess with certain parts of it, then the market adapts. You raise the minimum wage. What's the market adaptation? Tens of thousands of businesses go out of business and all those jobs are lost.

The market's just adjusting. It still does what it. The government can't control that. if one way or another, things are going to even out. The question is which way is it going to go when you're manipulating it? If you manipulate, you're going to get all kinds of trouble that you wouldn't normally get it if you let it do its natural thing. Because think about it. There is no one person who's smart enough to know what all the prices are all the wages are.

In the free market, you have millions of people making decisions that are creating this whole marketplace. and no one person is smart enough to manage all that. It's managed by everybody. We're all taking part in that. So anyway, I recommend that book and Money Greeting God and Economics in One Lesson and see what you think about that. Let's go to a question from Carrie. My wife and I are looking at doing a corporate sponsorship

with an organization we have been working with and financially supporting, which would include promotion of our company. Does that contradict Matthew 6.3, since part of the motivation is to promote our business? Well, when you read Matthew 6, Jesus' concern there is people who are looking like they're being generous when their motivation is simply to look good and not to genuinely be generous, provide, have the virtue of generosity. And so the antidote that Jesus offered is, don't let your left hand. know what your right is doing. If you are, if you are not letting anybody know what you're doing

in terms of your giving, or fasting was also on the list, then there's no way that you're going to be showboating for the sake of others' approval. That's the issue. Not for self-benefit. There's all kinds of things that it's legitimate to do that, you know, you may self-benefit from, But that doesn't mean it's tainted, okay? I've written a number of books that I wrote so that Christians would learn how to be more effective as communicators to the world, et cetera, et cetera. Do I want those books to sell? Yeah, for the ministry purpose. Well, wait a minute, I get a kickback from that because I'm the writer.

I get a royalty. Well, yeah. But does that disqualify my desire to see people benefit from the book just because I get paid for it? No. The work is worthy of his wage, all right? And so if you can arrange a business circumstance that helps a ministry and helps you, how could that possibly be a problem? The attitude that Jesus was trying to correct wasn't inherent in the circumstance that Kerry just described, you know. So I don't think there's any problem at all. And by the way, I don't think that, in a sense, disqualifies, desiring for people to be grateful for what you've done.

You know, if you've done a kindness to somebody for the sake of the kindness, it's appropriate for people to say thanks, you know, and that's not like somehow violating that principle either. So gratitude is an important part of this whole process. I don't think as Christians we have to rigidly follow the advice Jesus gave under those circumstances. If those circumstances don't obtain, then we don't need the antidote. If we are not hypocritically giving for the sake of self-aggrandizement, then we don't have to be strict about giving anonymously. and sometimes it's not actually even feasible to give anonymously in our culture now.

People are going to know. But if you're doing it for the sake of the giving, that's the key. If you're doing it for self-aggrandizement, that's a problem that Jesus addresses with that counsel. And here's another aspect of this. As a business, you promote your business so that you can do your business. You're paying money in one way or another. You probably have ads of some kind. You probably have all those.

There are different ways to promote it. So why not do both? This, why not do your promotion instead of putting the money into an ad to helping somebody? Now you're getting both and there's no problem with that whatsoever. You're actually making good use where you are getting both done at the same time. So I don't see a problem with this either. Okay, here's a question from Brian. Is the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12, 13 through 21 a direct refutation of America's approach to retirement, are we to infer from verse 21 that this man's main problem was that he didn't give to God, or is Christ also telling us we shouldn't be storing up for years of ease?

Well, I don't think the latter at all. In fact, if you read proverbs, there's actually quite a number of proverbs that talk about. saving, you know, and working during harvest so that in the winter you have food and things like that. I don't think the, I think the contrast, and I sometimes get a little bit surprised at questions like this, because when you read the whole text, just like the earlier one we were just dealing with about not letting your left hand know what the right is doing, you read the text, you realize there's a specific problem that Jesus is speaking to. And, um, and the that's the main concern. So why is the person who is storing up all this stuff called a fool by Jesus? And the reason is, is he had all of these things that he stored up, but, and now, okay,

now I'm great, but tonight your life is required of you, you idiot. Rather store up things in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroy nor thieves break in and steal. So the priority for us is to be storing up heavenly goods, not earthly goods, which don't have any eternal consequence. That doesn't mean that you're not supposed to be thoughtful and mindful about caring for yourself over time and even in retirement. I don't even see, well, I guess I could see somebody's temptation to think that it might apply there, but reading the passage to see it, to me, it's obviously not an application. All right. If you work and save so that you can rest when your body needs rest, and I'm just saying, have it just turned 75 myself, things slow down. You just can't keep working at the same rate. And so if you are making provision for yourself when you inevitably slow down, that's wisdom, okay? If your trust is completely in earthly goods. That's not even the wrong.

right way to put it. It's not just your trust. I mean, it's, it's your focus. This is the problem Jesus is talking about. This man's focus was in all of these material goods. And if you get them all stored up, he's in good shape. But then he dies. What good is all of that where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal? What good is all of that now in the eternal assessment? it's no good at all. That's Jesus' point. He isn't saying don't save. He's saying he's instructing about how our focus ought to be. And he starts this off by saying even when one has an abundance, does not even when one has an abundance does his life consist in his possessions? And then he gives the story and then he ends with, so is the man who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich

towards God. Not rich towards God. So he, he, like you said, his focus has been on building up all this wealth that comes to nothing in the end. So just to make an observation, notice how much more robust the response was when you read the words of the text, because the text solves the problem if you read the entire thing and take it at face value. It puts it in its proper balance. I was going by memory on the details, you read the text and you see, oh, well, that makes perfect sense. Jesus is making a very specific point, and he's making it clearly. And he follows this up with, don't worry about, don't focus on this and worry about this, because he goes on to say, which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his lifespan,

and he says about the Ravens, they don't worry about what's coming, but they also store up food. So I think, I think the problem here is that because we're sinners, we can mess up any situation. We can be bad rich people. We can be bad, poor people. We find ways to mess everything up. So whatever we're doing, whatever situation you are in, be wise about storing up for the future. As you said, Proverbs is very clear about this. We don't want to be wasteful and we want to take care of the people we need to take care of. But we shouldn't worry about it and that we should be focusing on building up treasure for God rather than treasure on earth. And I think there's wisdom that has to come as we conform our minds to Christ. And as we make these decisions,

we're going to mess up because we're fallen. There's grace. And we just continue to focus on the glory of God and building up our treasures in heaven. But we also take care of ourselves and the people we love and we give and we do all these things to help our community. And how that all works out, I think could be different for different people. Some people might have more temptation to sin if they have more money. That's possible. And maybe it's better for them not to have so much money. But I'm also really grateful for people who are wealthy, who have built hospitals and theaters that I get to benefit from and that make our society better. So there are all sorts of ways to live as somebody with a lot of money or somebody with not a lot of money. The point

is to do it for the glory of God and morally. All right, we're at a time, Greg. But we thank you, DJ and Carrie and Brian, and we would love it if you would send us your question on X with the hashtag SDRask or go to our website at STR.org and go to our hashtag STRask podcast page. Thank you so much for listening. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.