The Gift Exchange AKA further adventures in Seekonomics

In the below orange Paragraph Charles talks about wealth being personalized Through Locality and Free gift exchange. He later corrected "free gift exchange" in favor of just "gift exchange".

So we are back full circle at the Gift exchange. I just hope my new CD doesn't get redistributed and I end up being the one holding the half eaten bag of generic corn flakes at the end of the night. This is a joke it isn't meant to have a double meaning which applies to an eceonomic system. But maybe it does. Its unintentional.

I think what he is talking about (unless it is totally over my head) with the gift exchange is obligations that should/would/could come with wealth. This is like the OT practice of allowing your field to be gleaned by widows, orphans, and foreigners. And even letting it lie totally fallow every seven years for this purpose. Part of the covenant in exchange for posessing means of production was to be gracious to the poor. I can see how this would work in agriculture. Even now it could be done literally just the way it was in the Bible. But it is hard to envision how it would work in any other industry. Like if I owned a Jelly Bean factory would I have to sell all the Jelliflops really cheap. Oh wait they do do that.

This also reminds me of what some OP Missionaries are doing in a third world context they have a farm and pay day laborers in food to harvest the crop (or whatever else needs to be done). THey pay them 2 days worth of grain for their families for every one day worked. Maybe non agricultural businesses could contribute a percentage of their earnings to such a farm.

THe bigger question though is who enforces such a gift exchange. I think this is the underlying question in this whole discussion actually. Why would sinful people voluntarily live this way? WOuldn't the state have to enforce it? And then where are we?

In the OT God enforced it through prophets and judgments severe judgments. BTW Deuternomy 27-30 is one of my favirote portions of Scripture it would be advantagious for us all to recite it once a month or something.

But would it be presumptious of us to set up our own system and then claim that God enforced it? Maybe if we were as faithful as possible to the revealed covenant it wouldn't be setting up a new system at all, but returning to faithfulness to the already revealed (and still in force) covenant.

Then again we aught to remember that the Covenant was broken continually resulting in ever increased judgment. But then again then again this should be more of an argument for faithfulness than against it. THe covenant exists whether we attempt to follow it or not.

See Charles' paragraph:

However, I am not comfortable with mutualism's general disdain for inherited property and landed wealth. I think distributivism is closer to the biblical example. Not all concentrated wealth is bad. But it becomes bad when it lacks charity and seeks its own independent existance above people and their organic ties. I think alienation is the natural consequence of economic entities like corporations which are nothing but abstract and impersonal bureaucracies. Bureaucracy and oligarchy always emerge where the scale of organization is big. Thus, we need to get away from the 'abstract and large' and move toward the 'small and personal'. Wealth needs to be personalized, accomplished in a rediscovery of locality and free gift exchange, and one of the first steps in this direction would be an empowering of community---e.g., confining family, church, and state to their proper biblical spheres...

Oh and here is another great Charles Paragraph:

Exchange can't be 'free'. So let's leave it at 'gift exchange'. I got this from James A. Smith's book "radical orthodoxy". Gift exchange is a term RO uses to describe tithing and liturgy in both worship and christian life/economics. It is an exchange which contains an expected value, or a 'return' for charity given... more like 'obligations', 'oaths', and 'duties'.... I guess a 'covenantal exchange' may have another dimension where not only oaths are sworn, but charity, grace, and the welfare and good reputation of the other is also contextualized into the trading of goods/services. Thus, our economy should reflect the 'offerings' of our worship? The love for Christ should be the model for our love for neighbor? Thus our daily interactions with neighbors--our economic exchange---should resemble Christ's covenant? There is a charitable, reputatible, binding, and personal dimension?