A Lesson In Economics

TUES., DEC. 28, 1982, 6:14 AM
FARM, STUDY

No legitimate newscast or daily paper or weekly news magazine can be presented at this time in the earth, in your culture, without some major news and comment on economics. You will find no reference to economics in any concordance, for it is a term that has developed since the original Biblical times. (Know, of course, that each time since is also a Biblical time.) Yet the concept of the relationships among people (workers and non-workers), production of goods and services, and money (and, in some ways, government) is an ancient one. So hear Me, o son, as I comment on economics from My perspective on your portion of the earth on this day.

The Durants, whom you quote, picked up an important truth that applies to economics when they highlighted the everlasting struggle between freedom and equality. There is a mystical sense in which proper relationship with Me represents a melding of the two… an ideal state. At the beginning of human spiritual history those early inhabitants wanted to achieve this the easy way. Eating the fruit would make them equal with me in understanding… and therefore free to be like Me (Us). There was no spiritual achievement there, so I had to accent and reestablish inequality. I made an economic proclamation… that man would have to toil to bring forth food from the earth. Then the first violence had an economic facet, for Cain perceived that his grain offering was inferior to the meat offering of his brother, and because of this inequality blood was shed and life was taken. I then took away some of Cain’s freedom, but also limited the freedom of others to kill him.

I said this would be a lesson for today, so let’s leave the far past and get to the now-present. The strength of your economic system is freedom… the freedom to develop self, to produce a product or deliver a service (or both) and reap rewards in money or other products and services. But immediately, as this is in action, it can be seen that there are great inequalities, if freedom is absolute. Now if all people were equally spiritually developed there would be no problem for the freedom to reap unequally would be balanced by the desire to see that all have the necessities of life. Communism, without compulsion and force, would be the ideal system, for those who would reap the most would give the most, and the inequality of production would be balanced by the equality resulting from giving.

In spiritual economics those who have much give much, and those who have less receive in gratitude and do what they can with more zeal. In economics with much spirit there is little envy or jealousy, little coveting of what another has. There is more satisfaction with basic necessities and more desire to achieve an equality in this realm than to go to luxuries for self.