Author: John Stonestreet and Dr. Timothy D. Padgett
Laws raising minimum wage rates are intended to help people in lower income brackets to make more money. In practice, particularly with the rise of robotics and AI, it’s more likely that many in this demographic will be edged out of work. Recently, Dr. Anthony Bradley posted on X about a fully-automated McDonald’s,
This is the future of fast food. Raising the minimum wage won’t save these jobs—robots don’t need unions. Prediction: politicians will try to slow automation with new regulations, but it’s coming fast.
The supporters of laws that sound good and seem helpful are often silent when their good intentions don’t pan out. Remember the Cash for Clunkers program from the early years of the Obama administration? The program “fueled a car-buying spree in the summer of 2009.” However, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institute, it “cost $1.4 million for every job it created and did little to reduce carbon emissions.”
The idea of helping should not matter more than actually helping. Nor can any intended good justify ineffectiveness or increased harm. Every parent knows this already. A child saying, “I didn’t mean to,” does not magically change what the child did.
In a classic book on helping the poor, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor ... and Yourself, scholars Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert noted:
Few of us are conscious of having a god-complex, which is part of the problem. We are often deceived by Satan and by our sinful natures. For example, consider this: why do you want to help the poor? Really think about it. What truly motivates you? Do you really love poor people and want to serve them? Or do you have other motives? I confess to you that part of what motivates me to help the poor is my felt need to accomplish something worthwhile with my life, to be a person of significance, to feel like I have pursued a noble cause ... to be a bit like God.
Christ warned against making a public show, both in our worship and in how we care for others. The number of clicks and shares do not make a good deed better. In fact, that is a measure that should not matter at all. What matters is to obey God’s command to love our neighbor. Keeping our help private is an important way to avoid common temptations.
One is the desire to be seen as a good person by others. Paul wrote, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters” (Colossians 3:23). Jesus commanded that we “not practice our righteousness before men.” It is a good habit to gut-check what is motivating us to help others.
Another temptation, especially for government entities dependent on constantly increased funding, is to not fix the problem. If our self-worth, employment, or funding is based on being there for those in need, they have to always be there. No one would ever say such a thing out loud, but it is a very real temptation.
Finally, it is tempting to confuse pity and charity. This has everything to do with who we think people are, especially those we are trying to help. Michael Matheson Miller, who leads the Acton Institute’s Center for Social Flourishing, describes this as the temptation to treat the poor as objects of our pity rather than subjects made in the image of God. To be an image bearer is to be an “I,” not merely “one of them.”
Christians have always cared for the poor and always should. Even more, Christians normalized caring for the poor. This is not a question of if, it is a question of how. If the choice is between giving for bad reasons and not giving at all, by all means, give! But righteousness involves both doing the right thing and doing it for the right reasons. Good intentions are necessary but not enough.