“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 64
“A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight” (Prov. 11:1).
Doing business biblically presents many challenges. One of them is to resist the prevailing dishonesty in many portions of the business world (usually on the grounds that “everybody does it”). Here Christians are resisting the temptation to think that vice and dishonesty are somehow inevitable. And of course the verse above rebukes that kind of thinking. But it also rebukes some things that the unbelieving world has come to adopt as virtuous. Learning to think biblically not only means resisting unethical demands from the secular world, it also means that we must sometimes learn to resist the world’s ethical demands.
The problem above is a dishonest price. When the butcher tells you he is selling you a pound of meat when what he is really doing is selling you ¾ of a pound of meat plus his thumb on the scale, his problem is one of simple dishonesty. But a dishonest price is not the same thing as a high price. The Scriptures prohibit the one but not the other. But under certain conditions of scarcity, the American public has been conditioned to complain about “price gouging” as though something unethical is being done simply because prices rise.
Nothing is wrong with using mechanisms for rationing during times of scarcity. The most effective and flexible of those mechanisms would include higher prices when freely set by the owner. What the Bible requires in this, however, is that the seller seek to be a delight to the Lord by using a “just weight.”