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Of course Jesus cared deeply about the poor. When he said, “the poor you will always have with you” (Matt 26:11), it was a character marker of the type of people who were attracted to Jesus and his followers: those who were impoverished. So when we apply this characteristic of Christlikeness broadly to society, it is easy to believe that social justice is all about caring for the poor.

Yet social justice should consider a set of conditions, not a particular set of outcomes. Too often we evaluate the state of justice based on perceived outcomes without assessing the institutions that produce those outcomes. For example, those who lament wealth inequality rarely decry the central banking system which creates vast inequalities of both opportunity and government privilege. Because they are formed by human beings, institutions are also flawed and in regular need of reform. Social justice requires us to think about what is properly “social” as well as what is “just.” The poor are far better served when they are treated as legal equals in a society rather than persons to be pitied. Christians should demand equal treatment under the law, freedom of enterprise, secure private property rights, access to adequate defense, expedient justice in courts, and a host of other institutional arrangements under which conditions the poor can flourish along with the rest of society.

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Most people compare what the government spends on welfare for the poor to the private charity dollars spent on the poor, arriving at the conclusion that private charity organizations could not bear the burden of providing for the poor if the welfare state were simply removed. However, this comparison is unfair for two reasons. First, it does not account for the fact that private charity organizations, on average, have far less bureaucratic overhead than government-run ones. Money spent through private charities is often more effective than government-run welfare programs.

Second, and more importantly, it ignores a third but very prominent anti-poverty measure that doesn’t require government at all: free market capitalism. People achieved prosperity in the past 200 years not through welfare programs but through free markets. Oftentimes, governments have regulated the market in such a way that it creates the conditions for higher unemployment, increased prices for goods and services, and other factors that burden the poor.

Charity is only a short-term solution to the direct symptoms of poverty, not its causes. A robust society addresses the root problems to poverty by looking at a variety of issues.

Libertarian Christians believe that because work is essential to our life and our well-being, being recipients of the fruit of other people’s labor (whether private or public) can only go so far. What those in poverty want and need is the fruit of their own labor.

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Human flourishing should be the goal of any human-based institution, both private and public, so long as it is done within its sphere of capacity and ability.

Christians who believe the state should guide or lead us to human flourishing usually have in mind initiatives and programs that force individuals and businesses to behave in certain ways they view as conducive to human flourishing. Yet they fail to recognize that governments are particularly bad at guiding free human beings in ways that yield certain results. When governments try to pick winners and losers through subsidies and special privileges, they almost always fail.

As an institution on the monopoly of violence in society, the state’s narrow role should be to enable human flourishing through means that actually achieve human flourishing. That is, if the state’s role is to protect private property by enabling free exchange, not only would the economy grow, individuals and communities would flourish not because of the state but because the state was in its proper role in society.