Sometimes the Lord God collects the ball from the other side of the pitch, puts it in front of you on the six yard line and says, “Kick”, and it is like that now on Markets.

What are Markets? The short-version Adam Smith needed “an invisible hand” from no-where and self-interest. Then we needed entrepreneurs and capitalists and “free competition”. Then nearly sophisticated economists constructed micro-economic systems of supply and demand which equilibriated, which then became systems of equations and calculations allowing profits to be creamed off from irregularities. Then a lot of it stops for Coronavirus, and we have to really reflect.

And we realise, markets are a form of human co-operation. Markets are people working together for good, and for goods, like the present preoccupation with PPE. Christianity, as it usually is, was right all along. Markets are an extension of Loving your Neighbour as yourself, the Second Great Commandment. Over thousands of years, often as in 1279BC (guess) , 1929, 1939 and 2008 with hiccups, people have been constructing markets on the basis of loving your neighbour as yourself. Some got it fully, and others just tagged along, but this is the basis of all markets. They are co-operation systems for good. There is no way round, over, under or through this understanding. You must love your neighbour.

Of course, some people have got it all the way through. Wilberforce got rid of slavery. Shaftesbury got rid of child labour. The Salvation Army realised that strong alcohol was a bad, and the Good Samaritan realised that Healthcare was a non-traded good, or was that just fiction? Angela Merckel and the German Christian Democrats understood the social market while we were awhoring off after Thatcherite wealth creation, and the Chinese made and make things we need. Thank you, China.

There are at least seven major market lessons, and now they are hitting us in the face.

1. LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR. We love and are loved by our neighbour. We depend on them and we do for them. That is what we are doing in schools, factories, shops, fields, hospitals and a hundred and one other ways. We are not loving our neighbour when we are killing, addicting, shoddying goods, enslaving or abusing them.
2. YOU LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR AS YOURSELF. There is justice here – just wages, not one person getting 1000X what another does, – fair prices, not exploiting shortages and making billions out of others, – international fairness, not economic colonialism, slavery or resource rape. All goods are fairtrade goods. Capitalist systems of control are immoral and unjust and should be destroyed.
3. THERE ARE BAD MARKETS. Markets can exploit workers, consumers, political weaknesses, market anonymity, consumer addictions and weaknesses, the environment and the planet. We have to stay responsible for markets, not treat them as systems which govern us.
4.  WHAT IS GOOD FOR US? We need to think about goods and bads. Advertising is mainly based on selfishness and self-reward. You owe it to yourself. But what is really good for ourselves and others? The Tories were downgrading healthcare, but now two nurses have saved Boris’s life. “Oh, we got that one wrong” say the Tories. Perhaps a third of what we consume is not good for us. It makes us fight, fat and foughtless.
5. PRICES MUST REFLECT VALUES. We have been taught by those who make money out of it, that prices rule the world. They do not. We make prices. Mainly, these days we make them for the rich. But our values give price – what we pay people, what we will pay for diamonds, healthcare, food and saving the planet. Sometimes prices are complicated, but values must make them. We structure prices.
6. BAD MARKETS NEED REFORMING. World-wide, there are markets for the FEW, the bosses, the major shareholders, the stars, the moguls. But markets are meant to be for the Common Good, not the few. They used to be controlled by nationalisation, but now they have gone international. They have tax havens, accumulate power, run governments and distort our economic lives. There need to be a major world reform addressing the control of the superrich. We must all do it.
7. GOD’S GIFT TO US. The basis for all markets is God’s gifts to us in creation – food, water, wood, energy, light, air, minerals, plants, animals, insects, fish, oil, warmth, metals, rivers and much more. We depend on these. We are stewards of these. We understand them with God. We make what is good better. We must address global warming and the sin and arrogance of our modern exploitative mindset. We are nearly out of time before we face the judgment we call upon ourselves, and God waits. Our children’s children are also our neighbours.

This Christian understanding is the deepest wisdom about markets in human history. It should be understood by all, and is inescapable. Markets require that we love our neighbours as ourselves and they come from that source. So, as Coronavirus blows the foam of selfishness away, let us properly understand the markets within which we partly live.