Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 24-26.

Today’s passage contains various miscellaneous commands, but many of them touch on ethical business practices (or, perhaps, on forbidding unethical business practices). Let’s take a look at some of those rules:

• Don’t take the tools someone uses to make a living as security on a loan
• Don’t use a loan as an excuse to invade someone’s privacy
• Do not take advantage of hired workers by withholding their wages for a few days
• Don’t use different measures for different people
• When harvesting your crops, don’t go back over your fields to make sure that you didn’t miss a few sheafs of grain, a few grapes, or a few olives.

I see many businesses coming up with excuses as to why violating these are good business.  In a way, the justification for all of these amounts to violating that last one.  I interpret that last one this way: when you are a dominant player in “the market” leave room for others to make money in the margins.  Don’t manage your business so as to make sure that you don’t “leave money on the table”.   It may be “good business” to act in this manner, but it is bad for society, and it is bad for your soul.  The philosophy of “never leaving money on the table” makes people dependent on the biggest players to ever greater degrees and prevents them from independent.  The philosophy of “don’t leave any money on the table” means that you figure out how much someone can pay for something they must have, and making sure that you charge every penny of that.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.