God as Capitalist...

There are just so many signs that God has a bad business plan. Every time he moves to affirm that "the last shall be first, and the first shall be last," he scares away potential investors, loses market share, and pushes the most ambitious persons out of the firm. Elton Mayo may have built a kinder, gentler school of labor utitlization around the touchy-feely type of human relations (use compliments instead of threats, treat your workers well and they'll work for you, and all that), but you can't put the last first and the first last. The last are last for a reason--they're too stupid, or not sufficiently ruthless, or carrying too much baggage from prior exploitation or victimization. And if you don't put the first on top you're violating the natural order, setting up perverse incentives, and the evolution of better ideas, more efficient sorts of activities, and the creation of wealth.
These are just a few of the bad business practices that God, through Jesus, implements in the Gospels. But this isn't the enture story. Consider the strategies that God and Jesus don't practice that are part and parcel of every capitalistic enterprise. God not only does things guaranteed to frustrate economic rationality, God passes up other things that constitute good stewardship of economic resources and the production of value.
Consider, for example, the whole question of incentives. Contemporary capitalism lives in a world in which political entities offer incentives--tax breaks, subsidies, regulatory exemptions--to attract capitalist investment in one community rather than another. Illinois competes with Kentucky, the United States with Germany, Haiti with Honduras--while some people call corporate incentives a form of legal bribery, they're an important part oof what every good capitalist consideres in making investment decisions.
But not God. Not only does God seem decidedly lukewarm toward some traditional form of incentives (burnt offerings and sacrifices, for example), God doesn't seem attuned to locating where maximal return could be obtained. With all due respect to God's location team, choosing a backwater like Galilee as the site fo the incarnation, seems remakably short-sghted: doubtless the Romans would have offered a much more attractive package of temple construction, tax subsidies, and legal privileges were divinity to come in the form of the emperor(for real, not just in pagan terms) or some other imperial notable. But Galilee? Bad transportation infrastructure, far from religious markets, distant from suppliers, and not likely to jump from an ethnic/niche markey within Judaism to a worldwide commodity.

Michael L. Budde
"God Is Not a Capitalist"