The Justice of Distributism

by Thomas Storck

The basic assumption of bourgeois civilization was that the best interests of the world, the state and the community could be served by allowing each individual to work out his economic destiny as he saw fit. This is known as the principle of laissez faire. As far as possible individual life is unregulated by the state, whose function is purely negative, like that of a policeman. The less the state does, the better. It was not long until the evil of this principle manifested itself. If every individual is to be allowed to work out his economic destiny as he see fit, it will not be long until wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few and the vast majority are reduced, as Hilaire Belloc showed, to a slave state - Fulton J. Sheen[i]

In the spring 2002 issue of The Latin Mass, Mr. John Clark published an article called "Distributism as Economic Theory." I believe that his arguments and conclusions are not consonant with either the teaching of the Church or the thought of Hilaire Belloc, and I offer this article to clarify what the Church says on this matter, as well as to do justice to the memory of a great Catholic, Hilaire Belloc.

Mr. Clark rightly begins by defining his key term, "Capitalism." Clark's definition of capitalism runs thus: "Capitalism is an economic system in which private property is seen as a morally defensible right. Corollaries to this right include the right to free competition in the marketplace and the right to trade both domestically and internationally. Furthermore, the profit motive is seen by capitalism as morally defensible, and therefore there should be no legal limit as to the amount of money that one can legally earn" (p. 30).

Quadragesimo Anno

Clark contrasts this with Belloc's own definition of capitalism as "a state of society in which a minority control the means of production, leaving the mass of citizens dispossessed."[ii] Although I think Clark's definition is erroneous, Belloc's definition also suffers from the problem that it describes the nearly inevitable effects of capitalism rather than the distinguishing note of the system. For a better definition, then, I will turn to the 1931 encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno. In section 100, the Pope refers to "that economic system in which were provided by different people the capital and labor jointly needed for production."[iii] In other words, the distinguishing mark of capitalism is that some men own the means of production and hire other men to work for them. These latter are the "mass of citizens" that Belloc claims do not share in the ownership of the means of production.

Let us examine the deductions which Clark makes from his definiton of capitalism. "Capitalism is an economic system in which private property is seen as a morally defensible right." As we saw above, this is not the distinguishing mark of capitalism, but it nonetheless makes a correct point: private property is a morally defensible right. But what Clark claims follows from this is false: "Corollaries to this right include the right to free competition in the marketplace and the right to trade both domestically and internationally." Though we are accustomed to regarding free use of private property as inherent in our right to it, this is not the case. In the Catholic Middle Ages private property was upheld, but not the right of free competition. As we will see, traditional papal teaching on property by no means upholds the notion that one can do whatever one likes with one's property.

Property Rights

Clark next turns explicitly to the question of property rights. He says, "Although distributism claims to be the champion of private property, it is actually antithetical to it" (p. 31). Clark tries to substantiate this claim by focusing on the legal method that Belloc suggested in The Restoration of Property ought to be used to bring about the existence of a distributist society. In brief, Belloc's suggested method of achieving more widely distributed property was to institute a system of highly graduated taxation so that those who owned concentrations of property, for example, a chain of stores, would sell off their excess property.

"There must be a differential tax on chain-shops, that is, on the system whereby one man or corporation controls a great number of different shops of the same kind. To control two such may involve but a small tax, to control three a larger one in proportion; and so on, with the curve rising steeply until the ownership of, say, a dozen in the territory over which the government has power becomes economically impossible."[iv]

Clark and Belloc

Now, is there anything morally wrong with such a scheme? Let us consider the various charges which Clark brings against it. First of all, he quotes various Renaissance Catholic theologians on the evils of unjust taxation and on what he calls "state redistribution" of property. Unjust taxation is, of course, ipso facto unjust. But the question here is whether Belloc's plan is unjust or not. To quote writers who inveigh against unjust taxation without first establishing whether Belloc's proposed taxation is unjust, is to be guilty of what in logic is called a petitio principii, that is, begging the question.

Nor does his quote from Pedro de Navarra help - "Taxes can be tyrannical...if one is taxed more heavily than others..." (p. 32.) - for this writer was doubtless talking about two persons in the same circumstances being taxed at different rates.[v] More importantly, we must note that the context of all the quotes from these Renaissance theologians was their objections against the absolute monarchies of the time instituting excessive taxation for the support of the king and his court. But in fact, the very aim of Belloc's taxation was that no one would ever have to pay the tax at all! The entire aim of the taxation scheme to institute distributism was that people would not accumulate property in such amounts that they would have to pay the highly progressive taxes that accompanied the ownership of large amounts of certain kinds of property. The denunications of the theologians that Clark instances are simply beside the point.[vi]

Moreover, Belloc himself was against high taxation: "High taxation is incompatible with the general institution of property. The one kills the other. Where property is well distributed resistance to big taxation is so fierce and efficacious that big taxation breaks down."[vii]

This difference in attitude toward taxation flows from the different ways property is regarded in a distributist and in a capitalist society. In the former, property and all external goods are considered necessary precisely because they are necessary for the welfare and support of the family. It is the decent support of the family that is sought, not the maximization of income. Thus property will be so intimately connected with a man and his family, that he will have a fiercely protective attitude toward it and resist high taxation.[viii] But under capitalism, property is viewed simply as something with a money value, which is to be sold if a good price comes along. And although capitalists no doubt dislike paying taxes also, if one is thinking solely of money values, it often makes good business sense simply to write off high taxes as necessary costs of doing business.[ix]

Redistribution of Property?

Next let us consider Clark's charge of government "redistribution" of property. "`Redistribution of the means of production' is an economic fallacy" (p. 32) Clark avers. But distributism, as sketched by Belloc, has absolutely nothing to do with government acquiring, distributing or redistributing any property at all. Private owners, aware of the coming institution of a distributist system of taxation, would be free to sell off their property to any other private owner they chose. The government would not be involved in such transactions at all. One may support or oppose such a system, but to call it "redistribution" by the government makes no sense at all.

In order to evaluate the justice or injustice of Belloc's proposals, we must next look at Clark's statements about property rights and the question of property ownership.

Clark quotes from Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle: "It is a good thing that each one shall enlarge his possessions more, applying himself to them more carefully as being his own" (p. 33). Thomas is here summarizing and expanding upon Aristotle's refutation of Plato's argument for the community of goods, i.e., for ownership of all property in common, such as Plato advocated in his Republic. The full sentence as translated from the Latin says, "Another good is that each one will multiply his possession more, applying himself to it more carefully since it is his own."[x] Thomas, following Aristotle, is simply pointing out that, generally, one will take more care of his own property than of common property. However, one cannot deduce from this any notion that the unlimited enlargement of a man's possessions is good either for himself or for society. Elsewhere Aquinas makes this clear. In the same Commentary he writes, "Political economy, however, which is concerned with the using of money for a definite purpose, does not seek unlimited wealth, but wealth such as shall help towards its purpose, and this purpose is the good estate of the home."[xi] And in the Summa Theologiae, he says, "...the appetite of natural riches is not infinite, because according to a set measure they satisfy nature; but the appetite of artificial riches is infinite, because it serves inordinate concupiscence ...."[xii] Moreover, such quotations could be multiplied from Catholic theologians. For example, although Clark claims that St. Antoninus "viewed the profit motive as both moral and financially essential" (p. 33), in fact that saint wrote: "If any merchant exercises his art, not for some honest end, as the government of the family, the profit of the country or other like one, but principally out of great greed, he gains an infamous profit."[xiii]

What does this have to do with Belloc's distributism? Simply that, if the purpose of riches is the support of a man and his family, then no one has any right to more than is necessary for the decent support of his family. If we ask ourselves why God has created man so that he must engage in the activity of producing external goods, the answer is obvious: economic activity is meant to serve the more important aspects of life, our spiritual, family, social, intellectual and cultural lives; it is not an end in itself. Therefore it is not necessarily a tyrannical act if our political arrangements determine our use of property so that we seek the amount of worldy riches necessary for a decent human life, but not more. As St. Thomas pointed out further in his De Regno, the aim of men living together in society is not riches but virtue.[xiv] And he pointedly says, "If abundance of riches were the ultimate end, an economist would be ruler of the people."[xv]

Pius XI v. Tony Honore

But what of man's natural right to private property? Would not such a notion of the state conflict with it? Mr. Clark derives his notion of private property from Tony Honore, professor of law at Oxford University (p. 31), who is not a Catholic theologian. But Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno thought otherwise. He rejects both "individualism" and "collectivism" but clearly states that ownership has a "twofold aspect...which is individual or social accordingly as it regards individuals or concerns the common good." Therefore, "Provided that the natural and divine law be observed, the public authority, in view of the common good, may specify more accurately what is licit and what is illicit for property owners in the use of their possessions."[xvi] We do not have a right to do whatever we may please with our property. Thus distributism does not violate "the fundamental right of private property as traditionally taught by the Church" as Clark charges (p. 31). Rather it attempts to establish man's right to private property on a firm foundation, private property as the necessary means of support for the individual and his family.

Distribution of Income

Clark quotes St. Thomas' De Regno on the matter of distribution of income to the effect that "an architect who plans a building is...paid a higher wage than is the builder who does the manual labor under his direction" (p. 32).[xvii] No one disputes this. Belloc is not arguing for equality of property or equality of incomes. But the Catholic tradition by no means sanctions just any distribution of income. Pius XI, for example, in the encyclical already quoted, makes this remark about Catholics at the close of the nineteenth century and their opinions on the need for social reform: "Such also was the opinion of many Catholics, priests and laymen, who with admirable charity had long devoted themselves to relieving the undeserved misery of the laboring classes, and who could not persuade themselves that so vast and unfair a distinction in the distribution of temporal goods was really in harmony with the designs of an all-wise Creator."[xviii]

No distributist desires equality of income or property. However, consider these figures on "the ratio of the pay a CEO makes versus that earned by a factory worker. In the late 1960s, it was 25 to 1 and as recently as 1980 it was 42 to 1. By 1999 it had risen to a whopping 419 to 1."[xix] One may perhaps be allowed the opinion that a 25 to 1 ratio was quite sufficient to safeguard the incentives that entrepreneurs apparently require.

The philosophy of property that capitalism contains and promotes is not the philosopohy of property that traditional Catholicism promotes. Property as the support for a man and his family, yes; but not the unlimited acquisition of property, so that a society is kept in turmoil by economic dislocations, plant closings, and so that individuals themselves are corrupted by what Holy Scripture calls the "root of all evils" (I Timothy 6:10). Traditional Catholics, when they consider economic questions ought to consult the encyclicals and other writings of the Popes, especially Leo XIII, Pius XI and Pius XII, and the works of St. Thomas. There they will find a rich teaching on the proper place of material wealth, and it will not be a teaching consonant with capitalism, whose founders and theorists were eighteenth century Deists openly in revolt against the traditional Christian conception of society.[xx]

________________

[i]. Communism and the Conscience of the West (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, c. 1948) pp. 16-17.

[ii]. Quoted by Clark on page 30, but taken from Hilaire Belloc, The Restoration of Property (New York : Sheed & Ward, 1946) p. 19.

[iii]. The original Latin speaks of the economic system "qua generatim ad commune rei oeconomicae exercitium ab aliis res, ab aliis opera praestaretur." Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 23, no. 6, June 1931, pp. 209-210. All citations from Quadragesimo Anno are taken from the Paulist translation as published in Seven Great Encyclicals and elsewhere.

[iv]. The Restoration of Property, p. 69.

[v]. Clark takes his quote from Alejandro Chafuen's book, Christians for Freedom : Late-Scholastic Economics (San Francisco : Ignatius, c. 1986). This source does not shed any further light on the context of the quote, but it is surely absurd to suggest that de Navarra believed that it was unjust for a rich man to be taxed more heavily than a pauper.

[vi]. Moreover, Clark presumes that these Renaissance theologians have some specially weighty authority in theology. But this is not the case. In comparison with papal teaching or with the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, these Renaissance theologians have no more authority than any other group of theologians. In no way can their opinions be equated with what Clark calls "the traditional teaching of the Church" (p. 30).

[vii]. The Restoration of Property, p. 119.

[viii]. Pope John Paul II, in Centesimus Annus, speaks of the purpose of private property as "one's personal development and the development of one's family" (no. 6).

[ix]. I should point out here that no one in a distributist society would be forced to become an owner of productive property. Doubtless some would remain in the position of employee. But the employer/employee relationship would no longer be the usual economic mode of society. The characteristic mark of a distributist society would be widespread ownership of productive property, even if not everyone chose to own such property.[x]. "Aluid bonum est quod unusquisque magis multiplicabit possessionem suam insistens ei sollicitius tamquam propriae." Commentary on the Politics, book 2, lectio 4.

[xi]. Quoted in Bede Jarrett, Social Theories of the Middle Ages (Westminster, Md. : Newman Book Shop, 1942) p. 155.

[xii]. Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 2, a. 1 ad 3 [xiii].

Quoted in Joaquin Azpiazu, The Corporative State (St. Louis : Herder, 1951) p. 145.

[xiv]. "It seems moreover to be the purpose of the multitude joined together to live according to virtue.... the good life moreover is according to virtue; the virtuous life therefore is the purpose of the human community." In the original, "Videtur autem finis esse multitudinis congregatae vivere secundum virtutem.... bona autem vita est secundum virtutem; virtuosa igitur vita est congregationis humanae finis." De Regno, I, 14. (This work is also known as De Regimine Principum.)

[xv]. "Si autem ultimus finis esset divitiarum affuentia, oeconomus rex quidam multitudinis esset." Ibid. Consider also these words of John Paul II in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, in which he describes the mainly U.S. attempt in the years after World War II to defeat communism by trumpeting the material benefits of our economy. "Another kind of response, practical in nature, is represented by the affluent society or the consumer society. It seeks to defeat Marxism on the level of pure materialism by showing how a free-market society can achieve a greater satisfaction of material human needs than Communism, while equally excluding spiritual values. In reality, while on the one hand it is true that this social model shows the failure of Marxism to contribute to a humane and better society, on the other hand, insofar as it denies an autonomous existence and value to morality, law, culture and religion, it agrees with Marxism, in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs" (no. 19).

[xvi]. Quadragesimo Anno, sections 45, 46 and 49.

[xvii]. This is in De Regno, I, 9.

[xviii]. Quadragesimo Anno, section 5. Emphasis mine.

[xix]. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, "Markets and Morals," The Washington Times, Sunday July 21, 2002, p. B8.

[xx]For a good account of this, by someone who favors the new capitalist order, see Ralph Lerner, "Commerce and Character : the Anglo-American as New-Model Man" in Michael Novak, ed., Liberation South, Liberation North (Washington : American Enterprise Institute, c. 1981) pp. 24-49.

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The Way Of Love/1

by Bill Kauffman

The title "Dorothy Day and the American Right" promises a merciful brevity, along the lines of "Commandments We Have Kept" by the Kennedy brothers. After all, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of its newspaper lived among the poor, refused to participate in air-raid drills, and preferred Cesar Chavez to Bebe Rebozo.

But there is more to the "right" than a dollar bill stretching from the DuPonts to Ronald Reagan, just as the "left" is something greater than the bureau-building and bomb-dropping of Roosevelts and Kennedys. Maybe, just maybe, Dorothy Day had a home, if partially furnished and seldom occupied, on the American right.

The Catholic reactionary John Lukacs, after attending the lavish twenty-fifth anniversary bash for National Review in December 1980, held in the Plaza Hotel, hellward of the Catholic Worker House on Mott Street, wrote:

During the introduction of the celebrities a shower of applause greeted Henry Kissinger. I was sufficiently irritated to ejaculate a fairly loud Boo! ... A day or so before that evening Dorothy Day had died. She was the founder and saintly heroine of the Catholic Worker movement. During that glamorous evening I thought: who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day, whose respect for what was old and valid, whose dedication to the plain decencies and duties of human life rested on the traditions of two millennia of Christianity, and who was a radical only in the truthful sense of attempting to get to the roots of the human predicament. Despite its pro-Catholic tendency, and despite its commendable custom of commemorating the passing of worthy people even when some of these did not belong to the conservatives, National Review paid neither respect nor attention to the passing of Dorothy Day, while around the same time it published a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party.

National Review, dreadnought of postwar American conservatism, occasionally aimed its scattershot at Day. Founder William F. Buckley, Jr. referred casually to "the grotesqueries that go into making up the Catholic Worker movement"; of Miss Day, he chided "the slovenly, reckless, intellectually chaotic, anti-Catholic doctrines of this goodhearted woman--who, did she have her way in shaping national policy, would test the promise of Christ Himself, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us."

The grotesqueries he does not bother to itemize; nor does Buckley explain just what was "anti-Catholic" about a woman who told a friend, "The hierarchy permits a priest to say Mass in our chapel. They have given us the most precious thing of all--the Blessed Sacrament. If the Chancery ordered me to stop publishing The Catholic Worker tomorrow, I would."

If Buckley and Kissinger were the sum of the American right, mine would be a very brief article indeed. But there is another American right--or is it a left, for praise be the ambidextrous--in which Miss Day fits quite nicely. Indeed, I think she is more at home with these people than she ever was with Manhattan socialists. They are the Agrarians, the Distributists, the heirs to the Jeffersonian tradition. The keener of them--particularly the Catholics--understood their kinship with Day. Allen Tate, the Southern man of letters and contributor to the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, wrote his fellow Dixie poet Donald Davidson in 1936:

I also enclose a copy of a remarkable monthly paper, The Catholic Worker. The editor, Dorothy Day, has been here, and is greatly excited by our whole program. Just three months ago she discovered I'll Take My Stand, and has been commenting on it editorially. She is ready to hammer away in behalf of the new book. Listen to this: The Catholic Worker now has a paid circulation of 100,000! [Tate neglects to say that the price is a penny a copy] ... She offers her entire mailing list to Houghton-Mifflin; I've just written to Linscott about it. Miss Day may come by Nashville with us if the conference falls next weekend. She has been speaking all over the country in Catholic schools and colleges. A very remarkable woman. Terrific energy, much practical sense, and a fanatical devotion to the cause of the land!

The program that so excited Miss Day was summarized in the statement of principles drawn up at the Nashville meeting of Southern Agrarians and Distributists. Mocked as reactionary for their unwillingness to accept bigness as an inevitable condition, the conferees declared (inter alia):

--The condition of individual freedom and security is the wide distribution of active ownership of land and productive property.

--Population should be decentralized as well as ownership.

--Agriculture should be given its rightful recognition as the prime factor in a secure culture.

Though Day was absent from Nashville, she was to speak the language of the Southern Agrarians, without the drawl, many times over the years. "To Christ--To the Land!" Day exclaimed in the January 1936 issue. "The Catholic Worker is opposed to the wage system but not for the same reason that the Communist is. We are opposed to it, because the more wage earners there are the less owners there are ... how will they become owners if they do not get back to the land."

Widespread ownership was the basic tenet of the Agrarians' Catholic cousins, the Distributists. The Catholic Worker published all the major Distributists of the age, among them Chesterton and Belloc, Vincent McNabb, Father Luigi Ligutti, and the Jesuit John C. Rawe (a Nebraska-born "Catholic version of William Jennings Bryan"). On numberless occasions Dorothy Day called herself a Distributist. Thus her gripe with the New Deal: "Security for the worker, not ownership," was its false promise; she despaired in 1945 that "Catholics throughout the country are again accepting `the lesser of two evils'.... They fail to see the body of Catholic social teaching of such men as Fr. Vincent McNabb, G.K. Chesterton, Belloc, Eric Gill and other Distributists ... and lose all sight of The Little Way."

Dorothy Day kept to the little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not always beautiful, at least it is always human.

The Catholic Worker position on economics was expressed quite clearly:

[W]e favor the establishment of a Distributist economy wherein those who have a vocation to the land will work on the farms surrounding the village and those who have other vocations will work in the village itself. In this way we will have a decentralized economy which will dispense with the State as we know it today and will be federationist in character.... We believe in worker ownership of the means of production and distribution as distinguished from nationalization. This to be accomplished by decentralized cooperatives and the elimination of a distinct employer class.

The American name for this is Jeffersonianism, and the failure of Distributism to attract much of a stateside following outside of those Mencken derided as "typewriter agrarians" owes in part to its Chesterbellocian tincture. "Gothic Catholicism" never could play in Peoria.

Nor could it stand upon the Republican platform. Garry Wills recalls this exchange during his first visit with William F. Buckley, Jr.: "`Are you a conservative, then?' [Buckley asked]. I answered that I did not know. Are Distributists conservative? `Philip Burnham tells me they are not.' It was an exchange with the seeds of much later misunderstanding."

Were the Distributists conservative? Was Day conservative? Depends. Herbert Agar, the Kentucky Agrarian and movement theorist, wrote in the American Review (April 1934), "For seventy years, a `conservative' has meant a supporter of Big Business, of the politics of plutocracy," yet "the root of a real conservative policy for the United States must be redistribution of property." Ownership--whether of land, a crossroads store, a machine shop--must be made "the normal thing."

"Property is proper to man," insisted Dorothy Day, though she and the Distributists--and much of the old American right--meant by property something rather more substantial than paper shares in a Rockefellerian octopus. "Ownership and control are property," declared Allen Tate, making a distinction between a family farm--or family firm--and a joint-stock corporation, the artificial spawn of the state.

Like Tate and the Southern Agrarians, Day was no collectivist, eager to herd the fellaheen onto manury unromantic Blithedales. "The Communists," she said, sought to build "a sense of the sacredness and holiness and the dignity of the machine and of work, in order to content the proletariat with their property-less state." So why, she asked, "do we talk of fighting communism, which we are supposed to oppose because it does away with private property? We have done that very well ourselves in this country." The solution: "We must emphasize the holiness of work, and we must emphasize the sacramental quality of property too." ("An anti-religious agrarian is a contradiction in terms," according to Donald Davidson.)

Day described the Catholic Worker program as being "for ownership by the workers of the means of production, the abolition of the assembly line, decentralized factories, the restoration of crafts and the ownership of property," and these were to be achieved by libertarian means, through the repeal of state-granted privileges and a flowering of old-fashioned American voluntarism.

During the heyday of modern American liberalism, the 1930s, when Big Brother supposedly wore his friendliest phiz, Day and the Catholic Workers said no. They bore a certain resemblance to those old progressives (retroprogressives)--Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and Hiram Johnson--who turned against FDR for what they saw as the bureaucratic, militaristic, centralizing thrust of his New Deal. The antithetical tendencies of the Catholic Worker and the 1930s American left were juxtaposed in the November 1936 issue of the Catholic Worker. under the heading "Catholic Worker Opposition to Projected Farm-Labor Party.," the box read:

Farm-Labor Party stands for: Progress Industrialism Machine Caesarism (bureaucracy) Socialism Organizations.

Catholic Worker stands for: Tradition Ruralism Handicrafts Personalism Communitarianism Organisms.

And never the twain shall meet.

An anarchistic distrust of the state, even in its putatively benevolent role as giver of alms, pervaded the Catholic Workers, as it did the 1930s right. But then as the late Karl Hess, one-time Barry Goldwater speechwriter turned Wobbly homesteader, wrote, the American right had been "individualistic, isolationist, decentralist--even anarchistic," until the Cold War reconciled conservatives to the leviathan state.

The 1930s dissenters--the old-fashioned liberals now maligned as conservatives; the unreconstructed libertarians; the cornbelt radicals--proposed cooperatives and revitalized village economies as the alternative to government welfare. The Catholic Workers agreed. The holy fool Peter Maurin, Day's French peasant comrade, asserted that "he who is a pensioner of the state is a slave of the state." Day, in her memoir The Long Loneliness, complained:

The state had entered to solve [unemployment] by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials.... Labor was aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the responsibility that it entailed.

"Bigness itself in organization precludes real liberty," wrote Henry Clay Evans, Jr. in the American Review, a Distributist journal. The home--the family--was the right size for most undertakings. And so the home must be made productive once more. In the April 1945 Catholic Worker, Janet Kalven of the Graiiville Agricultural School for Women in Loveland, Ohio called for "an education that will give young women a vision of the family as the vital cell of the social organism, and that will inspire them with the great ambitions of being queens in the home." By which she did not mean a sequacious helpmeet to the Man of the House, picking up his dirty underwear and serving him Budweisers during commercials, but rather a partner in the management of a "small, diversified family firm," who is skilled in everything "from bread-making to beekeeping." For "the homestead is on a human scale"--the only scale that can really measure a person's weight.

The Agrarians and Distributists dreamed of a (voluntary, of course) dispersion of the population, and Day, despite her residence in what most decentralists regarded then and regard now as the locus of evil, agreed: "If the city is the occasion of sin, as Father Vincent McNabb points out, should not families, men and women, begin to aim at an exodus, a new migration, a going out from Egypt with its flesh pots?" asked Day in September 1946. This revulsion against urbanism seems odd in a woman whose base was Manhattan, symbol of congestion, of concentration, of cosmopolitanism rampant. Yet she wrote of the fumes from cars stinging her eyes as she walked to Mass, of the "prison-gray walls" and parking lots of broken glass. "We only know that it is not human to live in a city of ten million. It is not only not human, it is not possible." The Southern Agrarians would not demur.

World War II destroyed agrarianism as an active force in American intellectnal life--just as it fortified the urban citadels of power and money. Foes of America's involvement in the war, heirs to the non-interventionist legacy of George Washington, were slandered--most notably Charles Lindbergh, whom the Catholic Worker defended against the smears of the White House.

Despite Day's disavowal of the "isolationist" label, the Catholic Worker of 1939-1941spoke the diction of the American antiwar movement, which, because it was anti-FDR, was deemed "right-wing." Sentences like "We should like to know in just what measure the British Foreign Office is dictating the foreign policy of the United States!" could have come straight from the pages of Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune. So could the objection to the "English and Communist Propaganda" of the New York papers, and the reverence toward the traditional "neutrality of the United States" and the keeping of "our country aloof from the European war."

Bill Kaufman is the author of Look Homeward, America.

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Two Excerpts from Distributism: A Catholic System of Economics

by Donald Goodman III

The Scientific Status of Economics

Many, particularly those who hold opinions contrary to those expressed in the papal encyclicals, hold that the Church has no authority in economic matters. Economics, they claim, is advanced and practiced as a science, on the model of physics and mathematics. The Church cannot make authoritative pronouncements about science; she cannot, for example, decree that the freezing temperature of water will be anything other than 32. Similarly, the Church cannot declare that when supply rises demand will also rise. Such things are simply true or not, and it is beyond the Church's competency to speak on them. This view, however, must be rejected on careful consideration. In the first place, it is a matter of open debate whether economics is truly a science in the same sense as physics and chemistry. This debate largely centers around the unpredictability of human action and the predictive power of science. Success in the empirical sciences is generally gauged by how well that science can predict the actions of its objects. Physicists, for example, formulate theories to predict the actions of light waves, and the truth of those theories (that is, the degree to which those theories accurately describe light waves) is proportional to the accuracy of those predictions. Economists can do no such thing; it seems unlikely, then, that it is truly a science in the sense described above.

Economists' definition of their purported science further prove that economics cannot be considered the same way as physics or chemistry. According to Christian economist Ronald Nash,7 economics is the study of "the choices human beings make with regard to scarce resources. "

As Aristotle teaches, the definition of a thing is its genus specified by its specific difference; that is, the type of thing that it is specified by whatever of its features makes it different from the other things of its type.9 In this case, the genus of "economics" is the "choice human beings make" and the specific difference is with regard to scarce resources. We know, then, that economics is a study of human choices, like ethics or politics, but that it studies those choices specifically as regards scarce resources, which makes it something other than the other sciences which study human choices. Nash has given us a very compact and specific definition, one which he believes describes a very scientific type of inquiry.

However, this definition does not describe a science because the study of human choices is never an exact science. The human will is, as good philosophy and revealed faith teach us, free, and therefore not subject to the operations of economic laws. The economist, then, cannot make accurate predictions about the choices that human beings will make with regard to scarce resources. He can certainly make generalizations: if you glut the wheat market, the price of wheat will go downand that is certainly a very useful and valuable ability; it is not, however, truly an empirical science, in the sense of physics or chemistry.

Other, more learned arguments have been made against the status of economics as a science, particularly by MacIntyre10; the end result is that economics, if it is to be regarded as a science in the sense of physics and chemistry, must be regarded as a singularly bad one. But within its own sphere, that of predictive generalizations, it is, of course, useful and honorable, and my argument should not be construed as advocating its abandonment.

Even if these cogent arguments against the status of economics as a science are rejected, however, one still cannot claim the immunity of economics from the moral authority of the Church. First, of course, conomics is the study of human choices, and human choices are always moral and therefore subject to the decrees of Holy Mother Church. But second, and more significantly, what we call economics, as a study of human action, is simply a branch of political knowledge, and as such is a subset of ethical science, the authority of the Church over which no Catholic can deny.

The Profit Motive

It is axiomatic among capitalists that riches are not sinful. This is, of course, true; riches are not per se sinful. However, it is indisputable that riches are proximate causes of sin. Wealth is a dangerous thing, which Our Lord and His Church have been teaching throughout the ages. But still many of the rich insist that their possession of wealth represents no hindrance to their virtue or the obtaining of eternal happiness. Our Lord, however, thought otherwise, and not infrequently took the opportunity to say so. For Christ tells us that "[i]t is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven."61 The wealthy, however, often seem to think that the camel can navigate the eye of the needle without difficulty, thus putting the words of Our Lord to naught. Again, the rich young man approached Our Lord and asked what he must do to gain the kingdom of heaven. As happens so often, Our Lord responded, "Go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven."62 The young man's wealth was a hindrance to his salvation; Our Lord therefore, in His infinite goodness, instructed him to give it up, for "if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. For it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell."63 Can we, in the face of Our Lord's clear words, claim that riches are neutral in our pursuit of eternal salvation?

The Church, indeed, supports the teaching of the Gospel. Even in Rerum Novarum, concerned principally with the poor and not the rich, we and a warning about the dangers of wealth.

Therefore, the well-to-do are admonished that wealth does not give surcease of sorrow, and that wealth is of no avail unto the happiness of eternal life but is rather a hindrance; that the threats pronounced by Jesus Christ, so unusual coming from Him, ought to cause the rich to fear; and that on one day the strictest account for the use of wealth must be rendered to God as Judge.64

The Church is not condemning the rich to Hell, any more than Christ Himself is; she merely, following her divine Founder, seeks to warn those of her children with wealth of the dangers they are facing. It is maternal care, not socialistic vindictiveness, which motivates her cautions.

This is certainly not to say that riches render virtue impossible. Indeed, riches can be the source of great virtue; witness King St. Louis, for example, or any other of many wealthy saints. But their sanctity was due to their resposible use of their wealth for the benefit of others; had they used it for their own benefit, they could never have become the saints they did. As Leo XIII says, "No one, certainly, is obliged to assist others out of what is required for his own necessary use or for that of his family, or even to give to others what he himself needs to maintain his station in life becomingly and decently."65 Indeed, thepontiff even quotes St. Thomas Aquinas to this effect. However, he does not hesitate to insist that "when the demands of necessity and propriety have been su-ciently met, it is a duty to give to the poor out of that which remains."66 In so saying Leo is echoing the words of Our Lord, Who teaches that with "that which remaineth, give alms; and behold, all things are clean unto you."67 The holy pontiff teaches unequivocally that:

[t]he substance of all this is the following: whoever has received from the bounty of God a greater share of goods, whether corporeal and external, or of the soul, has received them for this purpose, namely, that he employ them for his own perfection and, likewise, as a servant of Divine Providence, for the benefit of others.68

So we see that riches are not unalloyed good; they impart grave responsibility on their holders, and we must always recall that great axiom of the moral life: "from those to whom much is given, much is expected."

(For the full text go to Goretti Publications)

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The Ownership Solution

by Jeff Gates

The moral legitimacy of markets and democracies is based on the premise that they disperse power across a wide range of individuals, and thus benefit from the foresight, concern and common sense that reside uniquely in individuals and their communities. Unfortunately, today's "disconnected capitalism" is very far from this ideal model of dispersed control and constructive feedback. With so much finance capital concentrated in the hands of money managers (more than $12 trillion in 1996), money itself has become the measure of the public good, with capital markets operating as if on automatic pilot, guided solely by the maximization of financial returns.

What is worse, this detached form of free enterprise is combined with a global tendency to enrich the already-rich. Three decades ago, people living in the well-to-do countries were 30 times better off than those in countries where the world's poorest 20 percent live. This gap has since widened to 82 times and, according to the World Bank, is poised to widen further. As this rich-poor divide has widened, it is producing--according to the United Nations--a world "gargantuan in its excesses and grotesque in its human and economic inequalities." An example: the combined wealth of the world's richest 225 people is now equal to the combined annual income of the poorest 2.5 billion of the world's people (47 percent of the global population). The three richest people have assets that exceed the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries.

The United States is, of course, not exempt from this tendency to inequality. While more American adults own stocks than at any time in history, 71 percent of households own no shares at all or hold less than $2,000 in any form, including stock mutual funds and popular 401(k) plans.1 Though the nation's net worth grew by $5 trillion from 1983 to 1989, NYU professor Ed Wolff found that 54 percent of that was claimed by the half million families who make up the top one-half of 1 percent of the US population. The net worth of the top one percent of households now exceeds that of the bottom 90 percent.

The story with income is similar. In 1996, the US Census Bureau reported record levels of inequality, with the top fifth of American households now claiming 48.2 percent of the nation's income while the bottom fifth gets by on just 3.6 percent. As with wealth, the trends are ominous. In 1973, the income of the top 20 percent of American families was 7.5 times that of the bottom 20 percent. By 1996, it was more than 13 times.

These trends led William McDonough, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to issue a strongly worded caution: "Issues of equity and social cohesion . . . affect the very temperament of the country. We are forced to face the question of whether we will be able to go forward together as a unified society with a confident outlook or as a society of diverse economic groups suspicious of both the future and each other."

Because these global and domestic trends fuel a system that simultaneously disconnects people from the economy and divides them from one another, we now face serious fiscal, political, social and environmental challenges. How can we respond constructively to these problems?

My answer begins with the fact that private property is an essential element of a private enterprise system. So the solution, I suggest, lies in ensuring that twenty-first century free enterprise draws on its core strength: using ownership itself as the means to reverse today's disconnectedness and division. In short, we must create more owners. Pursuit of this "ownership solution" presents us with three key challenges:

--How to make "capitalists" of those with little capital to invest;
--How to foster a broader distribution of wealth without forcibly redistributing already-owned wealth;
--How to evoke ownership patterns that include a stake by those most affected by commercial activity and those in the best position to affect it. Before presenting the essentials of this ownership solution, I first review four key problem areas whose resolution would be aided by a broader dispersion of personal ownership.

The Problems

Fiscal Unsustainability

In 1996, the US government paid out $839 billion in just three key income-support programs: Social Security, Medicare and civil service pensions. The bulk of these funds were paid to people who had accumulated insufficient assets to sustain themselves. This huge budget burden is our current fiscal reality, and that's well before the first of the nation's 76 million baby-boomers begin to retire.

These entitlement programs are now the third rail of American politics: touch them only at the risk of your political life. Yet without a system that enables Americans to accumulate significant economic assets, they will continue to use their political assets (their votes) to ensure some semblance of economic security. With a more broadly self-reliant populace, much of that fiscal capacity could instead be invested in infrastructure, education, research, health care, environmental restoration--or simply left in people's pockets.

As the world's "mentor" capitalist nation, the irony of this financial predicament is profound. Consider: at present, America's hugely regressive Social Security tax is the largest single tax paid by most taxpayers, accounting for 34 percent of this year's $1.7 trillion in federal tax receipts. Social Security is the only old-age pension for a majority of American workers in private industry. Most revealing of all, the present value of those anticipated payments now represent the most significant "wealth" for a majority of US households.

Thus, in the world's avowedly most capitalist economy, the most important asset for a majority of its citizens is an assurance that someone else will be taxed on their behalf. Adding insult to injury, that tax is on employment, the sole linkage that most Americans have to their capitalist economy.

Globalization exacerbates the problem by reducing the ability of governments to tax highly mobile capital, ensuring that a growing share of the tax burden is shifted to labor. Adding outrage to insult, Congressional discussion of income security is now focused on how best to finance Social Security rather than on the more obvious and more disturbing issue: Why, 63 years after its inception, are so many Americans still so reliant on it? Why do we still not have a capitalist system widely populated with capitalists?

Americans have yet to see an economically sustainable response to their precarious economic security. To date, the policy agenda has been a mind-numbing array of income-redistribution proposals, ignoring the need for policies that could connect them to income-producing assets, the only conceivable route to economic self-sufficiency in a private property economy. While unworkable ownership patterns are left largely intact, those who grow dependent on this "downstream" tinkering foster a fiscal inflexibility aptly characterized as "demosclerosis."

Constitutional Unsustainability

In the prologue to the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson altered John Locke's classic trilogy of "life, liberty and estates," or "life, liberty and property," to read "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Perhaps there was something to Locke's original formulation. After all, the pursuit of happiness has material preconditions.

For example, a malnourished child is not enjoying a "right to the pursuit of happiness." Yet presently one in five American children live in poverty. Undereducated or poorly educated youth are not enjoying a "right to the pursuit of happiness" because they are denied access to the skills and the attitudes required to cope successfully with life in an increasingly globalized economy. Yet the GAO reports that a majority of the nation's 42 million public school students could not use computers (even if their schools could afford them) because of obsolete structures (half of the nation's 80,000 schools lack adequate electrical wiring while a third lack sufficient power). To force students into poor schools condemns them to a future of incapacity and poverty.

The constitutional mandate is clear: the government's duty is to actively advance the general welfare, and the general diffusion of the material basis for happiness is an indispensable component in ensuring the general diffusion of the right to the pursuit of happiness. The "pursuit of happiness" in a private property economy requires a government committed to broad-based property ownership as an essential material basis not only for happiness but also (per the Declaration) as a means to "provide for the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The power granted government to promote the general welfare suggests an affirmative duty to ensure that the nation's welfare-- including its material wealth--is diffused not partially but generally, thus remedying a system that harbors a socially corrosive and increasingly divisive gap between haves and have-nots.

Social Unsustainability

Today's fast-widening wealth and income gap is wreaking civil havoc. Fully a third of American men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four do not earn enough to keep a family of four out of poverty, with all that implies for the strains on marriage and the prospects for young families. This growing rift is also racial. The Census Bureau disclosed in 1991 that the meager median wealth of white households is seven times that of Hispanic households and ten times that of African-American households.

This ever widening gap has disturbing social and political implications. Two-tier societies are not fertile ground for robust democracies. Extreme economic disparities threaten open political systems, as the possession of great wealth by a few confers on their holders inordinate power, which they are typically tempted to use in ways that run counter to the general welfare. Nor is the gap confined to narrowly economic conditions. In Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality, Richard Wilkinson draws attention to the fact that societal factors have emerged as a key limiting component in the quality of life in developed societies. Documenting "the overwhelmingly social and political nature of population health," he found that "death rates from about 80 percent of the most important 80 or so causes of death are more common in blue-collar than white-collar workers."

The marketplace is fundamentally indifferent to this inequality and divisiveness. Retailers have adjusted to social polarization by turning to a "Tiffany/Kmart" marketing strategy, tailoring their products and pitches to two very different Americas. Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Worldwide warns its clients of "a continuing erosion of our traditional mass market--the middle class," while Paine Webber Inc. cautions investors to "avoid companies that cater to the 'middle' of the consumer market." In 1997, both Kmart and Tiffany reported earning surges while the mid-scale chains such as J.C. Penney suffered. The Affluent Market Institute predicts that by 2005 America's millionaires will control 60 percent of the nation's purchasing dollars (sales of high-end luxury yachts are already at record levels).

This dual society means that separate and decidedly unequal markets are becoming the norm--for example, private banking for the well-to-do alongside record levels of check-cashing outlets (the United States now has 5500 check-cashing outlets, more than double the number in 1988). The Gap recently remodeled and expanded its upscale Banana Republic clothing stores, adding 68 new outlets since 1992. Meanwhile, it created a lower-end chain called Old Navy, opening more than 200 outlets since 1993 (compared with just 21 new middle-income Gap outlets).

Environmental Unsustainability

Americans relate to their environment largely through their wallets and through market signals. At present, those signals are incapable of guiding us toward environmental sustainability. Pricing alone--whether for products or for property (such as share prices)--cannot convey the complex information required for a sustainable future. And the combination of concentrated and disconnected capital ensures a decision-making process in which environmental effects are too distant in time or place to be incorporated as a value in a system that defers to the very limited information reflected in financial values (particularly net present value).

Environmental sustainability has local roots. Acid rain is not an abstraction; it begins with a specific facility in a specific location emitting identifiable toxins that travel in highly predictable patterns. Similarly, when solvents show up in an aquifer, it is because of a particular producer at a specific locale manufacturing explicit products for specific clients. Though we can often identify the immediate physical cause of environmental damage, little attention has been paid to identifying the underlying institutional cause, particularly the economic and social conditions that evoke, mask, condone or even reward such behavior.

One of the key challenges to sustainability is the notion that every environmental problem can be tackled by a technical or regulatory fix--cleaner refrigerants, a better smokestack scrubber, quicker clean-up and so forth. Though technical, regulatory, and after-the-fact remedies are all helpful, sustainability requires prevention: better to build a fence at the top of the cliff than station ambulances below.

For example, imagine an annual shareholders' meeting of an electric power company at which a question is raised about the potential effect on the community from the disposal of the utility's effluents. Imagine further that there is potential for long-term damage to the health of that community's children depending on the choice of waste-disposal method. There's nothing quite like a contingent of concerned, vocal, informed, and empowered parents showing up at a shareholders' meeting--as shareholders.

That change in context could change both the tone and content of the meeting, transforming what is typically an impersonal, financially oriented, technical discussion into a forum in which the full range of relevant considerations--emotional, nonfinancial, personal, and moral--come into play. Broadening the range of opinions presented (and feedback solicited) could result in a very different decision-making process, particularly where the environmental effects are local but uncertain or difficult to quantify. Corporate decision-making looks very different when your family is at stake, not just your financial return. By crafting the legal environment of free enterprise to ensure a component of up-close capitalists, we enhance the likelihood that we'll see the emergence of sound environmental decision-making in today's finance-dominated commercial environment.

Inclusive Capitalism

Crafting an ownership solution to these fiscal, political, social and environmental problems will require a mix of private and public leadership. To improve social equity and enhance intelligent, people-responsive feedback, we need a more broadly participatory capitalism. However, capitalism is presently engineered not to create capitalists but to finance capital. Until those two very different objectives are combined, free enterprise has no chance of becoming widely populated with capitalists. Currently, the corporate sector finances itself within a "closed system of finance" that's wired for highly exclusive ownership when what's needed is a financial and a policy environment that ensures a steady broadening of capital ownership.

To grasp fully the challenge facing those who prefer a more inclusive capitalism, it's essential to realize just how "the rich get richer." Everyone knows it happens; surprisingly few understand the quite simple mechanics of how. As a quick glance at Table 1 indicates, companies fund themselves in a way that is designed not to create more owners but to raise more capital for existing owners.

The second practical challenge is to address the role played by personal versus business saving. As the chart below indicates, business saving (i.e., internally generated funds) have long been the dominant form of national saving--and is steadily becoming more so. Yet business saving fuels the rich-get-richer "closed system of finance" (see Table 2).

One thing that's abundantly clear: individual stock purchases alone are inadequate for expanding ownership. We can't expect wage earners to buy their way into significant ownership from already stretched paychecks. If ever we hope to experience the benefits of a property system that favors more than a privileged few, we need not a "level playing field" but a field engineered to ensure that more players have a reasonable chance of making it onto the field. The intelligent reengineering of conventional financing techniques can steadily broaden ownership-based on the same financial principles that have proven so successful in concentrating ownership.

Planning for Participation

In Economic Policy for a Free Society, libertarian theorist Henry Simons argued that "the libertarian good society lies in the maximum dispersion of property compatible with effective production." How can we achieve that dispersion?

The ownership solution suggests an answer--or really, an hypothesis. Because we've never had an economic system engineered for inclusion, we can't know for certain what the results will be--whether inclusive firms will be better producers, better environmental stewards, or more socially responsible. We don't know whether an inclusive society will more cohesive, less violent, and more humane. We don't know for sure how much ownership engineering is too much--or too little. And it is not yet clear how quickly the need for government will shrink as we see a shrinkage in the need for income redistribution. To find out, we need to experiment.

But we need the right sorts of experiments, ones that are grounded in financial pragmatism. The widely popular employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) is one such experiment. Since 1975, the tax code has encouraged the use of ESOPs as an ownership-broadening technique of corporate finance. Where shares are acquired for employees on a debt-financed basis, ESOP-sponsor companies are allowed a tax deduction not only for interest expense but also for principal payments on the loan. That enables employees to acquire shares on a self-financed basis, paying for shares with the future earnings of the company rather than with the past savings from their labor.

For example, through an ESOP, founders of a company have a tax-favored way to sell their shares (potentially deferring payment of capital gain tax), companies get a tax deduction for funding an employee benefit plan, and employees get ownership on a tax-deferred basis. In essence, employees gain access to today's "closed system of finance" to build a nest egg, often without having to lay out cash.

Some 11,000 American corporations now have ESOPs and similar employee ownership plans, covering almost eight million employees. Ninety percent of ESOPs are in unlisted companies though ESOPs are also popular in publicly traded firms. For instance, United Airlines is 55 percent employee-owned through an ESOP. But while broad-based employee stock options are becoming popular, ESOPs are growing quite slowly, with 1996 ESOP transactions totaling less than $1 billion in a year when the US economy saw almost $1,850 billion in total capital financing (capital expenditures plus mergers and acquisitions). To make employee ownership attractive, companies need additional encouragement--such as a preferred corporate income tax rate for maintaining a prescribed level of broad-based ownership.

Or ownership-broadening firms might receive more favorable depreciation rates. And a tax deduction might also be allowed for, say, half the proceeds realized on an estate's sale of stock to an ESOP, thus encouraging today's well-to-do to ensure that part of their shares end up in the hands of the company's natural owners--the employees. The ESOP notion could also be expanded through a "RESOP"-related enterprise stock ownership plan--to create an ownership stake for those employed by firms (including micro-enterprise suppliers or distributors) related to an ESOP- sponsoring firm.

Cash Flows, Ownership Grows

As an ownership-engineering rule of thumb, remember: where the cash flows, ownership grows. That rule can be used to make owners not only of employees--as with ESOPs-but also of customers and even the general public. For example, CSOPs (customer stock ownership plans) could be implemented in investor-owned power companies that are financially reengineered so that their customers own a portion of their shares. As investment bankers know, practically any revenue stream can be used to "owner-ize" income-producing assets over time. In the case of a power company, the company's value is based on its customers paying their bills. Without their patronage, the company's financial value as a going concern would quickly vanish. The goal of the CSOP is to craft a capital structure that will capture some of that financial value for those whose patronage maintains that value.

Doubtless you pay two utility bills each month, power and water. Unless you're a rare exception, you don't own shares in those utilities. Yet each bill you pay includes a financial return for someone who does. You can live in a utility district for 100 years and still pay a return each month to someone who may live thousands of miles away. Why not, over time, localize a component of that ownership so that you pay some portion of that return to yourself? That's a CSOP.

Similar self-financing techniques can be used to create individual ownership based on geography or citizenship. Thus, consider GSOCs--general stock ownership corporations. They would "owner-ize" natural resources like mining deposits or drilling rights on public lands. A GSOC could, for instance, retain a royalty interest in an oil field, while a more traditional company, say with a combination ESOP/RESOP, is awarded extraction rights. Some shares (or warrants) could be allocated to fund local education or infrastructure.

In the only version of this concept thus far enacted into federal law, legislation was passed in 1978 enabling a for-profit GSOC that would have allowed Alaskan citizens to acquire British Petroleum's stake in the TransAlaska Pipeline Service Corp. A self-financing element would have paid the acquisition costs from future dividends. But the plan, championed by Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, was never implemented, for local political reasons. Alaskan voters did, however, establish the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., funded with lease payments and royalty income from the state's oil fields. Since 1977, it has paid out over $5.8 billion to 500,000 Alaskan residents from a principal now exceeding $20 billion.

Politics

Mechanisms like these are easily crafted. What's required is the public will to put them to use. That might be kick-started with an opinion poll, asking people if they'd like Congress to enact policies that create more capitalists. It was just such a poll--asking whether Congress should enact policies fostering full employment--that brought political credibility to the Employment Act of 1946. That act established the President's Council of Economic Advisers, requiring that it publish an annual report appraising the condition of the US economy--with the glaring exception of any requirement to appraise the condition of the nation's ownership. The 1946 act could be amended, creating a new Cabinet-level Department of Capital Ownership (similar to the job-oriented Department of Labor) that, working with the council, could include in each year's Economic Report of the President a survey of current ownership patterns and an appraisal of progress toward expanded capital ownership. What gets measured gets managed.

Similar use could be made of ownership impact reports, analogous to the environmental-impact assessmentsrequired by government agencies. For instance, government contracts could require an ownership impact analysis, identifying both the short-term and long-term effect on ownership patterns. Imagine if we'd had such a requirement when Eisenhower approved contracts for building the interstate highway system. Or during Reagan's $1 trillion defense build-up. Or to identify the ownership impact of his 1981 tax bill providing $872 billion in deficit-financed supply-side investment incentives. Similar reporting could accompany the granting of broadcast licenses, the opening of timber or oil resources to extraction, the granting of loan guarantees, or the provision of export/import assistance.

Taking that one step further, the government's purchasing power, for items ranging from aircraft carriers to airline tickets, could be directed to corporations with certifiably broad-based ownership. The value of these firms is often largely dependent on taxpayer-funded purchases. Taxpayers would realize far more value for their money if contract awards enhanced the economic self-sufficiency of a broad rather than a narrow base of their fellow taxpayers. Any government contract -- federal, state or local -- could likewise be limited to companies with broad-based ownership.

Through non-invasive ownership engineering, a shared capitalism can gradually replace today's exclusive, detached, divisive, and socially corrosive ownership patterns. This shift requires a mix of policy and private-sector initiatives focused on a steady broadening of ownership because only such a mix will, in time, change the current concentration. While full employment can remain a centerpiece of economic policy, it must be complemented by an ownership participation policy.

Oddly enough, this could fill the gaping policy void in either the Republican or the Democratic Party. That's because an ownership solution offers a unique political hybrid--lending itself to populist rhetoric while practical prescriptions are typically rock-ribbed conservative and appealingly progressive.

Toward a Connected Capitalism

Ironically, those most disadvantaged by today's neoclassical model and the fast-emerging impact of globalization may find their best philosophical ally in Adam Smith, who cautioned two centuries ago about the abuses likely to accompany excesses of economic liberty: "Those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments."

Both Smith and Thomas Jefferson were forceful advocates for systems of widely distributed control; both markets and democracies trace their origins to the concept of genuinely self-designed systems. Achievement of that still-elusive goal awaits an institutional environment engineered to incorporate the aspirations and ideas of those whose lives are affected by the commercial forces that surround them. We are only at the beginning stages of understanding how to foster such a system. At the very least, however, we must think more broadly, more deeply, and more creatively about how property--as an intrinsic element of free enterprise--can itself be engineered to ensure a more broadly shared prosperity.

1See James M. Poterba and Andrew A. Samwick, Stock Ownership Patterns, Stock Market Fluctuations, and Consumption (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1995), pp 295-357, 368-72.

Boston Review

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Distributism vs. Capitalism

by Roy F. Moore

Most of Distributism’s critics consider it as a form of Socialism. They point to the fact that both Chesterton and Belloc started as Socialists, and that is where their command of the facts comes to an end. Both Chesterton and Belloc clearly pulled away from the dark path of Socialism, and openly attacked it. But they never ceased their assault on Capitalism. So, in the minds of certain defenders of Capitalism, Distributism must still be Socialism.

Why do people insist on misunderstanding what we support and oppose? Why do folks believe we are against a “market economy”? It is because we have been indoctrinated in the belief that a “market economy” and a “capitalist economy” are one and the same.

But they aren’t.

A market economy has been with us ever since civilization began. The buying and selling of goods, trade across borders, barter and exchange and competition among rivals are part and parcel of a society’s life. From the days of ancient Babylon to our computerized age, the ebb and flow of production and commerce goes on like the tide and the seasons. After the coming of Christ and the spread of His Church into European society, the laws and life of commerce gradually became more humane, and the greed of the powerful was mostly held in check.

In western and central Europe during the High Middle Ages, as Belloc notes in his classic book, The Servile State, the guilds regulated the markets and the crafts, while the Crown kept tabs on financial and legal matters. High quality of goods and services were protected and preserved, competition was allowed to flourish, but within certain boundaries. And under-girding all was the authority of the Church, vigilant in defending God-given rights and the good of souls in both government and marketplace.

But between the late Renaissance and the birth of the Protestant Reformation, all that began to change and for the worse. The Church found its authority weakened due to internal corruption and heresy, and a Protestant legal system ushered in by John Calvin enabled the kings and princes of northern Europe to seize the Church’s lands and enrich the powerful few. Usury, no longer condemned as a sin, became the legal norm, and the wise prohibitions against usury that once protected the lower classes were tossed aside as if they were filthy rags. Bankers and wealthy merchants took advantage of the chaotic times to worsen the lot of the workers, farmers and craftsmen.

As the centuries plodded on, the ancient restraints on the market and finance crumbled away. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the poor and the farmers were fed into the factories, working themselves into their graves. Such abuses were the stuff of Charles Dickens’ fiction that was clearly based on fact, since he himself was forced to work as a boy in such a factory. He wrote eloquently and heart-breakingly of those black years and the poverty and shame.

This state of affairs which would be called Capitalism would have its explainers and defenders, the primary one being Adam Smith and his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. In it, he posited an “invisible hand” that guided economies toward the good, believing that “enlightened self-interest” would keep any forces of chaos unleashed by this system in check. Chesterton thought otherwise when he wrote:

It was the mystical dogma of (Jeremy) Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

Such abuses and turmoil brought forth moral revulsion, which emerged in the reaction of Socialism. But since, like Capitalism, it believed in centralization of economic and political power, the cure it promoted for the ills it protested was worse than the disease. And since, like Capitalism, it had a materialistic core, it saw the religious and spiritual as a dangerous drug for the masses, an “opiate of the people” as the foul Karl Marx put it. Neither system prizes the common man owning his own means of earning a living, not depending on a wage paid either by big government or big business.

As Chesterton put it:

Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property.

In Distributism, productive property is owned by the many, rather than the few. In practical terms, it means small business, co-operatives and worker-owned and managed businesses run the day-to-day workings of commerce. Big businesses are encouraged by government to break up into smaller, independent units. Government, in turn, is reduced in size and scale, with local government handling most of the responsibility thus eliminating the need for overregulation and reducing the size and scope of government, as well as the demand on taxpayers. Hence, a true market-based economy arises, one not plagued by the lust for dominance that infests both Capitalism and Socialism.

Chesterton knew that the word Distributism sounds suspicious to the ear. He admitted it so, saying it was “awkward but accurate”. And we are waiting for a better name. But in the meantime, better to be accurate and awkward than to be false and flowing.

Gilbert! Magazine
Reprinted with Permission

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Man, State, Economics

by Fr. Kenneth Novak

Economics begins with the "management of the household" and deals primarily with the family. Only secondarily is it concerned with "Political Economy," that is, the relation of the family to external goods, with the wealth of the nation and how that wealth is produced, distributed, exchanged, and consumed. The modern economist holds Political Economy to be a physical or natural science with rigid laws, comparable to physics or geometry, which can be methodically studied and empirically tested. The point for these moderns is that the "natural" law which governs economic science is not normative (i.e., consisting of moral laws that govern what man ought to do in this or that situation) but it is rather analytic (i.e., based simply upon conclusions drawn from observation and analysis). But, believing that Economics works the same as gravity works is nuts. The law of gravity is a property of physical nature that cannot be denied without serious consequences. "Laws" of economics which demonstrate that the big firm "must" always swallow the small firm may seem irrefutably true in a society in which laissez faire (literally, "let people do [as they please]") is the law of the land, but the idea that I must conform to a "law" of this kind simply because this observed "swallowing phenomena" is likely to repeat itself—barring any moral, customary, or legal restraint—is nuts, too.

The "scientific" approach to Economics is based upon basic truths and observed behavior. Well and good, so far. For instance, it is not "economical" to undertake a productive activity if it consumes more wealth than it produces, or, men stranded on an island will immediately look to build shelter. Catholics often conclude, however, from considering this "scientific" aspect of Political Economy, that Economics is a science like math and chemistry are. But thinking of Economics only in this way leads Catholics to forget that Economics is governed by laws of justice and morality. No Catholic who understands Economics in a Catholic way would say selling pornography is an "economically valuable" activity any more than it was a moral one, or that just because America can be efficiently stocked with slave-produced Chinese junk (49 hours a week at 30-40 cents an hour), it is therefore "economical" that Wal-Mart be allowed to run every family retail and craft shop out of business.

Modern economists come to their "economic" conclusions by saying that they are "compelled" by "economic law" to argue for this and that proposition. Hilaire Belloc says that if Economics as a science is truly independent of morality, it cannot propose certain courses of action but only explain how the economic process works.

The Science of Economics does not deal with true happiness nor even with well-being in material things. It deals with a strictly limited field of what is called "Economic Wealth," and if it goes outside its own boundaries it goes wrong. Making people as happy as possible is much more than Economics can pretend to. Economics cannot even tell you how to make people well-to-do in material things. -Economics for Helen

Belloc writes that "economic law" provides no excuse for violation of the moral law, because though the two are independent one is subordinate to the other. Economics must be kept in its place in order to prevent its trumping the moral law:

The only difficulty is to keep in our minds a clear distinction between what is called economic law, that is, the necessary results of producing wealth, and the moral law, that is the matter of right and wrong in the distribution and use of wealth. Some people are so shocked by the fact that economic law is different from moral law that they try to deny economic law. Others are so annoyed by this lack of logic that they fall into the other error of thinking that economic law can override moral law. (Ibid)

Laissez faire Economics is practically laissez faire morality.

Moral philosophy is a "science" no less scientific than the next. Modern Catholics tend to think, however, of "science" as based upon natural observation and physical fact, and some other discipline as telling us how to behave. On the contrary it is very "scientific" to understand, based on first principles, how normative laws governing human action regulate not only private activity but also the public pursuit of wealth.

Knowing to what degree the science of wealth creation is ultimately subordinate to moral science would help clear up the confusion perpetuated by writers—among them even traditional Catholics—who refer to Economics as an exclusively "positive science" which is a "value-neutral, scientific discipline" and not the normative one of Political Economy which regulates human conduct. Once we skate on Economics as "value-neutral," we are on thin ice. Whereas Fr. Denis Fahey explains, "As the Mystical Body of Christ was accepted by mankind…economic thought and action began to respect the jurisdiction and guidance of the Catholic Church" (The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World, 5), we hear a woodpile of Catholic thinkers today deliberating that Church teaching of cardinal points of doctrine on man, society, and economic life are "an indefensible extension of the prerogatives of the Church's legitimate teaching office." On the contrary, it is from moral and social philosophy itself that economics as a social science must derive its essential concepts (Fr. Heinrich Pesch, Ethics and the National Economy)! From this foundation certain principles of moral rectitude in economic practice (beyond just theft and dishonesty) can be derived that are not the less true because the Magisterium has sought to authoritatively teach them for the common good.

On "Economics," the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) says:

The best usage of the present time is to make political economy an ethical science, that is, to make it include a discussion of what ought to be in the economic world as well as what is. This has all along been the practice of Catholic writers.

Happily it also remains the practice of writers Christopher Ferrara and Dr. Peter Chojnowski. In this issue of The Angelus, they explain why we should reject modern schools of economics which fail to take root in a truly Catholic understanding of what justly guides and limits economic thought, namely, the moral and social philosophy that is the patrimony of the Church and her scholars. Actually, let me now pass the buck to them.

©Angelus Online

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Crucified Between Two Thieves:Catholic Social Thinking vs. Right and Left

by Anthony Basile, Ph.D

I. The Rhetoric of Freedom: "Free" Market and "Free" Sex

If I received a penny each time someone suspected me of having far Left sympathies, I would be a rich capitalist today! And why? Because I introduce considerations from Catholic social teaching into my arguments. I am sorry to add that often these accusations come from none other than my fellow Catholics! Yet, even when I point out the encyclical where the idea was first introduced, the result is predictably the same: with much guile and little critical thought, the insights of a century old Catholic tradition are dismissed outright. What is this? Are we still laboring under the spell of McCarthy's paranoia? Does questioning the justice of a market system that holds laissez-faire economics as its ideal automatically earn you the stigma of being a Marxist intellectual? What's going on here? We may be demoralized by the frequent dismissals, but if we Catholics don't speak out for economic justice, who will? It seems that "liberal guilt" has not yet moved the upper middle class to legitimate the "economically challenged" by including them in their politically correct pantheon of marginalized minorities. Certainly the rich have nothing to gain by speaking out for social justice. The media, a small set of very large corporations, reports that the economy is always getting better, but hardly clarifies the issue. Better for whom? Large corporations like the media?

Is it surprising that a profit-making company in the business of disseminating public information does not report that you're suffering while they prosper? Economic indicators are made public information by various academic or government organizations, but we hear little public debate regarding their significance. Just what do these numbers mean in terms of our everyday life? How should we act on the information they give us? Consider the following subtlety that is typical of statistical information: the price of computers goes down by 50 percent, but the price of cheese goes up 10 percent; so, on average, prices are dropping. OK, let them eat computer chips! It is difficult to respond to our current situation if we don't know the facts and we can't see how those facts are relevant to ourlives.I don't want to foster any false paranoia, but look around. We don't need an official report to let us know that the dignity of our fellow man is affronted every time he can't afford to send his children to college, or can't afford children in the first place, or has difficulty paying the gas bill, or getting decent housing, or, in the extreme, has to scavenge through garbage cans for empty bottles and half eaten bags of potato chips. This is not an exaggeration! Rummaging through garbage is a daily activity for the street people on Elmwood St. in Buffalo. And, in response to that legion of "concerned citizens" who politely inform me that I can always leave the country if I don't like it here, I remind them that these poor souls will not digest their food any better if I do. Yet, the very people that are indignant of my criticisms have no qualms complaining about how poorly they are treated when employers warn them in no uncertain terms,"well, if you don't like your job, you can work elsewhere."

Apparently, injustice is easier to recognize when it happens to you than when it happens to your neighbor. But, this is not a question about the American way vis-a-vis other ways of life. Indeed, it has been a growing global problem ever since the early '80s when First World leaders like Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney, among others, began to implement polices in their respective countries which, if they did not actually send us down our present economic path, certainly did little to prevent it. Nor should we limit our vision to the First World only; the Third World has suffered far greater injustices at the hands of the same economic system that now hits close to home. Economic exploitation knows no national boundaries.Let me begin by characterizing the problem, grosso modo. In a nation as rich as the US (or any First World country), it is difficult to believe that the economic hardship encountered by the average person and his family is due to scarcity. A more reasonable explanation points to the process by which the wealth is distributed. That is, it is not the case that the nation lacks the natural and human resources to, say, provide good housing for everyone; rather, these resources, as they are allocated by the economic rules of "fair play," are not directed towards addressing human needs, but towards increasing profit margins, and these two ends are not necessarily compatible; in fact, they are often blatantly contradictory.

Trickle down economics would have us believe otherwise, but it is hard to understand exactly how this would work. What magic connects the individual's needs to the profit margins of large corporations? Lower cost for products and services is the answer offered. But, consider the otherside, namely the now famous scenario of corporate downsizing-famous because it offers an excellent example of why trickle down economics fails. It is perfectly legitimate in the business world for a company to lay offworkers in order to increase its profit; however, doing so means that someone will have to pay by loosing his job. If these unfortunate individuals have a mortgage or other financial commitments, hardships are sure to follow. The lower price of computers will make little difference in their lives if they don't have a steady income; although, it may make a big difference in the pockets of other companies that do use computers. So the "magic" of trickle down economics does not benefit the workers; indeed, the environment created when every company simultaneously tends towards downsizing is an economy which is capital intensive and labor scarce. How can this possibly meet the need to include more people into the labor force? We can't just fool ourselves into some fantasy by saying, "well, somehow things will work out," because they don't. We can easily produce counter-examples and so can banks which foreclose on mortgages. There is no "invisible hand" within the system miraculously making things work out.

We must resist deluding ourselves with non-existent phantoms that transcend the sphere of human activity and appear just in time to save the day. The economic system in place is a result of the human actions, and any injustices to be found there point to individuals and the decisions they make. God promised us a world that could sustain us. The rest is our doing. Economics is essentially a matter of morality. If, then, the problem is not scarcity, but how the wealth is distributed,why are so many people resistant to questioning the "free" market system?

If things are really rough, and it seems to me that they are because many of my hard working friends and colleagues are experiencing similar financial hardships, albeit to varying degrees, why is there this uncritical commitment to the very system which they find oppressive? This is a difficult question with a very complex response. I cannot pretend to answer it completely, but there is this vague sense among the general public that the "free" market forms part of the "freedom" of the "Free World" which opposes itself to the totalitarianism of the old Soviet bloc, and now even the Muslim nations-the old good guys versus bad guys theme which still finds its expression in popular cinema. So, to question the "free" market is to question "freedom". I am well aware that this is just a caricature, and many people rise above it. Nonetheless, at the unconscious level, there are some very strong associations connected to the word "freedom" which have much more formative value than they should. In this way, many questionable cultural habits can be justified by simply affixing the word "free" in front of them, like "free" sex. But anyone who justifies the "free" market solely on the basis that it is "free" can have no argument against "free" sex; one wonders at times how different the political Left and Right really are in the US. Once the notion of a "free" what-have-you has entered the popular imagination, the logical argument is an uphill battle against people's emotional responses. Try to convince them that this sort of "freedom" is an illusion which, upon closer examination, reveals itself as enslavement, and you will see what I mean!

Catholic morality grows out of a wisdom that understands why "free" sex is really enslavement to passions and a loss of something very precious to our humanity, just as it can see why a "free" market is tantamount to near slavery. But do either criticisms get a sympathetic hearing? (Incidentally, if you doubt the second statement, that a "free" market tends to enslave, please read "Rerum Novarum" by Pope Leo XIII.) The remainder of this article is not aimed at expounding Catholic social teaching.

For this, I refer the reader to Rupert J. Ederer's fine book, Economics as if God matters, published by Fidelity Press. In it, the author comments on six major papal encyclicals that were central in forming the teaching, and he makes them accessible to the lay reader who wants togain an appreciation for their spirit. For those who want to jump directly into an encyclical, I recommend Centesimus Annus by John Paul II, since it commemorates the 100th anniversary of the incipient encyclical, Rerum Novarum, and refers back to important earlier work.

Rather, in this article, I want to limit myself to clearing a path for Catholic social teaching by showing that it is radically different from either Marxist or Liberal social theories. In doing so, I hope to resolve any scruples the reader might have, for reasons stated above or for other reasons, and assure him that the teaching does indeed grow organically out of Catholicism. In sum, I will show below that both the Marxist and Liberal traditions,which have their origin in the Enlightenment, share a defect that Catholic social teaching not only avoids, but addresses directly. Namely, both attempt to give an account of society on the basis of some underlying "amoral" dynamics, and in so doing, eclipse moral considerations from economic and political decisions. Historically, this has left a moral vacuum in society which has been filled by all sorts of injustices and resulted in countless suffering. We still live one particular version of that disorder today, what below I call "consumer-driven capitalism."

This unfortunate state of affairs came about because the Enlightenment reacted against Catholicism, and religion in general, and attempted to exclude morality from the public sphere, either by restricting it to the private sphere in the case of Liberalism, or by eliminating all together in the case of Marxism.

This unfortunate state of affairs came about because the Enlightenment reacted against Catholicism, and religion in general, and attempted to exclude morality from the public sphere, either by restricting it to the private sphere in the case of Liberalism, or by eliminating all together in the case of Marxism. Instead of moral reasoning, Enlightenment thinkers opted for procedural reasoning which they believed was morally neutral in the same way that the laws of physics are morally neutral. Their unlimited love for the natural sciences led them to appropriate scientific reasoning far beyond its proper limits and extend it to humans in society.

This project was bound to fail because humans are irreducibly moral creatures, and no amoral theory can possible describe them or prescribe norms for them. The only effect an amoral theory has if it is taken on as a complete understanding of our nature, is that it obscures moral awareness and leads to disordered behavior.

For this reason, I will call Marxism and Liberalism "theory" because they purport to be positive sciences like physics, and I will call Catholic social teaching a "teaching" because it unabashedly integrates a normative prescription with our social and economic world. In fact, Catholic social teaching, properly understood,belongs to moral theology and aims at responding to the mess created by the Enlightenment. My scope here is limited. If I succeed in awakening in the reader, especially the reader who has a position of responsibility within the community, a desire to seriously understand what scholars and popes have said about economic justice and to integrate that teaching into their lives, then this article has fulfilled its purpose.

II. Orthodox Marxism: The Material Dialectic and Morality Lost

It is important to distinguish Communism as the actual political movement that took power in Russia under Lenin in 1918 from the social theory that was invoked to justify it, namely Marxism. The relationship between what Marx said and what the Revolutionary Party picked up as the jargon for its propaganda is an uneasy one at best; so, I will take the accusation that some people have made against me, namely that Catholic social teaching is close in spirit to Communism, to mean that it is close to Marxism.

Otherwise, comparing theory and teaching on the one hand with an historical event on the other would be like comparing apples and oranges. But even with this distinction, Marxist social theory and Catholic social teaching are so different that the whole project of contrasting the two seems a little silly. In truth, the people who made the accusation did not know what they were saying; still, it was sufficient to hear any criticism of the "free" market for them to jump to conclusions, so I want this response to go on record. Moreover, my discussion of Marxism will bring out its essential defect so that its similarity to Liberal economics, despite the popular belief that these are polar opposites, will become obvious. The central doctrine of orthodox Marxism, the sine qua non, if you will,is the doctrine of the historical dialectic which aims at giving a total understanding of the human condition through an understanding of our history. Curiously enough, this aspect of Marxism ultimately derives from Christianity, if not in content, then at least in form. St. Augustine, in the City of God, gave Christians our lasting understanding of history as the succession of ages in which God's plan for the salvation of mankind unfolds. Unlike the mythical sense of time that the ancient Greeks possessed, in which archetypal events inaugurated by the gods in illo tempore were forever repeated, Christ came once and for all, and he came in history, as one who dwelt among us.

So, whereas pagan time was cyclical, Christian time is linear, with a definite beginning at Creation and the Fall, a definite middle with the coming of Christ and a definite end at the Final Judgment. This historical structure was first appropriated by Hegel, who emptied it of its Christian content and put in its place a pantheistic version. He saw history, not as the unfolding of God's plan, but as the unfolding of the World Spirit, and incarnations of this spirit were to be seen in the historical events and people of his day, like Napoleon. Linear history was next appropriated by Marx who turned Hegel upside down and said that it was not spirit, but matter and its impersonal, amoral laws that underlay history. But not the laws of physics; Marx was referring to the laws of economics.

Linear history was next appropriated by Marx who turned Hegel upside down and said that it was not spirit, but matter and its impersonal, amoral laws that underlay history. But not the laws ofphysics; Marx was referring to the laws of economics.

On this account, human history is driven forward by the interplay of a society's natural resources, means of production and means of distribution. From a primitive state, we evolved first into a slave economy, then a feudal economy, and now, a capitalist economy. But, there will be one final stage to the dialectic, the revolution, after which we will enter our socialist phase, history will end and we will live in the workers' paradise. That the dialectic must inevitably reach this critical point is demonstrated as follows: as capitalists get richer, the competition between them becomes fiercer, and the weaker members of their rank are forced into the working class, which in turn gets poorer. (Incidentally, if you hear something of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" in this, you may not find it surprising that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to him. One wonders just how different Marx's thought is from that of a good bourgeois Victorian!)

Eventually, the suffering of the working class leads them to realize their common condition and a class consciousness forms where the workers begin to act cooperatively. In one final decisive moment, the workers simply take over the means of production and private ownership is abolished. The creativity of the worker, which was once alienated from him in the form of wage-labor, is unleashed and becomes reintegrated into his life; he lives blissfully ever after, spontaneously producing and sharing wealth. I think the similarities to Christian eschatology are obviouse nough to not need comment. Since Marx was aiming at a total understanding of our social condition, he had to account for other institutions, like politics, law, philosophy, art, literature, religion and so forth, besides economics. To include these in his system, he posited a duality in society between the economic infrastructure, which is made up of the natural resources and the means of production and distribution, and the superstructure, which comprises the politics, laws, and so forth. The former is the material base which essentially drives society forward, while the latter, the conscious activity of society, is simply the "after effect." This has very important implications in terms of our nature.

For Marx, man is not homo sapiens, a reasoning creature, but homo faber, man the producer, an economic automaton whose functioning merges with the blind dynamics of material dialectic. On this view, one should not think of the poor working conditions of late capitalism as offending some "natural" sense of justice which is grounded in "reason"- that's Catholic talk - rather, these conditions are simply the origins of the workers' consciousness.

(The comparison can be made to the picture of the mind arising from the material functioning of the brain. Individuals in a Marxist society are like neurons in the brain: no single individual has much awareness, but collectively they do.) The class consciousness of the workers, as it is emerges from the material dialectic in the late stages of capitalism, results in a consciousness of the revolution; in contrast, bourgeois consciousness is the system of philosophy, religion, art, politics, laws,etc., which serves to justify the privileged position of the capitalists.

These are the so-called "ruling ideas" of society which, in Marx's language, attempts to instill a "false" consciousness in the workers so that they are distracted from a "true" consciousness of their condition and of the revolution.

III. The Opium of the Masses

It is at this point that the fatal flaw of Marxism reveals itself in full force. In his endeavor to develop a theory which would be truly "scientific," Marx separated the dynamics of society, which he represented as amoral and impersonal laws, from the living individuals who make up that society and are moral beings. Let me expand on this. Impersonal laws are fine in physics. It is absurd to think of the underlying constituents of a table, say, as deliberating over their condition, weighing their possible choices, considering the consequences of each, and paying the price for any immoral behavior afterwards. The dynamics of electrons is totally determined by the laws of physics which constrain them to behave in one and only one way, and they have no "choice" in the matter. Because of this, we would hardly think of treating electrons as moral creatures. We would not appeal to their freedom, discuss possibilities with them, feel that they should be punished for doing the "wrong" thing, and so on. It is simply the case that electrons cannot do the "wrong" thing, because they blindly follow set rules; so, one is justified in talking about them in an amoral fashion. But, humans do have an inner freedom and they can consciously choose among different possibilities. So, in so far as Marx reduces society to amoral laws, his theory can no longer speak to moral creatures.

Marx can no more tell an individual what he should or should not do than a physicist could tell an electron what it should or should not do. Or, put another way, I, as an individual, have no idea what to do with Marxism because nowhere does Marx ever say what I ought to do, only what I will do as an integral part of my class and its place in the dialectic. But this offends my sense of inner freedom. Do I not have some awareness of my situation and of the possibilities it entails? Can I not freely choose among these possibilities? And if I can, how should I choose? On the moral question, Marx is absolutely silent. As far as he's concerned, my behavior is determined like that of an electron.This problem manifests itself most forcefully in terms of the question of the revolution. First, consider it from the workers' perspective. Since the material dialectic proceeds to its critical point by an impersonal dynamic, the revolution is inevitable. But then, the workers might reasonably conclude that they need not work to bring it about because, after all, there is no possibility that it will not happen. Thus we arrive at an absurdity where the workers will inevitably revolt, but need not do anything for that revolution to occur! A similar absurdity is encountered when one consider the effect that Marxism would have on the capitalists. Now that they are aware of the material dialectic and the coming crisis,they could work towards resisting the revolution or even preventing it.

Either way, one could argue that the workers are better off if the dialectic is kept secret, not only from the capitalists, but also from themselves! In fact, pushing this ironic twist of reasoning further, one might speculate that we are not living in the workers' paradise today because awareness of the dialectic has already undermined the dynamics of the dialectic itself! Marx never considered what consequences an awareness of his theory might have because consciousness for Marx was only an "after effect" and had no causal efficacy. But, as we can see, only absurdity follows from such a position. In sum, we might find Marxism an elegant and sophisticated social theory, but what, pray tell, do we do with it?! How do we act on the basis of the knowledge it imparts? Do we sit by our windows and watch the inevitability of history unfold itself, or do we go into the streets and participate?

This is a subtle, but serious, flaw that is not limited to Marxism. As soon as one tries to construct any social theory based on an amoral dynamic, one succeeds in producing a theory which not only has no normative value for us, but is meaningless because we cannot resolve how it fits into our lives. How can an essentially amoral theory speak to essentially moral creatures? Nonetheless, the mind can fall under the spell of this amoralism, and when one does, it is not the case that one begins to act amorally, which is impossible for moral creatures; rather,one loses touch with the moral law and begins to act in a disordered fashion. So, in so far as Marxism aims at being purely an amoral description of society, it is utterly useless as a normative prescription for action. And in so far as one tries to internalize it as such, one looses touch with one's moral nature and acts in a disordered fashion. Injustices are sure to follow. Is it any wonder that Marxism was so easily picked up by the Communist party as propaganda and used to justify anything? As ideology, it lulled people into a moral slumber that allowed Stalin to commit atrocities against the people in the name of the People!

But I will not dwell on these sins because the media in the West has neverlost an opportunity to discredit Communism with them and we are all well informed about Soviet atrocities. But much to the media's chagrin, a proper analysis of the situation shows that Liberalism is equally implicated in the sins of its Enlightenment sibling! Below, I will turn my tactics around. Rather than dwell on Liberal economic theory, I will quickly expose the principle of amoralism in it and then turn to a longer discussion of just how that moral vacuum has been filled by disord in theWest. Whereas Marxist theory is little known here, but its effects well known, the situation with Liberal theory is somewhat reversed: the connection between its amoral principles and the resulting disordered social practices has not been brought to the foreground. Just how Liberal economics lulls us into moral slumber in our world is not discussed, or if the criticism is raised, it is easily dismissed as not worthy of serious consideration in the public forum.

IV. Liberal Economics: The Commodification of Everything and Morality Sold

Let me begin with a distinction similar to the one I made above. On the one hand we have Liberal economics, the exponent for which below will be Adam Smith who is considered its father, and on the other hand, we have the historical event which we are living today and which I will call capitalism (or the "free" market). Again, the relationship between theory and practice is a difficult one because, although the former is taken as the justification for the latter, the degree to which the practice truly reflects Smith's intentions is a matter of scholarly debate. But, it is not important for us to sift through this relationship because it will suffice to show that the theory is based on a central principle of amoral dynamics and so, regardless of what Smith intended, in so far as it is taken as justification, it eclipses moral awareness and leads to disorder; all else is just details. Below, I will show precisely what this principle is and how it has led first to labor-driven and now to consumer-driven capitalism. The second manifestation of this monster has succeeded to an historically unprecedented degree in absorbing life into economics. If the celebration of the life God gave us begins when economic necessity ends, it is little wonder that capitalism contributes to a growing cultural malaise. We have forgotten that work is for man and meant to dignify him, not vice versa.

Much of the Enlightenment can be understood as the appropriation of Medieval thinking, made "scientific." Marxism, as we have seen, takes the idea of linear history, empties it of God and puts in His place the material dialectic. Similarly Liberal economics adopts Natural Law from moral theology, but empties of its moral content, and applies it to economics. Natural Law, as it is generally understood, is God's intention for how man and society ought to operate. If a society goes against this law, then harm follows of its own accord, that is, it follows naturally and not as fire and brimstone from heaven. For instance, if the members of a society have made their peace with theft, then they must also pay the price because wherever there are thieves, there are also victims, and the society's collective misbehavior becomes its own punishment. But, this state of affairs can lead people to an awareness of their error and so there is the possibility of self-correction: when people start to realize that stealing is not such a good idea, laws are enacted, enforced, and so forth.

Adam Smith, in his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, appropriated this structure to explain the dynamics of the marketplace. According to Smith's account, the market is guided by laws of its own that naturally adjust the production and exchange of goods so that everyone in society benefits in the maximum way possible. These are not legislated laws, but in analogy to Natural Law, they are the "invisible hand" that guides the economy to meet the needs of society. The worst of all possible sins, then, would be to interfere with their workings; rather, one should always follow the rule of laissez-faire, "leave it alone". When a society acts against the Natural Law, it puts into play its own punishment; similarly when a society interferes with the free market, it falls short of meeting the needs of the people. The central principle operating here is the law of supply and demand which Smith formulated as follows:

1) If there is a demand for a particular product, then there will be a market for it. The product is at first scarce and its price high. But this will attract other manufacturers which want to compete and the net effect will be to reduce scarcity and bring down the price to a "fair" range.

2) If there is no demand for a particular product, then there will be no market for it. The product is in abundance and its price low. Manufacturers producing it will switch to producing other products for which they get a better return.

So, both the human and natural resources of society are shifted away from products not in demand to ones that are and any scarcity is alleviated. The system isself-correcting.The law of supply and demand, as it has been sketched out so far, is the amoral dynamics of Liberal economics and it aims at describing how the economy will adjust itself through the workings of an "invisible hand" (by"invisible" read impersonal, unconscious and amoral); but, again like the material dialectic or the laws of physics, it does not give us any normative prescription for action. Smith, as a good bourgeois, was not as radical in this respect as Marx, and he did recognize that there must be some deliberations going on in the decision making process of individuals.

To flesh out his theory, then, Smith described this behavior as the enlightened pursuit of self-interest and so implicitly prescribed it as normative-enlightened because the reasoning individual would recognize that violating the common good was not to his benefit. This pursuit leads to the law of supply and demand because, in pursuing their own self-interests, manufacturers are continuously competing to get ahead, and so adjusting the supply side to match the demand side. But it is rather clear that Smith's moral prescription is custom-tailored to fit his law, and is only secondary to it.

He simply answered the question of how to make his amoral law have the semblance of normative prescription by constructing that prescription which would make it work; so, like Marx, he put the amoral dynamics before any moral considerations and came up with a formula that can be summarized as "private vice equals public virtue."

But how does one sympathize with such a norm? How is the dignity of man guaranteed if this consideration is not brought in from the start? One answer Smith might put forward is that the protection of our dignity emerges as collective behavior through his law; but, it does not take much to construct scenarios which are consistent with the law, and yet affront our dignity. The history of capitalism is the history of such refuting scenarios. He might add that the pursuit of self-interests must be enlightened, that it must take into consideration the common good. But then he will not be able to justify the rule of laissez-faire. If the pursuits are not "enlightened," are we justified in interfering with the free market? Despite Smith's poor attempt to make his theory prescriptive, it remains essentially amoral, and in so far as it is used by our society to justify the "free" market, it leads to disorder. The suffering of marginalized individuals is explained away, or worse, simply dismissed on the premise that the law of supply and demand guarantees "fairness," and these individuals have no right to complain. In sum, it becomes ideology.

First in the history of capitalist disorders is the one that is now best understood. It set in around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and by the 1840s was inspiring Marx to formulate his theory. By the turn of the 19th century it had reached revolutionary fury and in 1918 this fury burst forth in Russia. In the US, it did not entertain a revolutionary hope, but it still manifested itself in the formation of labor unions and the violence that attended them, especially because of the involvement ofthe Mafia which remained a problem well into the '50s and early '60s.

Smith's laissez-faire economics was a naive hope at best,but when it was combined with the bourgeois dogma of absolute property rights (the belief that one can do whatever one wants with one's own property), it became downright immoral and an immediate danger to the average worker. Not factored into Smith's considerations was the fact that at least one way in which manufacturers could operate in their own self-interest was by lowering labor costs. Individuals were not only the agents in society that created demand by purchasing products, but they were also the labor force and, thus, a integral element of the supply side that could be purchased at an ever decreasing price as labor became available in abundance. And far from competing for labor resources, manufacturers quickly discovered that people were quite desperate for money and were forced to sell themselves at less than a just wage-a dramatic instance of Smith's law failing to set a "fair" price.

Collective exploitation of this situation by the capitalists led to inordinately poor working conditions, long hours in sweatshops, child and woman slave labor, and a general degradation of the masses of humanity that had nothing other than their labor to sell-we enter here the world of Charles Dickens. The advent of unions and collective bargaining somewhat protected the worker who otherwise stood naked before these industrial giants; but, the problem remains with us today and shows no sign of relief. Once again, we have an instance of the impossibility of founding an economic system on an amoral principle and expecting the dignity of man to be protected. The origin of the second major event in the history of capitalist disorders, at least here in the US, is located with Calvin Coolidge and his generation. If we call the first phase of capitalism labor-driven in that exploitation was concentrated on the labor force, we may call the second phase consumer-driven because attention was shifted onto the consumer. Although we inherit both problems today, each surfacing in turn, consumer-driven capitalism is much more insidious in that it has been largely successful in absorbing our culture and churning it into mush.

Let's see how this has come about. The '20s saw the first industrialists who realized that the very factory workers they employed were also the consumers of their products. So, the industrialists were undermining their own interests by paying the workers too low a wage: if the workers could not afford the products, the markets would remain restricted. Instead, the industrialists calculated that by increasing the workers' wages by a certain amount, the latter would have a surplus income and want to own items of "luxury." If wages and prices were balanced just right, and the workers instilled with a desire for these luxuries, the industrialists would increase their overall profits. Overnight, the mass consumer was born, caught in a vicious circle where still more labor was needed to obtain the very items the worker desired. As time progressed, society became dependent on these "luxuries," like the automobile, and we became enmeshed in our present economic monster.Advertising was instrumental in this shift. Beginning in the '20s and with increasing frequency, advertisements were used to entice consumers by presenting them with a vision of the good life as one with filled with luxuries. Fashion magazines gave the public the latest designs which, ofcourse, were always changing; and, for the first time, women were shown as obsessing over their looks in the mirror. The depression disrupted much of the economy's activity, as did the war, but as the US recovered, capitalism became ever more consumer-driven.

In the '50s, the business of advertising became a major industry in its own right, shaping our culture through the icons it injected into the popular imagination. When one considers that the mere symbol of a soft-drink, Coca-Cola, has won international recognition, one is struck by the absurdity of the situation! Today, there is a certain cultural current which ridicules the emptiness of these icons and recognizes their facile attempt at manipulation, but this has not stopped manufacturers from finding other ways of exploiting consumers. We are told that marketing surveys are for our benefit, so that manufacturers know what the public wants and can better serve us. But, this is just a front; what they really want to know is our spending impulses. Frugality is not a capitalist virtue.Thus, the brave new idea of consumerism expanded Smith's amoral law to cover, and hence disorder, a whole new dimension of society. When Smith proposed his law of supply and demand, he did not consider the possibility that demand could be generated out of whim by the enticement of manufacturers; rather, he was thinking of average needs and wants.

Of course, with the moral nature of human beings eclipsed, this sort ofconsideration is no longer available to the exponent of Liberal economics who is forced to respond that it is the individual's "free" choice and responsibility whether or not to consume a particular product. This, of course, presupposes that the individual's sensibilities are formed in the private sphere previous to his becoming a consumer in the public sphere, and that he has the moral strength to avoid continuous temptation; but, as we well know, this is exactly what advertising aims at undermining. It wants to form a consumer that acts on whim as often as possible and is given over to impulse. Here we must resist the tendency to put the blame squarely on the individual and his lack of frugality. Remember, as fallen creatures, we are all weak to some extent. A more charitable outlook recognizes that guilt also lies in the hands of those who take advantage of that weakness without shame. Individuals in a society depend on one another when moral strength fails them. Consumer-driven capitalism betrays such a trust. So, whereas labor-driven capitalism preyed on those who only had themselves to sell on the labor market, consumer-driven capitalism preys on our moral infirmities. Either way, the weakest member of society always pays the most.

But, consider how unique an historical situation this is. Unlike most social orders in the past or elsewhere in the world today, which require a certain amount of self-restraint and sublimation of base desires, capitalism is a social order which thrives off of the opposite! Not "private vice equals public virtue", but "private vice equals public resilience" - injustices abound, but the system is too rigid to allow for correction. Capitalism only bottoms out at dangerous decivilizing forces which are curtailed either by our innate sensibilities or by intervention of the state. Other than this, consumer-driven capitalism seems able to pick up any aspect of human life, make it into a commodity, and sell it back to us as a product, a simulation of the real which becomes the only reality we know. We enter the world of Andy Warhol; life becomes a stroll through the department store, with the isolated narcissist at the center and all of life as commodity stretched out before him. Like an infant which still identifies the whole world as an extension of itself, the consumer experiences pain when his wants are withdrawn and numbness when he is satiated.

The highest and best in man, his God-given existence and the celebration of that life in art, literature, spirituality and so forth, is swallowed up in the abyss of consumerism. Our senses are packaged and sold back to us: taste is commodified in the mass-produced food we purchase at supermarkets, sight is commodified in TV images, and sound is commodified in pop music. Even Gregorian Chants are no longer the special occasion of a religious celebration; they are the digitized sounds whose aura has been striped; they are spliced in with alternative music, as the group Enigma did, and even make the top 40s list. Love is commodified in sex and sex in its mechanical reproduction as pornography. Children are commodified in artificial contraception or abortion; there is a whole money-making industry around the elimination of the "unwanted." World events are commodified in the news; you won't see it if it doesn't sell commercial time. Time is commodified in interest rates; if you want today what you can only afford tomorrow, you must pay for the intermediate time. Health is commodified in medical insurance; peace of mind carries a cost.

Spirituality is commodified in therapy and self-fulfillment. The mind is commodified in skills that are sold on the job market; gone are the days when education was "food for the soul." The freedom these various activities and entities once had, to be for their own sake, has been taken up within an economic system which only returns them to us for a price, and then only as a simulation of their original reality. In consumer-driven capitalism, economics strives for ontology: an entity exists only to the extent that it can be made into a commodity and sold on the market. It is difficult to minimize the extent to which consumerism has chewed up our culture and spit it out as mush. An interesting illustration is afforded by the fate of certain counter-cultural movements in our society.

Consider the hippies, which began as a reaction against the materialism of the '50s and preached an anti-establishment gospel. Yet, while their music aimed to create a new consciousness of "peace and love" which would "overthrow the establishment," the sale of their records turned the music industry to a political force mandating the very things the music protested. It seems that even attempts at overthrowing consumer-driven capitalism are co-opted by it and sold back to the"revolutionaries"! Today, the "counter-culture," or "alternative" as it is called, is a well-established market. To be clear, I have little sympathies for the hippies; it was before my time and the whole affair strikes me as something short of pure silliness, but neither do I sympathize with what they were reacting against. Nor am I preaching asubversion of the system-heaven knows what injustices will follow. But failed attempts at subversion do reveal the resilience of the system: one wonders if other cultures would have survived the level of decadence introduced by the hippies into ours. Today my students bring me the lyrics of popular alternative, rap and heavy metal bands. One of them, Rage against the Machine, has for its album cover a collage of various revolutionary books, like The Anarchist Cookbook. The lyrics are filled with misdirected anger and incite us to "rage," to "fight the system," and so forth. This is not a danger to capitalism, it is a celebration of it!

The CDs and related cultural fetishes, like body piercing, sell; there is a market to be exploited here. Alternative is the mainstream. If these students are really seeking an alternative to the culture of death theyhave inherited, they might try Catholicism.The same resilience and ability to deflect criticisms is found in our public domain discourse, in particular, as it is carried out in the media. Economic concerns encompass a major portion of our public debates, to besure, but these remain so far in the abstract as to be of little value to us; that is, we cannot act on the information we are given.

Why are economic injustices not reported as such? Why doesn't the media tell us what particular decisions were taken by what particular companies and what effect these decisions had? (We hear lots of noise when it comes to issues of ecology. Why not the same volume when it comes to the concerns of the workers?) We know companies downsize, but why is there no follow-up on just what happens to those individuals who have the misfortune to experience it? Do they find a new job? If they do, does their pay decrease? Or, work hours increase? Do they find it harder to make ends meet? And just where are we going with all this economic activity? Where do we want to go? How does it all fit into what constitutes a good life, a life worthy of the existence God has given us? These essentially moral questions are generally excluded from our public discourse. The question of why this is the case and the role the media plays is profoundly complex and I cannot pretend to answer it here.

Nonetheless there are at least three criticisms which are worth mentionining because each has enough truth in it as to alert us to the dangers. The first comes from the political Right and is not always very probing in its analysis. It simply points to the fact that the news has a certain Left-wing bias and tends to set the agenda for public discussion accordingly. There is some truth to this, particularly when it comes to issues of sexuality, but less so when it comes to economics per se. For instance, it is not often that we hear a debate about how couples are punished economically for having a family.

The sacrifices parents must make today are substantial given that they must guarantee their children will properly integrate into society; among other things, they must worry about giving them a college education. At a cost about $50,000 per child for college alone, this is not a trivial expense, and it is sufficient to put a real economic wedge between DINKS and families. DINKS (couples with Double Incomes and No Kids) live in a different economic world, and therefore cling to different values, than families with children. Yet, one often hears arguments in accord with their values: it is the responsibility of the couple to limit their family within their economic means. This is true; but what limits the economic means of families? An economy of mass consumption and profit margins. Is it any wonder that so many of our youth feel displaced in a world that puts such a heavy price on their heads?

Their very existence is pitted against the profit margins of companies and the consumerism of the previous generation. But how often is this argument put forward in the public arena? Its mere elimination shows a biasing of certain values.The two other criticisms of the media are more probing because they show precisely how the media has merged into the functioning of consumer-driven capitalism: in effect, even our perception of the world as it is given to us by the news is caught up in commodification where what counts as the reality of our situation is only its simulation, packaged and sold back to us. The first criticism comes from Chomsky and other Leftist critics. As capitalism discovered its new vocation in advertising, newspapers increased their profits by augmenting returns from sales of the paper with returns from advertising. Soon newspapers became dependent mostly on the latter,and were co-opted by consumer-driven capitalism. Papers which resisted sales of advertising could not compete and folded. The Daily Herald affords an example of this. As a Left-wing British paper, it once had more than twice the circulation of The Times, The Financial Times and The Guardian combined; but, refusing to sell advertisements for ideological reasons, it collapsed in the '60s.

So, asks Chomsky, what kind of news would one expect to come out of a media that is comprised of, and responsible to, large corporations? Clearly, it would be dedicated primarily to their interests and act as an effective filter for challenging ideas. Chomsky gives a disturbing example of this filtering process. Two simultaneous and comparable atrocities occurred in the mid to late '70s in the South East Pacific; one in Cambodia, the other in East Timor. While the first was intensely covered by The New York Times, the other was not. Why? Because the first was committed by Communists (the Khmer Rouge), who were not very good business allies of American companies, and the second by the Indonesians, who were, especially when it came to the sales of arms. East Timor, a largely Catholic and egalitarian country, was simply expendable. Only "off-beat" media, like those run by Catholics committed to social justice, reported much about East Timor. They still do. The December 1996 edition of The Catholic Worker has a short article on the small island; it reports that the Nobel Peace Prize this year is shared by Bishop Carlos Belo of Dili, capitol of East Timor, and Jose Ramos-Horta, the foreign minister in exile.The final criticism of the commodification of the media comes from radical pessimists, like Baudrillard, and does not look to vested capitalist interests as an explanation. On this view, the commodification of everything has reached such a critical degree in our society that reality itself has been leveled. We see this in a totally apathetic society which simply absorbs whatever is thrown at it. After years of simulated reality on television, commercials of happy people with fake smiles, implicit promises of outrageous proportions, the general public has totally succumbed-its only reality is the commodity. For instance, given the choice between watching a political debate or a football game on TV, most people opt for the latter. Both are judged strictly as commodities for consumption. And why not? Watching the evening news, we see daily stories about famines in Africa juxtaposed with stories about how Scruffy the dog saved Fluffy the cat from mortal peril: one naturally wonders just what the reality of television is! Unlike Chomsky's account, critical discussions in the public sphere do not happen, not because it would upset those who control the means by which the discussions would occur, but because such discussions simply do not matter. The only reality such debates have is their value as commodity, in which case, Scruffy and Fluffy are on par with major famines, and both are equal to one minute of air time. This is a rather hopeless view of things, but again, there is some truth in it. And the extent to which it is true, is the extent to which Adam Smith's amoral law of supply and demand has absorbed our world.

V. Towards a Culture of Life: Catholic Social Teaching and Morality Restored

It is time to move past the Enlightenment's vision of the human being as the duality of private and public sphere, the latter being merely the nexus where impersonal and amoral laws meet. This distorted view of our nature has opened up a crack in our world that has been filled by the monsters described above. The rise and fall of Communism and the present disorder in the East, the culture of death in the West, these are not trivial matters and they reflect the devastating effect of the amoral view we have adopted towards ourselves and our society. (Even Fascism and Nazism can be understood in this context, but as reactions against the Enlightenment rather than offsprings of it.) And the danger is still with us. The next round of economic nightmare may be just around the corner. Today, multinationals operate beyond any nation's power to curtail their excesses and truly are Titans that need not have any concern for us ordinary mortals. We tolerate them to the extent that we hope that, in their indifference to our humanity, it is our neighbor they will step on, and not us. Even our citizenship and the rights it entails cannot effectively protect us; multinationals intimidate their host countries with economic retaliation by threatening to withdraw to countries where labor or natural resources are cheaper. There are some very real dangers here in terms of the dignity of man, both in the First and Third Worlds.

The first step, then, towards addressing this problem is to regain what was lost by the Enlightenment, namely the view of ourselves as essentially integral moral creatures. We have lost sight of the fact that it is we who make the decisions that have repercussion on ourselves and on our fellow man. We are responsible, not some impersonal force like the law of supply and demand; and, we must not give credence to conclusions based on the workings of these ghosts, like the injunction not to interfere with the "free" market. The place of Catholic social teaching in all of this should now be clear: it is directed squarely at the eclipsed moral questions that are not being asked by our society and it unabashedly puts forward norms for the limits of economic, political and social decisions in the aim of protection our dignity. Needless to say, this approach is sorely opposed by our society, with its gut reaction that any moral considerations, especially if these originate in religious thought, are partisan and would unfairly privilege one set of values over another. It is not considered possible that such considerations might benefit all. Rather, the preferred modern solution is to lull ourselves into slumber with the belief that there can be some morally neutral procedural rules in the public domain which guarantee "fairness" to everyone. The evidence is now in, and we can safely conclude that nothing of the sort has occurred: the "system" does not insure justice, people of good will do.

Finally, I would like to end with a caveat. Today, there is a very negative sense associated with the word "morality" and the criticisms made above do little to bring out its positive side. (Sometimes the word "ethics" is used, but this does not always help.) It is true that much of our concern in economic justice regards the responsibility of those who have power before those who do not; for instance, it can be concluded that capitalists act immorally when they take advantage of desperate workers by offering them less than just wage. But there is a positive sense to "morality" beyond the self-restraint we are expected to take on ourselves to do right by our neighbor.

As Catholics, we look to the next world as our true home, but not at the expense of degrading this one. We value the life God has given us and the wonderful things in it that make it meaningful and worth living. There is deep satisfaction the many walks of life and we are called to these things for our own fulfillment, each in his own way. When we are young, we are educated and take on the wisdom of our society; we express our creativity in work; we marry, raise our children and grandchildren and see that they pick up where we left off; some of us dedicate ourselves to the service of others and God in various ministries. All these things are good; they make life worth living and the moral law is meant to guarantee them for us. It is not some empty legalistic code which renders life dreary, but the means by which we may have a culture of life.

Instead, having lost sight of this end, we now have a culture of death, one in which life is mostly a dreary matter of survival-just ask the GM worker who screws in the same bolt eight hours a day, six days a week. To the extent that morality has been vanquished from the social sphere, economic concerns have returned with a vengeance to frustrate life and fill it with needless anxiety. If we are to surpass our culture of death and regain life, we must reintegrate morality in our public sphere. Against the Enlightenment's social theories, we need Catholic social teaching.

Culture Wars
©Copyright 1998

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