A great many eyebrows undoubtedly went up while reading in yesterday’s posting when we claimed that much modern economic thought is not based on the natural law, but on a rejection of it; that of the schools of economic thought of which we are aware, only binary economics takes the natural law into account.
This is upsetting to the Monetarist/Chicago and Austrian
schools for the simple reason that adherents can truthfully state that they respect
the natural rights to life, liberty (freedom of association/contract) and,
especially, property. The problem is
that the currency school assumptions that underpin the Monetarist/Chicago and
Austrian schools — particularly the disproved belief that the only way to
finance new capital formation is to cut consumption and accumulate money
savings — necessarily restricts capital ownership to the already wealthy.
The rich are, obviously, the only ones who can afford to
save, and are, therefore, the rightful owners of those savings. Naturally, the rich perform a valuable
service when they reinvest their profits to create jobs for non-owning workers,
and should distribute as alms whatever is not required to finance new capital
or maintain them and their dependents in suitable style.
Effectively, this means that as far as adherents of the
Monetarist/Chicago and Austrian school are concerned, all human beings are not created equal, all people do not have equal access to the exercise of
otherwise inalienable rights of life, liberty and property. Since the Thomist understanding of the
natural law is that every human being has by definition an “analogously
complete” capacity to acquire and develop virtue by exercising his or her
natural rights, denying the effective exercise of natural rights to individuals
or groups raises barriers to full participation in the common good that is the
natural right of all humanity. The
natural law is effectively nullified by denying the exercise of rights.
Binary economics is even more upsetting (if possible) to adherents
of the Keynesian school, the other mainstream school of economics based on
currency school principles. (We’ve made
the case so many times that, while Keynesian economics claims to be banking
school it is really currency school, we don’t
feel the need to prove it one more time.)
Keynesians accept the fact that many people are unable to
acquire and possess property in capital . . . if we continue to define “property” the way Aquinas did, as a
natural right to be an owner inhering in every single human being, and the bundle of socially determined
rights that define the exercise of property. For the Keynesians as well, lack of democratic
capital ownership is dictated by the presumed necessity of having to cut
consumption and accumulate money savings before financing new capital
formation.
Keynes, however, did not make the mistake of saying that
people are not equal, and thus rights are only to be exercised by an
elite. No, he simply changed what it
means for something to be a right and inalienable, that is, natural. Keynes shifted rights from being inherent in
the human person, to being a special grant from the State. He then redefined liberty — freedom of
association/contract — and abolished private property. To do this, of course, Keynes had to give the
State a power greater than God by vesting it with the power (as he put it) to
“re-edit the dictionary.”
This is disastrous in Thomist terms. In Thomism — the “official” philosophy of the
Catholic Church — the natural law is based on God’s Nature, which is self-realized
in His Intellect. That is, God is a
fully and perfectly integrated Personality, with no conflict between His Nature
and His Being; God is fully all that He is, was, or ever will be.
God “reflects” (a poor word for the concept, although Saint
Clare spoke profoundly of God as “the Mirror of Eternity”) His Nature on to His
“special creation,” humanity. Human
nature is thus a “reflection” of the Divine Nature.
As we might expect, however, human beings are not fully
integrated personalities, that is, we are not fully human the way God is fully
God. (This is different from saying that
all human beings are fully human, and are human in the same way.) God is the fullness of virtue (“God is
love”); His capacity to acquire and develop virtue is fully and self-realized,
while human beings need to exercise their natural rights to acquire and develop
virtue, thereby conforming themselves more perfectly to their own nature.
While human beings are not fully integrated personalities,
however, we still are a reflection of God’s Nature. That means that what is good to God is also
good to us — Aristotle pointed out that “good” is conformity with nature. That means that the natural law is a part of
what we are — human nature, the natural law (as the expression goes) is
“written in the hearts of all men.” We
can, therefore, get a reasonable understanding of the absolutes of the natural
law by using our reason and observing and drawing conclusions from human
nature, even if only “through a glass darkly.”
The Keynesian re-editing of the dictionary overthrows all of
this and effectively abolishes the natural law.
Re-editing the dictionary allows the State to change the definition of various
natural laws as well as the natural law itself — in short, to re-define God. Rights no longer come from a Creator, but
from the State, and can be redefined as well as granted or taken away at the
will of the State. It is no wonder that
philosophers like Mortimer Adler, financial experts like Harold Moulton, and jurists like Heinrich Rommen concluded
that shifting the basis of the natural law away from what can be observed about
human nature and on to, e.g., faith
or political expedience, is a straight road to totalitarianism.