In yesterday’s posting we pointed out what we think are a
few technical flaws in the legal opinion rendered in Roe v. Wade. If we’re
correct, the Court’s opinion may have been unconstitutional, that is to say,
illegal. Frankly, whether you’re
Pro-Life or Pro-Choice, the reasoning behind the decision has got to make you a
little queasy.
The law, after all, is not a tool to use to get you what you
want (or what you think you want) or a club to compel others. Manipulate the law to gain some end, and you
end up with chaos, and from chaos you go to tyranny to restore order. As the scene from A Man for All Seasons has it,
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| Sir Thomas More |
MORE: I
know what’s legal not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.
ROPER:
Then you set man’s law above God’s!
MORE:
No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact — I’m not God. The
currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I
can’t navigate. I’m no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I’m a
forester. I doubt if there’s a man alive who could follow me there, thank God .
. .
(He says
this last to himself)
ALICE:
(Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he’s gone!
MORE:
And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
ROPER:
So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE:
Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the
Devil?
ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do
that!
MORE:
(Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down,
and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all
being flat? (He leaves him) This country’s planted thick with laws from coast
to coast-man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down-and you’re just the
man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that
would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own
safety’s sake.
The problem, of course, is what to do about it. Until ordinary people have democratic access
to the means of acquiring and possessing private property in capital, they will
remain dependent on those who control those means (money and credit), and who
thereby control the government and the courts.
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| Pius XI at Work |
Pius XI made this point in Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, explaining why, in the forty years since
Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s solution to
the problems in society had not been implemented: widespread capital
ownership. As Leo XIII put it,
“We have
seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a
principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law,
therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many
as possible of the people to become owners.” (Rerum Novarum, § 46.)
Why were people not becoming owners? According to Pius XI,
“In the
first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times
but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the
hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors
of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will
and pleasure.
“This
dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the
money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of
money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the
entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it
were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will.” (Quadragesimo Anno, §§ 105-106.)
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| Daniel Webster |
Why is private property in capital so important? Because “Power,” as Daniel Webster pointed
out in 1820, “naturally and necessarily follows property.”
Thus, if we want to end abortion, or slavery, or solve the
income gap, or any number of other social problems, first get power to the
people, which means vest ordinary children, women, and men with direct
ownership of capital. As the “Apostle of
Distributism,” William Cobbett, put it,
“Freedom
is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that
nobody can feel. It means,—and it means nothing else,—the full and quiet
enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well
secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave.” (A History of the Protestant Reformation in
England and Ireland, 1827, §456.)
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| William Cobbett, the "Apostle of Distributism" |
This is not redistribution of existing wealth, as Leo XIII
made clear, but equal opportunity to acquire future wealth. If you rely on redistribution, all you do is
destroy property for some to restore it for others — which means you destroy it
for everyone.
This is essentially the case we made in Supporting Life: The Case for a Pro-Life Economic Agenda (2010),
giving the argument for adopting “Capital Homesteading” as the most just and
efficient way of empowering people through broad-based capital ownership.
#30#