We missed it, but that’s nothing unusual. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee ratified the
Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote. (And, as we might expect, there was a flurry
of cartoons showing women refusing to state their ages in order to prove they
were of age. . . . 1920s humor.) Of
course, Wyoming had extended the franchise to women decades before, but that
was the Wild West, where men were men and women were glad of it, so it didn’t
count.
Let’s get serious, though.
The vote is a good first step . . . but only a step, and only the first
in a series of necessary follow up steps.
Stop with the vote, or anything short of the Just Third Way, and you end
up nowhere. Like the civil rights movement,
you end up more or less satisfied with the vote, jobs, and welfare.
The problem is that if all you have is a vote, you have a
tendency to vote for the wrong things.
People who have made a great gain tend to want to maintain the status quo thereafter, and not keep
going. They forget why they wanted the
vote, or why it is important. The vote,
jobs, and welfare became the end, rather than the means to an end.
A job? If that's all
you're after, where are you when the machine takes your job? What do you do? Vote to eliminate machines, or wreck them in
a Luddite frenzy?
Welfare? The
government produces nothing. Contrary to
Adolph Berle and other Keynesian New Deal experts, governments do not produce
wealth. They take from those who have
wealth by various means, and either use it to cover legitimate expenses of
government, or redistribute it for "social purposes" — illegitimate,
except in an emergency when the common good is otherwise endangered. And what happens when the government can no
longer fund welfare?
You see this sort of short sightedness today in the
interpretation of Catholic social teaching.
Many people see only the emergency aspect: redistribute wealth to keep
people going. Thus, they demand wage
raises, welfare, redistribution, healthcare, etc., etc., etc., which, necessary
as it may be for government to supply at times, are not, and can never be a
solution. People must produce in order
to consume ("He who does not work, neither shall he eat"), and
redistribution discourages, even prevents production. The well eventually runs dry, and not all the
shrieking condemnations of greedy (other) people can force them to produce so
that others may consume — it's called "slavery." As Lincoln pointed out in his debates with
Stephen Douglas,
"That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this
country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be
silent. It is the eternal struggle
between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood
face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to
struggle. The one is the common right of
humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it
develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn
bread, and I’ll eat it.' No matter in
what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the
people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race
of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical
principle."
So what is the solution?
Catholic social teaching has two "prongs," so to speak. First, take care of people now. Second, restructure the system so that people
can take care of themselves through their own efforts.
How?
"Power," as Daniel Webster said, "naturally and
necessarily follows property." If
you want power over your own life, meaning control, income, and so on, you must
own capital. You are otherwise under the
control of those who do own capital.
It's not votes, it's not jobs, it's 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.)
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