As we noted in yesterday’s posting, quoting Daniel Webster, “Power
naturally and necessarily follows property.”
Not surprisingly, then, politics naturally and necessarily follows
power, which follows property, so that people who have property are going to
dictate politics. The obvious thing to counter
political corruption, then, is to ensure that as many people as possible have
property.
In our opinion, as soon as the typical American family owns
a capital stake sufficient to generate an adequate and secure income, we will see
not only same sex unions, but abortion and a host of other evils fall by the
wayside and die of their own dead weight as human behavior can once again
assert itself in conformity with its inherent nature. As Leo XIII insisted,
“The
rights here spoken of, belonging to each individual man, are seen in much
stronger light when considered in relation to man's social and domestic
obligations. In choosing a state of life, it is indisputable that all are at
full liberty to follow the counsel of Jesus Christ as to observing virginity,
or to bind themselves by the marriage tie. No human law can abolish the natural
and original right of marriage, nor in any way limit the chief and principal
purpose of marriage ordained by God's authority from the beginning: ‘Increase
and multiply.’ Hence we have the family, the ‘society’ of a man’s house — a
society very small, one must admit, but none the less a true society, and one
older than any State. Consequently, it has rights and duties peculiar to itself
which are quite independent of the State.
“That
right to property, therefore, which has been proved to belong naturally to
individual persons, must in like wise belong to a man in his capacity of head
of a family; nay, that right is all the stronger in proportion as the human
person receives a wider extension in the family group. It is a most sacred law
of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom
he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his
children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by
him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves
decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life. Now,
in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive
property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance. A family, no
less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an
authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father.
Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for
which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with
the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation
and its just liberty. We say, ‘at least equal rights’; for, inasmuch as the
domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering
of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties
which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in
nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and
fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and
were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would
rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire.
“The
contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into
and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and
pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly
deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating
itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each
family is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts
of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public
authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper
due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and
properly to safeguard and strengthen them. But the rulers of the commonwealth
must go no further; here, nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be
neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as
human life itself. "The child belongs to the father," and is, as it
were, the continuation of the father's personality; and speaking strictly, the
child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its
quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason
that ‘the child belongs to the father’ it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says,
‘before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its
parents.’ The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up
a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of
the home.” (Rerum Novarum, §§ 12-14.)
At present, only CESJ’s Just Third Way as applied in the Capital Homesteading proposal
is a economically, financially, politically, and, especially, morally sound program to counter the
growing disorder throughout the world.
The longer we wait to implement the program, however, the greater the
disorder and degree of dissolution of the family will become.
At the very least, anyone concerned about the situation
today should seriously investigate the claims of the Just Third Way, and not
let individuals and groups with an interest in maintaining the status quo color a truly objective assessment,
or prevent them from spreading word throughout their networks.
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