Today
we look at the fourth pillar of a just market economy, expanded capital
ownership. Father Pesch did not
specifically list widespread ownership as a pillar in his system of solidarity,
but — as we will demonstrate — it is necessarily implied in his third pillar, “private
property.”
Why? Because “property” is actually two things, both of which can be meant
by the single word. Unfortunately, that
leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding, especially when people confuse the
thing owned with the rights of ownership, or fail to distinguish between the
right to be an owner from the bundle of rights that define what an owner may
legitimately do with what is owned.
Father Pesch included both of these meanings under a single pillar. Having lawyers help draw up the four pillars
of a just market economy, CESJ separates them.
Putting the cart
before the horse in a sense, we already covered what an owner may do with what
is owned. This was yesterday, under “restoration
of the rights of private property,” also known as the “universal destination of
all goods,” which (as we noted yesterday) is probably a really bad way of
putting it, as it kind of sounds like socialism. No, it just means that “use” (i.e., the exercise of the rights of
property) should always be in accordance with the demands of the common good of
all humanity, and the requirement not to do harm to others or the common good.
Today we look at
the right to be an owner at all, the “generic right of dominion” — another way
of saying something that causes problems . . . until you look in the dictionary
and realize that “generic” means “something that every member of a class has,” viz., “of, applicable to, or referring to all the members of a genus,
class, group, or kind; general.”
“Generic” does
not mean something that only the group has, but that members of the group do
not . . . even though that is the meaning some people impute to it. The “generic right of dominion” means — and
can only mean — that each and every human being has the same right to be an
owner as every other human being, and thus the same right of access to the
means to become an owner.
This is an
application of the first principle of reason you’ve seen many times on this
blog. In its “positive” aspect it is the
principle of identity. This is stated
as, “That which is true is as true, and is true in the same way, as everything
else that is true.”
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| Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J. |
Sadly, some
latter day disciples of Father Pesch have insisted on reinterpreting his plain
meaning. They insist Father Pesch, like
Marx, meant only consumer goods or, as other commentators on the social
encyclicals insist, agricultural land (National Conference of Catholic Bishops,
Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter
on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1986), §
19.), or only sufficient property to generate a little extra pocket money, e.g.,
Pay a man a just wage and he can
buy stock with his extra income, or tools or rental property, or he can simply
put extra money aside in liquid savings accounts that is his business, and
there is nothing especially sacred about owning stock, even in the company
where he happens to work. (Dr. Rupert J.
Ederer, Letter to Father John H. Miller, C.S.C., S.T.D., August 4, 1993.)
Interestingly, Pope
Leo XIII contradicted the claim that “there is nothing especially sacred about
owning stock”: “The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one
would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the
inviolability of private property.” (Rerum
Novarum, § 15); “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.” (Ibid., §
46.)
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| John Paul II: Ownership is important. |
Contradicting Dr.
Ederer, the right to be an owner is inherent in every human being in the same
way. Owning stock, therefore, is just as
“sacred and inviolable” as owning anything else — and is especially relevant
when it comes to owning a part of the company where someone “happens to work.” As Pope St. John Paul II reemphasized this point
in § 12 of his encyclical on human work, Laborem
Exercens:
It is obvious that, when we speak of opposition
between labor and capital, we are not dealing only with abstract concepts or
“impersonal forces” operating in economic production. Behind both concepts
there are people, living, actual people: on the one side are those who do the
work without being the owners of the means of production, and on the other side
those who act as entrepreneurs and who own these means or represent the owners.
Thus the issue of ownership or property enters from
the beginning into the whole of this difficult historical process. The
Encyclical Rerum Novarum, which has the social question as its
theme, stresses this issue also, recalling and confirming the Church’s teaching
on ownership, on the right to private property even when it is a question of
the means of production. The Encyclical Mater et Magistra did the
same. . . .
Furthermore, in the Church’s teaching, ownership has
never been understood in a way that could constitute grounds for social
conflict in labor. As mentioned above, property is acquired first of all
through work in order that it may serve work. This concerns in a special way
ownership of the means of production. Isolating these means as a separate
property in order to set it up in the form of “capital” in opposition to “labor”
— and even to practice exploitation of labor — is contrary to the very nature
of these means and their possession. They cannot be possessed
against labor, they cannot even be possessed for possession’s sake, because the
only legitimate title to their possession — whether in the form of private
ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership — is that
they should serve labor, and thus, by serving labor, that they should make
possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the
universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them.
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| Pius XI: free association is key to social justice. |
In light of these
statements, to claim that there is “nothing especially sacred” about owning a
piece of the company in which someone works borders on the delusional. That interpretation does extreme violence to
the clear link between work, and the tools (including the institution of the
corporation) with which one works. As
Pope Pius XI explained the importance of the many forms of free associations
(such as business corporations) for the restructuring of the social order,
Moreover, just as
inhabitants of a town are wont to found associations with the widest diversity
of purposes, which each is quite free to join or not, so those engaged in the
same industry or profession will combine with one another into associations
equally free for purposes connected in some manner with the pursuit of the
calling itself. Since these free associations are clearly and lucidly explained
by Our Predecessor of illustrious memory, We consider it enough to emphasize
this one point: People are quite free not only to found such associations,
which are a matter of private order and private right, but also in respect to
them “freely to adopt the organization and the rules which they judge most
appropriate to achieve their purpose.” (Quadragesimo Anno, § 87.)
Therefore, by taking
into account Father Pesch’s support of the free market and the importance of
private property for the support of marriage and the family, we can conclude
that Father Pesch would certainly have agreed with CESJ’s fourth pillar. He may not, though, have agreed with the
necessity of stating something so obvious, particularly since Leo XIII had
already explicitly said as much, as we pointed out above.
Father Pesch agreed
with CESJ that “capitalism” is not the same as the free enterprise system or
even use of capital. As G.K. Chesterton
said, “If the use of capital is capitalism, then everything is capitalism.” (G.
K. Chesterton, “The Beginning of the Quarrel,” The Outline of Sanity, Volume V, Collected Works. San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press,
1987, 43.) As one authority on Father
Pesch’s work put it, “Needless to say, Father Pesch rejected the socialist
identification of capitalism with the institution of private property and with
free enterprise. But he also objected to
the notion that the essence of capitalism consists merely in the extensive use
of capital goods (produced means of production). ‘Capitalism,’ he said, ‘is control of the
national economy through the unrestrained and uninhibited acquisitiveness of
the owners of capital.’” (Franz H. Mueller, “I Knew Heinrich Pesch, the
Formative Influence of a ‘Human Scholar’” Social
Order, April, 1951, 149.)
We necessarily
conclude that Father Pesch’s views on property are fully consistent with those
of the Just Third Way. The only question
is how anybody ever came to a different conclusion — a subject we are not
prepared to discuss, even if our readers were interested in something so tedious
and trivial.
#30#
