This past Friday, September 1, 2017, we read the “Labor
Day Statement 2017” of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops by Most Reverend Frank J. Dewane, Bishop of Venice, Chairman of the Committee
on Domestic Justice and Human Development, United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops, September 4, 2017.
It’s dated today, but it was released last week . . . possibly to give
its author a running start to get out of town ahead of angry mobs of the
unemployed.
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| "Guys ... shut up and listen. I'm not just flapping my gums." |
Why? Because all the Statement did
was repeat platitudes about trying to implement emergency measures as solutions
to a problem growing exponentially worse every year. Capitalists are aware that these measures
can’t work in the long term, and are risky in the short term, and so reject
them. Socialists ignore reality and
insist that they would work if other
people weren’t so greedy. Everybody else
just stands around wondering why nobody is talking sense or even saying
something that ordinary people can understand.
Ironically, it was the Catholic Church that gave the solution more than a
century ago in an effort to counter the evils of capitalism, and the evil of
socialism (if you have to think about that . . . good). As succinctly put by Pope Leo XIII,
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.)
Now . . . does that say don’t do any of the emergency measures that
everybody thinks are being presented as a solution? No. It
does say, however, that if you want a solution, get to work figuring out a way
to make as many people as possible owners of capital.
. . . if you want a solution, that is.
Not that the 2017 Statement left ownership out. There was a paragraph on the subject:
Worker-owned businesses can be a force for strengthening
solidarity, as the Second Vatican Council encouraged businesses to consider “the
active sharing of all in the administration and profits of these enterprises in
ways to be properly determined.” When decisions are made that greatly
affect workers and their families, “the workers themselves should have a share
also in determining these conditions—in person or through freely elected
delegates.” (Gaudium et Spes,
no. 68.) The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has helped
in the formation of many employee-owned companies which provide jobs in
communities where work opportunities may be scarce. (For example, CCHD helped
support Opportunity Threads. See, Duda, John. “How a worker
cooperative factory is helping bring textile manufacturing back to North
Carolina.” Community-wealth.org,
October 16, 2014. http://community-wealth.org/content/how-worker-cooperative-factory-helping-bring-textile-manufacturing-back-north-carolina
. . . accessed August 16, 2017.)
Let’s be brutally frank. This is
so weak as to amount to nothing substantive at all. The reader is left with the impression of a
prudential suggestion in place of Leo XIII’s near ultimatum that ownership is
essential if “the Labor Question” is to be resolved at all.
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| And this is "solidarity"? Looks more like "tit for tat." |
The quoted passage from Rerum Novarum clearly states that private property is “sacred and
inviolable.” The “should” that follows
is not a suggestion, but a virtual mandate; by stopping short of “must,” Leo
XIII allowed those rare instances where worker ownership is presumably not
feasible at the present time to hold off until it is possible, but without sinning. For those many instances where it is possible
immediately, however, the implication is that it had better be done, or a
“sacred and inviolable” right has been violated.
The 2017 Statement? Oh, worker
ownership can be (but is not necessarily) “a force for strengthening
solidarity,” and therefore businesses are “encouraged . . . to consider” ways
to share in administration and profits — not ownership . . . and just consider,
not actually even do the faux ownership of profit sharing and having a say in
decisions “that greatly affect workers and their families.”
News flash: that is not ownership, except in the socialist, workers’
paradise sense.
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| Zero-Sum thinking is forever. |
Even so, we are assured that “[t]he Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has helped
in the formation of many employee-owned companies which provide jobs in
communities where work opportunities may be scarce.” That is, worker ownership is valued because
it creates jobs, not because as a natural right it is an essential component of
human dignity.
But they give an example! The CCHD
“helped support” Opportunity Threads.
Not supported, but helped support. And Opportunity Threads? As the CEO described it in the link provided:
Right now we have 20 people. Eight of those people are part
of the ownership—there are six that are full owners and then we have three
people that are what we call pre-members. And then we have everyone else, who
are kind of en-route—we have a long vetting period. It’s up to about two years,
and people also have to buy in at $5,000, so it’s a pretty significant
commitment—and that’s what we want it to be.
First, twenty is not many people affected for the
millions that CCHD has collected and distributed in an effort (as the initial
launch put it) to “break the hellish circle of poverty.” We’ll let that go, however. The key statement is that Opportunity
Threads’ solution to creating jobs and ownership is to require people to plunk
down five grand — that’s five thousand of the best — in order to become an
owner.
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| Perugia: the Gateway to Umbria...why Sardinia wanted it. |
Not too many people living in poverty happen to have
$5,000 lying around that they can spare.
That tends to put a bit of a crimp in Leo XIII’s near-mandate that as
many people as possible should prefer to become owners. In fact, as Archbishop-Bishop of Perugia, Leo
XIII founded a bank to finance worker ownership of small businesses, and put up
the bulk of the capitalization himself.
(We don’t know for certain, but this may have been one of the
institutions suppressed by the Kingdom of Sardinia and its assets confiscated
when the Savoyards invaded and conquered the Papal States.)
Rather than maunder on prattling of all the various
ameliorative measures that would work if people weren’t so greedy, what the
USCCB — and every other bishops’ conference throughout the world — should be
doing is figuring out a way to make every child, woman, and man a capital
owner. Do that, and two things will
happen. One, it will be a lot easier to
get the money to help people in need right now.
The rich are more likely to be forthcoming when there is an end in
sight; they don’t like people using them as money machines any more than the
average person likes to keep coming back, hat in hand, to beg for more money. Two, there will be an end to poverty as a
usual thing. As Leo XIII put it,
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| "Was I unclear in what I said?" |
Many excellent
results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will certainly
become more equitably divided. For, the result of civil change and revolution
has been to divide cities into two classes separated by a wide chasm. On the
one side there is the party which holds power because it holds wealth; which
has in its grasp the whole of labor and trade; which manipulates for its own
benefit and its own purposes all the sources of supply, and which is not
without influence even in the administration of the commonwealth. On the other
side there is the needy and powerless multitude, sick and sore in spirit and
ever ready for disturbance. If working people can be encouraged to look forward
to obtaining a share in the land, the consequence will be that the gulf between
vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over, and the respective classes
will be brought nearer to one another. A further consequence will result in the
great abundance of the fruits of the earth. Men always work harder and more
readily when they work on that which belongs to them; nay, they learn to love
the very soil that yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only
food to eat, but an abundance of good things for themselves and those that are
dear to them. That such a spirit of willing labor would add to the produce of
the earth and to the wealth of the community is self evident. And a third
advantage would spring from this: men would cling to the country in which they
were born, for no one would exchange his country for a foreign land if his own
afforded him the means of living a decent and happy life. These three important
benefits, however, can be reckoned on only provided that a man’s means be not
drained and exhausted by excessive taxation. The right to possess private
property is derived from nature, not from man; and the State has the right to
control its use in the interests of the public good alone, but by no means to
absorb it altogether. The State would therefore be unjust and cruel if under the
name of taxation it were to deprive the private owner of more than is fair. (Rerum
Novarum, § 47.)
Now, is there a way to do what Leo XIII all but
commanded? Yes — and it’s a way that
doesn’t require people to pony up $5,000 they don’t have just to get a
job. It’s called “Capital Homesteading,”
and instead of pointing a finger at the rich, it points the way to a solution.
#30#
