In the opening of
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
noted that the French Revolution was a time so like his own day as to be
practically indistinguishable. Although Dickens
was employing a literary device to bring the reader into the story, a similar
observation could be made comparing the early twentieth century to the present time.
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| Pope Pius XI: the State is overwhelmed |
Since the advent
of the new things, the idea has pervaded the popular consciousness that
sovereignty resides in the abstraction of the people as a whole, not in actual individual
human beings. As a result, it has seemed
natural to most people that the State has taken over more and more control not
only over the common good and national interests, but every aspect of their
daily lives.
For example,
during the 1920s and 1930s virtually every government on Earth abandoned a
fixed standard for its currency and began backing issues with government debt
instead of private sector hard assets. Theorists
have justified this on many grounds, but the real reason was to give
governments complete control over money and credit, thereby vesting them with
near-absolute economic power over their own citizens. (Cf. Quadragesimo Anno, §§ 105-106.)
Nor has this been
without cost to the State as well as to its citizens. National debts have skyrocketed,
destabilizing economic life, sometimes bringing it to a virtual
standstill. In some instances the State,
having destroyed as many other institutions as possible to bring everything
within its own sphere, has tried to do so much that it has ended up able to do
nothing. As Pius XI noted,
When we speak of the reform of institutions, the State comes chiefly
to mind, not as if universal well-being were to be expected from its activity,
but because things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have
termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction
of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations
of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State. This
is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social
governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked
associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost
infinite tasks and duties. (Ibid., §
78. Cf. Rerum Novarum, § 3.)
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| Daniel Webster |
With the rise of
the Nation State, not by coincidence in concert with the new things of
socialism, modernism, and the New Age, the human person has become a cipher in
a society presumably organized for his benefit.
Economic disenfranchisement and the alienation of the human person from private
property was the trend of the nineteenth century. Political disenfranchisement and the
alienation of the individual from all institutions except the State was the
mark of the twentieth century. The
combination resulted in virtually the complete alienation of the human person
from society.
Not that the
process of economic disenfranchisement slowed.
It accelerated. Because (as
Daniel Webster, 1782-1852, pointed out) “Power naturally and necessarily
follows property,” the more people became dependent on wages for their
subsistence, the more powerless they became, and the more isolated from the
institutions of the common good.
Over the course
of the nineteenth century, the responsibility for the wellbeing of the
individual and the family shifted. In
the early nineteenth century most people were owners of capital, whether in the
form of land or technology, and depended on themselves and their immediate
friends and family to be productive. By
the end of the century, most people owned no significant amount of capital. They depended on the relatively few owners of
capital for a wage system job.
As the productive
capacity of technology began far outstripping that of human labor, private
industry could not carry the burden of being able to provide workers with
adequate and secure incomes, and the State had to step in. Minimum wage laws, mandatory pensions and
benefits, and increased taxation to support social welfare programs began
taking a larger and larger share of corporate profits.
To sustain corporate
profitability, ensuring that the private sector would continue to function, the
State then began taking over a part of the burden in the form of social welfare
programs, government old age pensions, and subsidies to corporations for job
creation — “corporate welfare.” This required
debt financing and monetization of government deficits to fund social programs. To be able to continue to float additional
debt, governments were forced to abandon fixed monetary standards and
asset-backed currencies.
What resulted, as
the solidarist labor economist Goetz Antony Briefs (1889-1974) noted, was “a challenge to western
civilization.” As Briefs explained in
his book, The Proletariat (1937),
whether a society can maintain itself with the vast majority of people cut off
from participation in society by lack of capital ownership is a question that
must be answered.
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| Pope Leo XIII: a yoke little better than slavery |
This is because,
as commentators as far back as Aristotle have recognized, capital ownership
vests human beings with a “social identity” by making all other rights
effective. Human beings are political
animals, existing naturally in a state of society as persons.
A person is a
human being “considered according to the rank he holds in society, with all the
right to which the place he holds entitles him, and the duties which it
imposes.” (“Person,” Black’s Law Dictionary.) A human being
without rights is not a person, because he has no social identity.
There is another
word for human beings who do not have rights: slave. Slavery is “that
civil relation in which one man has absolute power over the life, fortune
[property], and liberty of another.” (“Slavery,” ibid.)
Someone may be
technically a person, for all human beings are “natural persons,” having been
vested by God with natural rights.
Without private property in capital, however, a person has no effective means
of exercising the natural rights of life and liberty. He is, to all intents and purposes, a
slave. That is why Leo XIII declared,
[T]he hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in
the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have
been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little
better than that of slavery itself. (Rerum
Novarum, § 3.)
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