As we saw in the
previous posting on this subject (subject being the
Core Values of the interfaith Center for Economic and Social Justice,
CESJ), persons need rights in order to exercise their sovereignty and to pursue
truth, beauty, love, and justice, not necessarily in that order.
Two questions
come to mind regarding the Core Value we examined last. One, how do people actually pursue truth,
beauty, love, and justice? Two, what do
we mean by “person”? We will look first
at the second question.
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| Fr. William Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., CESJ co-founder |
What is a person? Legally and socially speaking (these are,
after all, the Core Values of the Center for Economic and Social Justice), 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.)
How do persons
pursue truth, beauty, love, and justice?
That is answered in the seventh item on the list of CESJ’s Core Values:
People create tools, shaped from
the resources and energies of nature, to support the economic and social
sovereignty of the person. Through private property ownership, each person can
become master of the technology needed to realize his or her fullest human
potential and dignity.
As far back as
Aristotle, commentators have recognized that capital ownership vests human
beings with a “social identity” by making all other rights effective. Anyone without rights is not a person and
therefore has no social identity.
Without rights it is difficult to impossible for someone to acquire and
develop virtue, “human-ness,” the habit of doing good.
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| Daniel Webster |
This becomes a
serious problem when technology advances, displacing labor, and ownership of
the technology is concentrated. This is
a double whammy, because not only are people cut off from participating in
society through their labor, over the past couple of centuries or so the State
has tried to step in and take up the slack . . . turning nominal adults into de
facto children utterly dependent on the State for everything.
With the rise of
the Nation State, not by coincidence in concert with the spread of the “New Things”
of socialism, modernism, and the New Age, the human person gradually became 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 during the twentieth
century. It accelerated. 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. The more powerless they became, the more they
were isolated from the institutions of the common good.
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| Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J. |
Over the course
of the nineteenth century, then, primary 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.
They 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 wage system jobs.
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 addition to inflating the currency to
shift purchasing power, lack of productive income was made up in the form of
social welfare programs, government old age pensions, and subsidies to
corporations for job creation — “corporate welfare.”
Government
expansion required additional debt financing and monetization of government
deficits to fund social programs. To be
able to continue to float debt and control economic life, governments were
forced to abandon fixed monetary standards and asset-backed currencies.
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| Pope Pius XI |
What resulted, as
the solidarist labor economist Goetz Antony Briefs (1889-1974) noted, was “a
challenge to western civilization.” As
Briefs, a student of Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J. (1854-1926), summarized the
situation in his book, The Proletariat
(1937),
It is a fact that large groups of
workers today have no objection to raise against propertylessness — provided
their jobs are secure, their wages sufficient, and provisions are made through
social insurance for old age and unemployment.
To meet these requirements the economic system has had to shoulder
increasing burdens and to put up with an increasing amount of social
legislation, which, of course, implies additional regimentation. (Goetz A.
Briefs, The Proletariat: A Challenge to
Western Civilization. New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Çompany, Inc., 1937, 273-274.)
Not surprisingly,
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. (Quadragesimo
Anno, § 78. Cf. Rerum Novarum, § 3.)
Whether a society
can maintain itself with the vast majority of people cut off from participation
in the common good by lack of capital ownership is a question that must be
answered. CESJ believes the answer is “no,”
and proposes “Capital
Homesteading” to solve the problem.
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