• Pope Francis and the Dignity of Labor. Today, May 1, is celebrated by many
Christians as the “Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker.” Saint Joseph is honored as the foster-father
of Jesus, and husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In honor of Saint Joseph’s status as a
worker, Pope
Francis made a statement during mass calling for Catholics (and,
presumably, all people of good will) to fight for “dignified work” for all. This, of course, raises the question as to
what His Holiness means by “dignified work.”
Ostensibly — and going by Francis’s comments — this means sufficient pay
from employment, safe working conditions, respect for one’s person, and so
on. Missing from the prescription,
however (at least as far as we could see), is any mention of worker ownership. This begs the question, for Saint Joseph was
not a wage earner. On the contrary, he
was a worker-owner, with his own shop.
In Saint Joseph’s day, free workers for hire were virtual non-entities;
Aristotle referred to them as “masterless slaves.” One of the more startling things Jesus did
during His ministry was to treat common laborers as if they were just as good
as everyone else, even if they owned nothing.
Ordinarily, non-owning laborers (“non-owning workers” — Rerum Novarum,
§ 3, Quadragesimo Anno, § 5) were considered lower than slaves. Slaves were owned, and as private property “shared”
the dignity of their owners. An offense
against a slave, even disrespect, was an offense against the slave’s
owner. An offense against a non-owning
worker who had no patron was nothing to be concerned about. That is why Catholic social teaching insists
that capital ownership is essential both for individual human growth and
development, and for a just social order.
As Pope Leo XIII noted, and was reiterated by subsequent pontiffs, “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.) Pope Francis needs to expand on his comments,
perhaps by taking note of this
article from Homiletic and Pastoral Review from a few years back. St. Joseph was a worker-owner, not an
employee.
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| "Ah views this development wif grave concern!" |
• DOW or Dowry?. According to an article in the Wall Street
Journal (“Marriage Rate Plunges To Lowest Level on Record,” 04/30/20, A-3),
the United States’ rate of marriage has fallen to an all-time low, “reflect[ing]
how economic insecurity and changing norms are eroding the institution.” We contend that the decline in the marriage
rate is a far more accurate economic indicator than the stock market, as well
as a powerful social indicator gauging the overall health of a society. We also contend that the so-called “changing
norms” as well as the economic insecurity could easily be reversed and
countered simply by making it possible for every child, woman, and man to
become a capital owner without redistribution or other coercive measures. By following the program presented in CESJ’s Capital
Homesteading proposal, it should be possible to provide the basis for
restoring a just social order within a relatively short time.
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| Henry C. Adams (not Henry Adams) |
• Trump Threatens Tariffs . . . Again. As punishment (or just political
blustering), President Trump has announced he is considering tariffs against
China in retaliation for the Coronavirus.
Ignoring for the sake of the argument that a tariff is a tax and only
Congress has the right to levy taxes, there is the question of what good it
would do. The problem is that economic
retaliation invites retaliation and eventually war. The situation is not improved when one of the
countries involved holds a mountain of the other country’s debt. As Henry C. Adams pointed out over a century
ago, “[D]eficit financiering, carried so far as to result in an
interchange of capital and credit between peoples of varying grades of
political advancement, must endanger the autonomy of weaker states unable to
meet their debt-payments. Provided only that the interests involved are of
sufficient importance to make diplomatic interference worth the while, the
claims allowed by international law will certainly be urged against the
delinquent states, and the citizens of such states may regard themselves
fortunate if they succeed in maintaining their political integrity.” (Henry
C. Adams, Public Debts, An Essay in the Science of Finance. New York: D.
Appleton and Company, 1898, pp. 28-29.)
Translation: China holds American debt.
They can demand payment. If their
demands are not met, they may endanger American sovereignty if they feel it
worth their while.
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| Pope Leo XIII |
• Why Not Capital Homesteading?. While President Trump considers
retaliatory tariffs against China, in our opinion a better — and more
profitable — response would be to implement the program outlined in CESJ’s
recent paper, “Universalizing
Capital Ownership.” Briefly, the
idea is to stop backing money with government debt and shift to private sector
hard assets. If done in a way that
expands the capital ownership base throughout the American economy, consumption
power will be restored, the wealth and income gap closed, the currency
stabilized, and a host of other benefits, including restoration of the tax
base, moving production back to the U.S., and massive “job creation” without
government subsidies. Nor does this mean
gaining at other countries’ expense, as they can achieve the same thing by
adopting the program themselves. As Pope
Leo XIII said well over a century ago, “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.)
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• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 40 different
countries and 44 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, India, the
United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “ ‘A
Euphemism for Muddle-Headedness’,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 17,” “How
to Have UBO (Universal Basic Ownership),” “Social
Justice, IV: The Characteristics of Social Justice,”
and “Adam
Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’.”
Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.
If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.” Due to imprudent
language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled
comments.
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