Unless you’ve
been living in a bottle or on the top of a mountain in Tibet, you are probably
aware of the massive confusion surrounding the terms “capitalism,” “socialism,”
“private property,” “rights,” “duties,” “person,” etc., etc., etc.
The fact is that a lot of people are using terms when they have no idea
what they really mean, and just put their own private meaning on to things.
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| G.K. Chesterton: "I said that?" |
This does not
make for civil or even rational discussion.
As G.K. Chesterton pointed out in his little book on Thomas Aquinas when
he related what happened when Aquinas lost his temper at people who insisted on
twisting his words (one of two times he is known to have gotten angry in his
entire life),
At the top of his fury, Thomas Aquinas understands, what so many
defenders of orthodoxy will not understand. It is no good to tell an atheist
that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of
denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong,
by proving that he is wrong on somebody else’s principles, but not on his own. After
the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have
stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must
argue on his grounds and not ours. We may do other things instead of arguing, according to our views of what actions are
morally permissible; but if we argue we must argue “on the reasons and
statements of the philosophers themselves.” (G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. New
York: Image Books, 1957, 95-96)
So what has this
got to do with anything? Just this. In addition to the constant complaints we’ve
always gotten from people who insist that the Just Third Way is capitalist
because it promotes widespread capital ownership, we have a rising
tide of people who claim that the Just Third Way is socialist because it
promotes widespread capital ownership!
Right.
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| Hilaire Belloc: "Not in this universe." |
No, you read that
correctly. It reminds us of Michael
Novak’s and Martin Gardener’s respective definitions of what Chesterton and Hilaire
Belloc called “distributism.” According
to Novak, what Chesterton meant by distributism is what he, Novak meant by “democratic
capitalism.” According to Gardener, what
Chesterton meant by distributism is what he, Gardener, meant by “democratic socialism.”
Right.
Within the past
week we had yet another capitalist of some form or other insisting that the
Just Third Way is socialist because it calls for widespread capital ownership,
and that’s socialism. When we pointed
out that socialism is the abolition of private property, not working to make
more people owners, the capitalist came back with a long, involved explanation
about how making poor people into capital owners is socialism. He wouldn’t say why.
Then we pointed
out that Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan encouraged and endorsed
the Just Third Way. The capitalist
sneered that we were just “dropping names.”
Say what?
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| Ronald Reagan: "I am not now, nor have I ever been a socialist." |
Here is what
Reagan said to us, directly, in the speech he gave before the Presidential Task
Force on Project Economic Justice, August 3, 1987:
I’ve long believed one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has
been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation
that anyone’s child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a
business or corporation.
Thomas Jefferson dreamed of a land of small farmers, of shop owners
and merchants. Abraham Lincoln signed into law the “Homestead Act” that ensured
that the great western prairies of America would be the realm of independent,
property-owning citizens-a mightier guarantee of freedom is difficult to
imagine.
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| John Paul II: "Me neither, Gipp." |
And Pope John
Paul II? Did he equate widespread
capital ownership with socialism? No, he
said just the opposite:
[M]erely converting
the means of production into State property in the collectivist system is by no
means equivalent to "socializing" that property. We can speak of
socializing only when the subject character of society is ensured, that is to
say, when on the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider
himself a part-owner of the great workbench at which he is working with every
one else. A way towards that goal could be found by associating labour with the
ownership of capital, as far as possible, and by producing a wide range of
intermediate bodies with economic, social and cultural purposes; they would be
bodies enjoying real autonomy with regard to the public powers, pursuing their
specific aims in honest collaboration with each other and in subordination to
the demands of the common good, and they would be living communities both in
form and in substance, in the sense that the members of each body would be
looked upon and treated as persons and encouraged to take an active part in the
life of the body. (Laborem Exercens,
§ 14.)
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| Fulton Sheen: "When did I become a socialist?" |
Once you concentrate property in
the hands of the few,
you create slaves; when you decentralize it, you restore
liberty. . . . Private property is the economic guarantee of human liberty. . .
. Because the ownership of external things is the sign of freedom, the Church
has made the wide distribution of private property the cornerstone of her
social program.
Fulton Sheen a socialist? Widespread capital ownership is
socialism? Frankly, we couldn’t
figure out what the capitalist’s deal was.
His response to everything was that he was right and we must be
socialists because we’re advocating widespread capital ownership . . . which is
the direct antithesis of socialism!
Evidently, in
today’s world, it is easy for something to “be” and “not be” at the same time
under the same conditions. All you have
to do is scream loud enough and you must be right, especially if you can toss
in a condescending insult or two.
#30#
