“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make
words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which
is to be master — that’s all.”
Sitting on a wall while talking to Alice or sitting anywhere and minding your own business when someone asks your opinion on something, you are going to run into what seems to be a mental pandemic these days: the lack of meaning in thought, word, and deed. In a moral environment in which might increasingly makes right, words tend to lose their former meaning in favor of what the rich and powerful, uh, favor. Take, for example, the ease with which people prefer to fight over form rather than discuss substance.
Consequently, movements like positivism and modernism derive much of their momentum, even acceptability to many people simply because it’s easier to go along to get along and they want to be left in peace or (better) in charge. People therefore sometimes become focused on vague terminology to the point they neglect substance, especially in politics and religion. Slogans tossed around by demagogues become accepted doctrine while careful analysis gets rejected as “fake news” or worse.
Take, for example, the recent spate of argument between capitalism and socialism . . . with few people able to define either with any degree of accuracy. Although many authorities and politicians seem to endorse capitalism in preference to socialism, many of them never both to define either term.
True, many of the many imply socialism has something to do with a rejection of private property and free markets along with a correlative reliance on totalitarian government control. Many people seem to be accepting capitalism as equated with the institution of the free market and the natural right of private property — but it is rare that anyone explicitly states a definition of capitalism.
While this is probably not anyone’s intention, they come across as equivocating and dodging the issue. They seem ready to go either way if challenged by adherents of either system. This is an understandable stance today when far too many people will defend the terms socialism or capitalism to the death (usually someone else’s) but are unable to give a clear definition in many cases except that socialism is whatever capitalism is not and vice versa.
G.K. Chesterton
One is reminded, for example, of Michael
Novak’s and Martin Gardener’s respective definitions of democratic capitalism
and democratic socialism. Each claimed
what he meant by his chosen term is what G.K. Chesterton meant by
“distributism.” Unfortunately, as
Chesterton’s definitions of distributism were so vague, and Hilaire Belloc’s
distributist prescriptions so unworkable that one is left even more in the dark
than before.
That is why we at the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ), www.cesj.org, have chosen the term “Economic Personalism.” We define socialism/capitalism as the abolition of private property in capital (and the consequent concentration of capital ownership or control in the State and a bureaucratic elite), capitalism as the concentration of capital ownership or control in a private sector elite, and the Servile State as the concentration of capital ownership or control in the hands of a combined private and public sector elite.
We define Economic Personalism as an economic system centered on the dignity and economic empowerment of each human person. It recognizes human life, dignity, and liberty require each person have the power and independent means to support and sustain one’s own life, dignity and liberty — i.e., through one’s own private property rights: personal or shared control and rights to the full fruits or “profits” in what one owns. In contrast to monopolistic capitalism, collectivist socialism/communism, and their various forms of State or collective ownership of productive capital assets, economic personalism aims to structurally diffuse economic power by democratizing access to capital ownership for each person.
The Just Third Way version of Economic Personalism recognizes two categories of inputs that each person can contribute to, and gain consumption income from, the production of marketable goods and services. These are 1) one’s labor, including manual, intellectual, managerial, entrepreneurial, etc., and 2) one’s capital, including land, structures, machinery, patents, etc. The chief institutions for universalizing equal access to the means of acquiring and owning productive capital, while respecting the private property rights of current owners, include a just monetary system, a just tax system and a just inheritance system to remove barriers to equal opportunity for every citizen to become a capital owner in the future.
Economic Personalism holds the most democratic economic system for determining just wages, just prices and just profits is an open, anti-monopolistic free market guided by the three system principles of participative justice, distributive justice and social justice.
CESJ presented the principles of Economic Personalism to Pope St. John Paul II, and he encouraged CESJ’s work in a private audience prior to Centesimus Annus. Following Centesimus Annus, CESJ presented a seminar at the Vatican on the importance of widespread capital ownership for a sound, participative, free market economy. This led to CESJ’s 1994 compendium, Curing World Poverty: The New Role of Property, and more recently the short book, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, prepared at the behest of some Vatican officials. CESJ is currently working with various individuals and groups to spread the world about Economic Personalism to a broader audience.
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