Loading ...
Isn’t it ironic that the Day of Sin should coincide exactly with the most significant day for the primary elections? In honor of such a momentous day, I thought I would take a plunge into some of the political questions that have been simmering on the edge of some of the previous posts. I’ve promised to post about Ron Paul and Pope Leo XIII. I’m going to do that, but there are several pieces to this puzzle, and rather than posting them all in one monster thread that nobody can get to the bottom of, I thought I might break the thing down into a couple of pieces. In this thread, I want to open the floor to a discussion of politics generally. I want to explain, especially, why it’s often so difficult to use Catholic thinkers as a resource in deciding how to view certain political questions.
As we know, the Church claims to be infallible only in matters of faith and morals. She will not infallibly predict the weather or the outcome of a sporting event; she does not offer intimate details about DNA or the respiratory systems of the horned frog; she cannot definitely say what is the best way to persuade a six-year-old to stop torturing his little sister. This sometimes gets tricky when it comes to morally charged political issues, because they tend to involve a mixture of pragmatic questions (on which the Church is not infallible) and moral ones (on which she is.)
Sometimes the pragmatic questions are pretty easy. For example, the Church teaches that abortion is a serious evil. It doesn’t take a political genius to figure out that there would probably be less of abortion if it were illegal. There might be some debatable questions about the smaller details (for example: can Catholics support the legalization of abortion in cases of rape if it appears that this measure will prevent a law banning abortion from being overturned entirely?) But in general, the policy dictated by that moral precept seems pretty clear. Issues surrounding “life” often tend to be that way.
Things get much, much messier when we get to the issues that involve economics. Property rights. Entitlement programs. Trade regulations. Taxation. All of these issues have moral questions embedded within them. But they also involve a heavy dose of economics, and when it comes down to it, economics is one massive mess of pragmatic issues to which it isn’t clear that Catholic thinkers have given especially good answers.
It’s always tempting to make the situation easier by pulling the moral and pragmatic questions apart. Unfortunately, it generally doesn’t work. To see what I mean, examine the writings of great philosophers on these subjects. You will find that even statements that appear to be bedrock moral claims contain within them some economic assumptions that may not be right. Take, for example, a seemingly basic question like the following: is it morally acceptable for governments to tax their citizens? The dialectic might go something like the following:
Teacher: The moral law teaches that stealing is wrong. Therefore, the government cannot tax its citizens if taxation would be merely a form of stealing.
Student: But what is stealing?
Teacher: Stealing is taking from a man that which belongs to him.
Student: But what belongs to him?
And to sort that one out, you need some kind of economic system, so already pragmatic considerations have entered the game. Generally, philosophers dealing this question begin by asserting that a person “owns” whatever he himself has made; thus, the farmer owns his crops, the craftsman his handiwork, and so forth. In a modern economy, though, that principle doesn’t get us very far, because the great majority of us are wage laborers, and hardly any of the things we own, eat, or use were made or grown by us. To get any useful conclusions, then, we need principles for fair trade and fair employment, and by this time it should be obvious that we have an enormous list of pragmatic concerns on the table that must be addressed if we are to give any adequate answer even to my question about taxation.
I will offer one important example of the kind of problem that tends to arise when we invoke older Catholic thinkers as authorities for political (and especially economics-laden) questions. For quite a long time, discussions of fair trade were always built on the assumption that the “value” of the goods involved in a transaction would remain fixed throughout. Hence, you’ll find Aristotle or St. Thomas explaining that a person who walks away from a transaction with “more” than what he had going in, must be dishonest. He must somehow have cheated his partner in trade, because by rights they should each have something of the same “value” as what they originally brought to the trade. There are lots of interesting ramifications of this assumption — among them, that usury must be immoral, since a person who collects interest on an investment obviously walks away with more than what he originally had. And sure enough, if you look you can find many statements from political or moral philosophers harshly condemning usury. You might get the idea, if you assembled the right quotations, that the condemnation of usury is a solid moral precept of the Church.
What we’ve learned in recent centuries, though, is that the basic Aristotelian assumption is wrong. Through trade, the overall value of the goods in question can actually grow. It is possible to become “richer” through a business transaction without cheating anyone. This would seem to make all the difference when it comes to things like usury. So, suppose I invest money in a company, and they use my money to manufacture a product, which they then sell at a price that consumers find attractive. The consumers benefit from the transaction, because they get a good buy. The company makes money from the sales and ends up richer than it could have been without the startup capital that they got from their investment. And after I collect my interest, I’m richer too. Everybody ends up better off than they were before. Obviously this is just Capitalism 101. But it isn’t just a pretty theory — it happens all the time. And if it’s possible for everyone to benefit from the overall transaction as in that case, that would seem to undermine the reasons for all those stern pronouncements against usury. It isn’t that Aristotle and St. Thomas were wrong all through — they were invoking some sound moral principles about how to deal fairly with others. But they got the pragmatics wrong, so many of their applications of the relevant principles are somewhat unhelpful.
For all these reasons, it’s not really possible to view political and economic questions of this kind in the same way that we’d view questions about sex or marriage, or theological questions that have been definitively settled by the Church. Holy Mother Church can give us some relevant precepts to consider in ordering a nation generally, but she will never tell us exactly what a Christian economy should look like.
I don’t know that this is exactly helpful for those of you who are going to the polls today (I am myself, in fact). But it might help a little just to clear the slate of any misconceptions about how the words of particular Catholic authorities might oblige us to vote for this or that candidate. In my next post, I want to do a more detailed comparison of the works of Pope Leo XIII and Dr. Ron Paul to explain why I do not think the latter can be said to embody the ideas of the former… also I’ll say a few frank words about why I’m still never going to vote for Ron Paul. But for now, happy voting, and happy Fat Tuesday!
Clara,
One quick comment before I give up my computer for Lent: Leo XIII makes it very clear that he does not speak with any competancy about the applications of the moral principles he is laying down. So we are all in agreement on that.
As far as property rights are concerned: they come to us from God under the Natural Law, as does our right to life. The one stems from the other. Property is the fruit of labor therefore your wages are your property. There is no moral difference between the crops one man grows and the check you receive at the end of the month.
One of the reasons witholding taxes is so pernicious is that people simply forget that they are handing over a large amount of their property to the govt. When govts had to send around tax collectors to people’s doors, and people had to go to their coffers and physically bring out a portion of their property to hand over to them, they thought about it a lot more!
I think you’ve sort of missed the main point of my discussion. You still think you can make lots of complex pre-institutional claims about who owns what, and this is precisely what I deny. It might be true that people are born with the right, on an abstract level, to own property of some kind and to benefit from their labor. But as soon as you start making specific claims about X owning Y, this is an application and depends on principles of government and economics on which, as we’ve agreed, the Church is not infallible.
Even the principle about owning what I make really isn’t as straightforward as it seems, because in order to make something I need time, materials, and possibly skills. If I’m a hired employee, or a convict, then what I make may not be mine; if I’m using someone else’s land or materials then it’s at least not clear. And if someone is helping me to acquire skills, might they not be entitled to some of the fruits of my labor in compensation? In short, you need a political and economic system to sort it out.
“There is no moral difference between the crops one man grows and the check you receive at the end of the month.”
Says you. How can that be so clear? Once we start talking about wages, we depend on legislation to help determine who can hire whom and under what conditions. (This is one kind of regulation that Pius XIII seemed to support, by the way.) And it’s only within an economic system that you can even understand what money is and how it can be used. So while it makes sense to say that a man is entitled to just compensation at the end of the work day, it seems a little strange to doggedly insist that he has a pre-institutional natural right to his $87.50 and not a penny less. Without a pre-existing economic system, that number wouldn’t really even mean anything.
It seems to me that, on Pius XIII’s principles, withholding should be a good thing. One of the things he talks about is expectations — the worker expects to receive his negotiated wage at the end of each month. Well, when you withhold a certain amount from his paycheck even before he gets it, his expectations are adjusted accordingly. Now again, I’m not necessarily denying that injustice could still be done to him without his realizing it, but it does seem that the natural order that Pope Leo cares about (wherein men work, get reasonable compensation, and make decisions about how to use those wages in order to provide for themselves and their families) can be preserved pretty well even in a system that includes income taxes. To ask for anything more specific than that, you have to enter into the economics of it all, and pragmatic considerations begin doing some of the work.
1.) In my absence from this website, Clara has apparently joined one of the sedevacantist sects that has a Pius the Thirteenth. My.
2.) Clara, I thought usury was the term for sinful interest-taking, just as murder is the term for sinful homicide. Homicide is not innately wrong, nor is interest-taking. But usury is intrinsically wrong — it refers specifically to a sin. The Church has absolutely forbidden usury, in the harshest terms. It did not condemn interest-taking per se, and, if I recall the relevant magisterial texts, they make the necessary distinctions. The saints did not get the pragmatics “wrong” — they accurately related the pragmatics of their day. The pragmatics have simply changed. By and large, almost any lending of interest in the Middle Ages was going to entail usury or could do so. When capital-driven economies developed, the theologians saw that some interest-taking was justified.
3.) I don’t think you quite understand Vicki’s point about wages. Whatever the wage is, in whatever medium it is paid, however we determine it, whoever pays it, the wage is that which, by definition, is owed to the worker. Therefore, it is *morally* (not economically, not practically) the same as the farmer’s crops. It belongs to him as his private property. It is a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance to deny him his just wages; so says the Bible. Yet, of course, the government may tax private property — it would be difficult to see how it could avoid doing so.
Whether the income tax is just or not, I don’t know. I wish it were so, so that I could indulge my paranoid contrarian streak and have something else to shake my fist and/or pitchfork about, but that’s just a prejudice. I am paid so little that I fall in a fairly benevolent tax bracket. So long as the govt. prevents others from killing me, and keeps the roads okay (or pay for new shocks for my Lumina, which Iosephus, Iacobus, and Robertus know to be in poor shape), and provides me with the circus of politics, I really don’t know what difference the exact method of taxation makes.
I cast my ballot for Ron Paul in the primaries. I think he is much more sensible than the bulk of his followers are. Many of them seem to think he’s the Second Coming, which he isn’t. Before casting my vote, I asked Vin Lewis (www.vinlewis.typepad.com) what he thought. He is in favor of continuing the U.S. occupation of Iraq, so I thought he would condemn Paul. He pointed out that at this point the major candidates qualify for certain classified information. If continuing the occupation/keeping Gitmo open/using waterboarding/renewing parts of the Patriot Act is all that is keeping us from another terrorist attack, the designated national security expert will tell the candidates that. I hardly think that Paul (or Clinton, for that matter) would take a stand on “principle” if that meant, according to classified but real info., an imminent attack on the U.S. (And remember, that agent would subsequently blackmail any President who got elected and allowed a forewarned attack to occur. Impeachment and/or death would follow.) IF Paul won, some face-saving way would be made for him to continue doing what he needs to do, regardless of his constituents. He would “betray” the antiwar people if he knew it would seriously imperil national security to do otherwise, a condition which he may not have known up till this point. And if it won’t imperil national security, or prestige, or our duties to our new Iraqi clients, heck, bring the troops home. This insight relieved me, as I tend to agree with Paul on alot of the rest. On pragmatic issues, not his ideological libertarianism. (Note: I’m not saying that Vin endorsed my candidate.)
That said, I hope that Romney beats McCain. I half regret my “purist” vote, and I will kick myself if McCain beats Romney by one vote in Illinois. Between Huckabee, McCain, and Romney, I would rank McCain third. On the Democratic side, I hope that this November I will be given an opportunity not to vote for Obama, not an opportunity not to vote for Hillary. Although I fairly would swoon if they ran together, for then I could opt not to vote for either one of them.
If it were a matter of policy per se and not of feasibility, I would prefer Huckabee on social issues, minus prayer in school. I went to a public school. I am not comfortable with teachers having Catholic students join Protestant ones in blatantly sectarian or blatantly non-sectarian prayers. Lex orandi, lex credendi applies here. Now, if all Catholic kids were homeschooled and/or in Catholic schools, then I would find generically Christian or theistic prayers in state schools less problematic (Protestant ones, though, I don’t want to fund with my tax money). Yet, constitutionally speaking, I agree with Huckabee (does he qualify as an heresiarch? or just a heretic?) on the unconstitutionality of the 1962 Supreme Court ban. And he was right on Mormonism.
How’s that for creative closed-mindedness?
Good to hear from you again, TP! But I can’t say I agree with you about the possibility of Paul changing positions once he got to the White House. He’s not that sort of a guy, methinks.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter because he won’t get that far. I can admit that I’ve found Paul a bit more personally likable as I’ve read more about him — in debates and such he still just strikes me as a nutjob, but when you read about his life etc., there are lots of things to like. I can also understand how he might seem a refreshing change from what most political candidates are like. People love to talk about his honesty and consistency, and I agree, he is both honest and consistent. And I can see how there’s a certain appeal to that.
But that said, he would be a terrible president. The very quality that his supporters enjoy — his uncompromising nature — would make him a disaster in the White House. I mean, sure, there are some issues on which it isn’t acceptable to compromise. For Paul, though, that seems to be pretty much every issue. It makes him sort of interesting as a congressional gadfly, but the move from gadfly to president just isn’t a good idea. You have to work with people to be a good president. You have to pick your battles, and recognize which things can be conceded for the same of making things work. Paul has proven amply that that isn’t his style.
I don’t agree with you about Huckabee/Romney either, but I already wrote a post on that, so I’ll leave it for now.
As I said I would, I voted for John McCain today, and the odds are looking good that I’ll get my wish on that one.
Whoops! I meant, “I wish it were UNjust, so I’d have something else to rant about”
“But that said, he would be a terrible president.”
Which is why I probably won’t vote for him in the national election, even if he runs on a third party ticket. As for his consistency — has he ever said that he would not fight a war in which the national interest was imperiled? I thought his claim was that withdrawal would be in our best interest. To be honest, I have no idea why anyone in the United States who lacks security clearance would know what to think on this, pro or con. So much of the relevant information is absolutely Top Secret. That is why I did not hypothesize, “President Paul will magically become a hawk,” but rather, “If and when the relevant agencies tell him the necessary information, which he hasn’t seen before, even by his own standards he will be convinced to do what is necessary.” What is necessary might be withdrawal, or it might be staying, or some magical third alternative that the eggheads in the military-industrial complex have hatched.
But that is probably just me engaging in projection; the man by all accounts is definitely unrealistic. Oh well, I did no damage. And when McCain loses the election, or when Pres. McCain gets us into a disastrous war, or appoints a pro-choice Supreme Court judge, or grants amnesty to all the illegals, I can yet again say, “Hey, it’s not my fault; he’s not my candidate.” Should McCain win the election and then prove absolutely impeccable, then I can say, “Hey, I got it wrong.”
I guess I just figured that this may be the last national election in which a “congressional gadfly” of that sort runs. It was vindicating to see Paul beat Giuliani in a number of states. The state of Illinois went to McCain by a huge margin, so I don’t have to take responsibility either way — either for winning it for an unworthy candidate, or losing it for a worthy one. To be honest, if I thought that Paul was actually going to win the nomination, I probably would not have voted for him — I’d hate to have responsibility for helping nominate him. On the other hand, I don’t mind giving him a protest vote that might bring the attention of the Republican leadership to a constituency they’ve taken for granted.
And then my state will vote for Hillary, or Obama, or both come November. A lot of McCain’s support has come from blue states, like Illinois, which he will not win in November. Stupid — who cares which Republican the blue state of Illinois wants, and who cares which Democrat the red state of Utah wants?
Now, I just really, really want Obama to defeat Hillary. There I have none of the inner conflicts generated in the Republican race. Obama is definitely the Democrat I want not to vote for!
Wait a second, I need to make my post remotely religious. May God be praised for the fact that no wretched pro-choice “Catholic” is amongst the frontrunners, and may none of them be brought in as VP candidates on either side.
Also, excellent post on MLK, Clara. But I have not had success in the past when I have tried to trace down an objective source on the claims that MLK either battered women or paid for prostitutes. That he was a chronic adulterer I knew, but I don’t know the sources for the more sordid details. Thanks.
On MLK, I think there are some reasonably solid sources concerning his abusive tendencies, but I’ll get back to you on that. It’s too late to go tracking such things down tonight.
You’re right, of course, that any candidate we choose might go wrong. And I don’t think it’s necessarily silly to go with a protest vote. Sometimes, as you say, it sends a good message. I don’t love everything about McCain either, but I still have to give him the edge for a host of reasons. For one, he seems the most electable. And while he’s sometimes criticized for not being a real conservative, he seems real enough on the issues I care about. On military and foreign affairs issues, he’s definitely real; on life issues he could be better but overall I think he deserves the edge over Romney. Both have compromised themselves a little… but McCain has been pretty solid considering how long he’s been in the system. Romney, by contrast, was the governor of the first state to legalize gay marriage. Hmmm. Anyway, I would vote for either in a general election, but you know, you have to pick one horse for the primaries, and overall I found McCain the more trustworthy. (Huckabee may have a more solid pedigree than either on life issues, but I mark him as beyond the pale. I’ve talked about my reasons before, I think.)
McCain’s love of environmentalism does leave me a bit disgruntled. I guess you can’t have everything. Also, I wish he were a little younger. But on the other issues where his conservative credentials are supposed to be shaky… well, to be honest, I can’t be too bothered. On immigration I like him quite a bit better than his competitors, whose wildly unrealistic plans (removing all illegals within 120 days? Please.) and apparent zest for punishing illegal immigrants leaves me rather cold. We need to do more to seal the border, but all the candidates agree to that. I’m not that concerned to see that we devise harsher punishments for the ones already here.
And I guess the other big one is campaign finance. You know, I think I have a kind of special disability relating to that subject. People have tried on many occasions to explain to me why it matters so much, but somehow every time they do, I find my attention almost irresistaby drawn to something else. In fact, I lost my last ever college debate round (I’ve probably never mentioned it, but I had a long career as a high school/collegiate debater) on this precise issue… apparently I couldn’t even do a respectable imitation of being exercised about it.
“On military and foreign affairs issues, he’s definitely real; on life issues he could be better but overall I think he deserves the edge over Romney. Both have compromised themselves a little… but McCain has been pretty solid considering how long he’s been in the system. Romney, by contrast, was the governor of the first state to legalize gay marriage. Hmmm.”
On the military and foreign affairs he is both real and scary. The surge in Iraq seems to be working. Bombing Iran on the other hand — recently the combined intelligence agencies of this country said they simply don’t have a weapons program. Haven’t since 2003. That may well be attributable to America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and one may question why we should believe the intelligence agencies about the lack of weapons in Iran when they were wrong about the presence of weapons in Iraq. But they came out and said to McCain: “Bomb what?” His eagerness is on this issue rules him out for me. Romney had a good idea about making secret deals with the Iraqi PM. It is quite reasonable to keep these things secret. Unfortunately, Romney admitted in public to the fact that leaders make secret deals. Then McCain misconstrued this in order to malign Romney. Which is why McCain merits my disdain. Though I voted for Buchanan in 2000, I definitely rejoiced when Bush surpassed McCain back then — that is when my dislike for the man began.
“on life issues he could be better but overall I think he deserves the edge over Romney. Both have compromised themselves a little… but McCain has been pretty solid considering how long he’s been in the system. Romney, by contrast, was the governor of the first state to legalize gay marriage. Hmmm.”
Romney sold out the right (both moral rightness, and the political right) for the sake of power. Yet he did have a Supreme Court ruling, and it might have caused a constitutional crisis in the state had he done otherwise. That is a mitigating factor. If the Supreme Court mandated same-sex marriage under McCain, I rather think that he would enforce their rule, just as all Republican presidents since 1973 have dutifully enforced Roe v. Wade. Romney was in a Massachusetts setting. I trust that in the natural arena, he’ll sell out to the conservatives. Which he has so far. I prefer someone who acts reliably once he’s “sold out,” not someone who will be a maverick. (Reagan and the Bushes were pro-choice, then turned pro-life for the national elections. Many leading Democrats were once pro-life, then sold out the other way. They are all “reliable” in their “hypocritical” positions.) As for McCain, in a public interview he stated that he would not mind if there were gay marriage, then minutes later contradicted himself and said it should be illegal. A man who had little to gain or lose flip-flopped in minutes. Great.
In short, my position is that none of the candidates were all that great, but McCain had several more serious defects, most notably his “zest” to wage war against a country our intelligence agencies recently say is not working on WMD.
“I’ve talked about my reasons before, I think.”
Well, thanks for re-summarizing; I have neither the time nor inclination to re-read over a month’s worth of posts.
“natural arena” Er, “national arena.”
“Which he has so far. I prefer someone who acts reliably once he’s “sold out,” not someone who will be a maverick.”
So why did I vote for Paul, the truest maverick? Because his “maverick” nature helped keep him more conservative (which means precisely what nowadays, anyway?), while Mitt had to sell out in order to become conservative. Most of McCain’s deviations were favorable to Democrats.
As for illegal immigration, it will need to be solved, and mass deportation will not work. It is probably better to have a non-leftist do it, so as to preserve some modicum of decency about the whole mess. But the one who “solves” the problem will the be the guy who says, “We have officially failed as a nation, so let’s give up and pardon these guys.” It will be a sad day, no matter what. I wish that a Democrat could take the fall for this.
Well, all I can say is, if you think Paul would behave more responsibly (with respect to foreign policy) once he had control of the White House, it seems fair to give McCain at least as much trust. We’re not really sure what they do or don’t know about Iran. But unlike you (I think) I supported the invasion of Iraq, and I also feel like it’s good for the world to have a hawkish president in office. It makes threats more credible. Keeps bad leaders on their toes.
Good to have you back, Tobias Petrus. I was beginning to think you had gone “Into the Great Silence”—joined a monastery or something.
This is not a rash judgment but it appears that the Cornell Society for a Good Time is participating in the Media Blackout on Presidential Candidate Alan Keyes. Not only is he pro life on all the issues—except the death penalty of course—but Catholic as well. And is their any sense of Academic Solidarity among you people??? Because he spent a few years as an undergraduate at Cornell. I think I will have to look elsewhere than this blog for the political scoop—or sound political opinion, for that matter. I may turn to the Cornell Daily Sun. Extra ashes for the staff today.
Alan Keyes: he has no credentials. He has proven a failure in every single election he’s tried. I say that as one who likes outsider candidates. In 1996, it is likely he stayed in the race to be a spoiler for Buchanan, by stealing votes from him.
“We’re not really sure what they do or don’t know about Iran.”
If one falls back on the justification for the Iraq War, “Our intelligence said there were weapons,” then it seems reasonable that the judgment of those agencies “No weapons in Iran,” should be taken at face value. Granted, as far as I know, they didn’t make statements about the support of Iran for Hezbollah, etc.
“joined a monastery or something.”
Would that I had been silent because I had advanced in holiness, not for much more mundane reasons.
Having forgotten how to sign in and edit, I wish to indicate that the last post was mine.
Additionally, in weighing candidates, I think it’s okay to put a higher burden of proof on voting for a frontrunner like McCain as a opposed to a protest vote. Foreign affairs ruled out McCain, who was going to win my state, but it didn’t Paul, who was never going to win. I am in principle an irresponsible voter, insofar as I want to cast a vote that will make me least responsible for any real or potential negative outcome. Maybe I should simple have returned an unmarked ballot, which is an even clearer demonstration of contempt for the slate of candidates.
But alas, I think that in my comments here, I have veered away from religious and moral considerations into personal ramblings and purely secular analysis.
Actually, I didn’t know Keyes was running this time, until today. His name wasn’t on my ballot. I voted for Ron Paul.
Keyes also ran up huge campaign debts in Maryland that he’s never paid back, and he accused Barack Obama of having insufficient negritude.
!
I guess I take the opposite line, TP. Protest votes are primarily for times when the mainstream candidates are unacceptable. I suspect most of us are probably the same in that our views are far enough outside the mainstream that any candidate we really loved would have no chance at all of getting elected. So I lower the bar. All I demand of the GOP is: acceptable candidate for president. If the mainstream options include someone I can live with — which is by no means a given — I’ll vote for him.
Giuliani, Huckabee, and Paul were all unacceptable. For different reasons, I would consider any of their presidencies to be pretty much a disaster. Romney and McCain were acceptable. I vacillated a bit between them but, as between two acceptable candidates, electability becomes a key consideration for me. I felt bad for Romney, getting flanked by Huckabee and McCain, but the fact that Huckabee was able to do it might show that the country (or at least the South) isn’t ready for a Mormon president. (I don’t endorse this prejudice, for reasons I explained in my Romney post last December, but there it is.)
I think we should all take a moment to reflect on how good it would be if the GOP could win this next presidential election. Or perhaps I should put it this way: it would be really good if the Dems could lose this next election. One reason for that, obviously, is the Court — the only way to win it back is by siege, so any break in the line is potentially a serious defeat. But also, with the Democrats, we want their frustration to be at high pitch. If we can freeze them out for long enough, they might eventually be forced to consider whether the price of being the pro-death and anti-morals party might be too high.
Clara,
I am afraid it may come as no surprise that I disagreed with some of the claims you made here. (:
Teacher: The moral law teaches that stealing is wrong. Therefore, the government cannot tax its citizens if taxation would be merely a form of stealing.
Student: But what is stealing?
Teacher: Stealing is taking from a man that which belongs to him.
Student: But what belongs to him?
And to sort that one out, you need some kind of economic system, so already pragmatic considerations have entered the game.
An economic system is not necessary to answer that question. As TP pointed out, there is another moral priniciple at stake – whether the government is owed a percentage of our private property. What belongs to a man is more properly a question of justice than of economics. We should not define justice according to systems of economics. Rather, we should order economic systems according to justice.
Through trade, the overall value of the goods in question can actually grow. It is possible to become “richer” through a business transaction without cheating anyone. This would seem to make all the difference when it comes to things like usury.
Actually, St. Thomas mentions that possibility and distinguishes the productive loan from the usurious loan: “He who lends money transfers the ownership of the money to the borrower. Hence the borrower holds the money at his own risk and is bound to pay it all back: wherefore the lender must not exact more. On the other hand he that entrusts his money to a merchant or craftsman so as to form a kind of society, does not transfer the ownership of his money to them, for it remains his, so that at his risk the merchant speculates with it, or the craftsman uses it for his craft, and consequently he may lawfully demand as something belonging to him, part of the profits derived from his money.” II-II78.2.ad5
So, suppose I invest money in a company, and they use my money to manufacture a product, which they then sell at a price that consumers find attractive. The consumers benefit from the transaction, because they get a good buy. The company makes money from the sales and ends up richer than it could have been without the startup capital that they got from their investment. And after I collect my interest, I’m richer too. Everybody ends up better off than they were before. Obviously this is just Capitalism 101. But it isn’t just a pretty theory — it happens all the time. And if it’s possible for everyone to benefit from the overall transaction as in that case, that would seem to undermine the reasons for all those stern pronouncements against usury.
It is naïve to maintain that everyone is benefiting from such a transaction. Our economic system just removes us from the man being taken advantage of in China or Mexico. This is from Thomas Storck’s NOR review of the famous solidarist Heinrich Pesch’s ten volume work, Teaching Guide to Economics:
“Pesch’s discussion of the just wage is surely one of his most original contributions to economic and moral theory, for he speaks of the concept of the ‘just wage as the economically correct wage.’ After noting that a man’s labor is ordinarily capable of producing enough to provide for himself and his family, Pesch goes on to say, ‘The employer who, by his own ineptitude, uses labor in such a way that it does not come up to doing what it is capable of doing, would nevertheless be required to pay the kind of wage which labor is intended to provide. However, if labor is utilized properly in accordance with its natural purpose, and the employer pays a wage which does not provide for labor’s livelihood, then he violates commutative justice. Finally, an industry which, even under normal circumstances is not in a position to pay wages corresponding to what wages are supposed to accomplish, is lacking in economic justification. This means that the requisite consumer demand is lacking, and such an industry no longer has a place in the pattern of satisfying normal human wants.’
In other words, if the only way in which an employer can afford to sell his product is to set his prices so low that he cannot afford to pay his workers a living wage, then clearly his product lacks sufficient consumer demand. It is as if he had to bribe the public to buy his product by charging less than its genuine production cost. Today we are inundated with cheap goods produced abroad, sometimes, as with those produced in China, in conditions little better than slavery. This is a distortion of the economic process. If the item is worth buying, it is worth paying a price that fully compensates all who are involved in its production. If someone revived chattel slavery today and boasted that he could undersell his competitors, who would doubt but that his entire enterprise was an economic as well as a moral evil, no matter how cheaply he could produce? The same logic must be applied to any enterprise that cannot afford to pay its workers a just wage. This kind of analysis, which respects both real economic facts as well as ethical principles, is characteristic of Pesch and of the Catholic tradition at its best.”
For a perspective utterly at variance with the mainstream, you may read this interesting, albeit light-hearted, consideration of usury written by an acquaintance of mine.
Well, the first thing I would say, Raindear, is that you’re making a lot of assumptions about my example. Sweatshops (as such “low-paying businesses” are often called) raise difficult ethical issues of their own, but why do you assume that my hypothetical company uses them? Are you yourself asserting that it would be impossible to offer goods at an “attractive” price unless the workers were exploited? Perhaps you’re also having trouble eradicating that deep Aristotelian intuition that, one way or another, the value of all the “stuff” in the system has to remain fixed. The consumers can’t possibly walk away happy unless someone has been robbed!
I read your friend’s bit on usury. I think I agree with the first commenter more. Actually, I’m going to contradict the basic premise of this post straight up: wealth does grow. It grows, provided it is used in the way that people (behaving as rational animals) ought to use it. That’s why the world is wealthier today than it was yesterday, and considerably wealthier this year than it was 50 years ago. This is what actually happens when people continue working and using capital in appropriate ways. And on that note, I can’t see the sense of making a distinction between productive and non-productive loans. All loans are potentially productive, in more or less direct ways. That may not seem to be the case when you isolate particular features of the system — for example, as your friend points out, for all the money you’re giving to the mortgage company, the house doesn’t actually grow or get nicer over the years. Quite the contrary, it tends to fall apart in time. So it’s not directly productive, but it’s productive in the sense that you can be productive while living in the house. You wouldn’t be able to do your job effectively if you didn’t have a place to live, and over the course of living in a place, you might generate quite a lot of wealth. And maybe you’ll raise children there, and they can be productive too, once they’ve reached a certain age. So the mortgage is a productive loan, looked at in the right way. Just about any loan could be seen in such a light — and in cases where it couldn’t (for example, if the loan were used to buy a video game system that was then used to waste inordinate amounts of formerly productive time), we’d generally be willing to say that the money had been squandered at the fault of the borrower.
As far as justice and economics — I don’t think economics should be permitted to dictate justice, but nor to I think it can be purely dictated by justice. Each is necessary for forming the other. That is to say, it would be dangerous to devise an economic system without giving any thought to the relevant moral principles. But it would likewise be foolish to try to devise a just model for ownership without using principles of economics. Even the basic units in play are meaningless without economics, and you need some understanding of how wealth works and can be used, before you can make reasoned statements about who should own what.
I don’t pretend to have definitely settled views about the best way to order an economy or a government. I can see serious possible objections to all of the proposals on the table. Capitalism unchecked can obviously have some morally repugnant ramifications… theories like Distributism try to get around them by “starting” with moral principles and working from there, but the pragmatics of these theories always just seem very wrong. And these are the sorts of questions where pragmatics really matter, quite a lot actually, since at the end of the day what we want is to see as many people as possible working for decent, livable wages.
Thank goodness for party platforms. Who knows what a candidate would believe. However, Huckabee is fairly clear on his views — regardless of party platform. Yesterday on the news he said “why gain the whole world and lose your soul in the process.” Good point. Unfortunately, McCain and Romney appear to be less convicted based upon their past. However, I am not upset if Romney or McCain wins. But I’d prefer Romney than McCain if I was to choose either.
Alan Keyes comes off as a bit over the top and I’d have reservations in voting for him; but purely on his social issues stances — great. Capital punishment — outdated, however.
‘Yesterday on the news he said “why gain the whole world and lose your soul in the process.” Good point.’
It’s not originally his. He was quoting.
Clara,
You said: “Obviously this is just Capitalism 101. But it isn’t just a pretty theory — it happens all the time.” In the first place, the greatest “successes” of capitalist America are associated with labor abuses. The majority of manufacturers subcontract overseas factories, otherwise they would not be able to provide their goods so cheaply. Bill also pointed me to this report posted last year by the National Labor Committee. That particular report references Home Depot. This one references Walmart and JCPenny, Walmart comes up again here along with Nike and Gap. I am fairly convinced that you cannot make the kind of profit a capitalist economy depends upon without either underpaying the labor or overcharging the consumer.
Where does Aristotle declare the fixed value of primary/natural wealth? I thought he only made that claim about artificial wealth.
Your argument in favor of house mortgages could be applied to all those goods necessary for life. Thankfully, we do not need loans to obtain clothes or food, but do you really think the payment we owe for them appreciates over time just because they have contributed indirectly to the improvement of our situation? Even if, in a certain sense, their value to the user has increased, that is on account of his own industry. Just as the producer/seller should not suffer for a consumer’s negligence, so should he not expect inordinate profit from the consumer’s industry. In most cases, the price of a house - even before interest - exceeds the cost of building. Couldn’t that be said to compensate the loaner for providing a very useful good which the consumer could not otherwise obtain?
Just out of curiousity, how many Distributist works did you read before you discerned the impracticality of their principles? I once heard a lecture on the errors of distributism, given by a Mr. John Clark, a Catholic business who has published articles defending capitalism in Latin Magazine. However, I found it singular that Mr. Clark considered himself qualified to dissect distributism after reading one little book, The Restoration of Property , which provides hardly more than an evening’s worth of reading. Perhaps you have done more research, but distributism is often written off as impractical by those unfamiliar with its substance. If it is so very impractical, why are all kinds of books now being published reexamining these issues? Here are just a few examples:
Small Is Still Beautiful, Joseph Pearce
Third Ways, Allan Carlson
Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, Amintore Fanfani
Human Goods, Economic Evils, Edward Hadas
An Essay on the Economic Effects of the Reformation
Beyond Capitalism & Socialism
Better Off, Eric Brende
Geography of Nowhere, James Kuntsler
Clara — no duh.
“But also, with the Democrats, we want their frustration to be at high pitch. ”
But Democrats love John McCain. When he gets elected, I foresee federal funding for stem-cell research, the first legislation vetoed by Bush (God bless him), to be passed pretty rapidly.
John McCain opposed nominating another Samuel Alito nomination, saying he “wore his conservatism on his sleeve,” (though he would support another Roberts). He also helped block Bush’s conservative judicial nominations. Most of the pro-choice Republicans voted for him after Giuliani (who endorsed him) bowed out. I hope that when he sells out his maverick status in order to shore up the Right, McCain sells out once and for all and never looks back. But with his history of collaboration with Democratic pols in Congress, I don’t know how he will deal with the Democratic Congress.
Clara,
The difference between a productive and a non-productive loan is part of Church teaching. Look up the condemnations of usury. Those Popes meant business. Even if all loans are potentially productive, that doesn’t mean that each one actually is, or that all are likely to be. During the Middle Ages, loans were made so people would have enough money to buy bread to live. They’d pay the money back later, but merely surviving in the meantime was not “productive.” And during large periods of time, wealth has remained fairly stable, or at least it has grown together with the population.
“The difference between a productive and a non-productive loan is part of Church teaching.”
Well, I certainly might be wrong in my assessments of how loans work… but part of the question I’m asking is whether something like that can be part of Church teaching in the same way that, say, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is part of Church teaching. I don’t really think so, actually. It certainly isn’t a theological truth. And while there are certainly moral considerations embedded within it, they are complemented by a particular understanding of wealth and capital and how these work… in short, economic questions. That was originally the point of the post. We can’t really take economic, or economically-charged statements as dogmatic in the same way some other things might be, because the Church is not infallible on those same questions.
Now, certainly I can agree that not everything a person uses a loan for would necessarily be productive. Paying for grandma’s surgery, for example, probably won’t be. And yes, the capitalist does need a way to deal with obligations to the non-productive. But to go back to Raindear’s question… yes, it seems to me that my arguments might be applied to, for example, food. And that doesn’t necessarily seem inappropriate. Suppose you and I are both very poor people, looking for a way to get ourselves food for a day. I am (let’s suppose) in better shape than you, but you have a bit of money that might be used to buy lunch… but only for one of us. I could get a day’s work, but it’s physically demanding and I won’t be strong enough to get the job done unless I have some food. So you give me the money and go hungry all day, but then I, having now been able to complete the day’s work, give you the money back, plus a few dollars’ interest. And then we both get a decent evening meal. This seems like a classic sort of case of both of us benefitting from your usurious practice, which enabled me to get work and you to get the interest. Yes, the profit came from my industry and not yours… but does that mean that you’re taking advantage of me? I don’t really see it that way. Labor is my contribution to the deal, and capital is yours.
I will readily concede that I haven’t read as much on distributism as I want to, in no small part because it’s extremely difficult to find the material. Truly, I did make an effort. I’ve read some blogs and articles and such things as can be found online, but the university library on my husband’s campus had exactly… zero books on distributism. I managed to find a couple of books that had a few pages on it, but that’s all. I’ve looked in bookstores and the only one I’ve seen is the Pearce book (which I flipped through, but didn’t buy… I’ve read a few of Pearce’s books before and wasn’t overly impressed. He always seems to me like rather a muddled man.) I recently broke down and paid the full price to order a few recommended books online. It’s much more fun to look through a stack before picking the one(s) you actually want to read, but there it is. So anyway, I hope to read more soon. I have seen Clark’s writings, by the way, and also found them a bit unfair at points.
However, as an academic (in training), I don’t really take the mere existence of a handful of new books on a subject as much evidence of its reasonableness. In academic libraries, one can find whole shelves of books on all sorts of ridiculous subjects and ludicrous theories.
Before I forget — for the Aristotle, check out the Ethics, book 5. Particularly chapter 5.
You don’t have to answer these, since I may find the answers myself when I get a chance to read the stuff I ordered, but just offhand, here are some things about distributism that I wonder about:
First, do distributists deny that, in the sort of world they advocate, there would probably be a lot more hunger and general want? Anyway, it certainly seems to me that there’s a lot less now than in the medieval-guild world that they take as a model. Maybe you’ll just think I’ve been drinking the Economist kool-aid for too long, and I suppose any stats that they publish about that tend to be somewhat speculative. But I’m definitely under the impression that there’s a lot less hunger, less infant mortality, less lack of clean drinking water, and so forth, in the world today than at almost any other time. And it seems to me that this mainly stems from two features of capitalism. First, it is more efficient. This is not necessarily due to the exploitation of workers (though that does sometimes occur); it also has to do with the sorts of possibilities that open up when a company has more capital and just generally more reach. You can build assembly lines (look at America during WWII, and how enormously productive we were then. That wasn’t from outsourcing.) You can train your workers to specialize. You can transport things in enormous bulk, and arrange for cooperative ventures with other large businesses that cut out intermediary steps for both of you. You have enough capital that you can devote some to research and development (I don’t quite understand who would do that in a distributist world), and just in general, you have more flexibility in what options you can give to customers, since your kids aren’t going to starve if you don’t make X number of dollars this week. Furthermore, the competitive nature of the market will ensure that most large companies are managed by people who are good at business, and who figure out how to make things that people want and sell them where they’re most valued. There are just a lot of things that large companies do better than small businesses… and while exploiting workers may be one, it isn’t by any means the only one.
Oh, but back to the hunger issue. The efficiency of capitalism is one reason it helps in the long run. The other is sort of related. As I understand it, the distributist answer to unexpected hardship (i.e. a small business failing for whatever reason) is community-based. If you’re a dairy farmer and your cows all suddenly die of some livestock disease, then hopefully your neighbors will step in and offer some assistance while you figure out what to do next. The thing is, though, that disasters often strike entire regions all at one time. Droughts, for example, can cripple all the farmers in a large region, all at the same time. However much goodwill your neighbors have, it won’t help if they’re equally destitute. And that used to be the reality pretty much all across the world — you just never knew when hard times might suddenly hit, and you and all your neighbors might be suddenly penniless. Of course capitalism doesn’t completely solve this problem, but it definitely helps. Even leaving aside the question of insurance, large businesses have enough capital and enough flexibility to recognize pretty quickly, “Hey, there are lots of destitute farmers in this region, so if we build a factory, or our corporate headquarters, or a massive getaway resort, in this area, we’ll be able to get all the labor we need.” I guess that would, in the distributist view, put all the farmers into the slavery of wage labor, but it certainly seems better than starvation.
Or maybe not. As you see, I don’t quite buy into the claim that ‘a man’s labor should under ordinary conditions be enough to support him and his family’ — should it? What are ‘ordinary’ circumstances? It’s a reasonable goal, but there are scores in the history of the human race for whom it hasn’t worked out, not necessarily due to lack of effort or even skill. However, I’m not totally unsympathetic to distributism (or at least my crude understanding of distributism) because I do share many of the concerns of Belloc and Chesterton and others. About the breakdown of community, for example. Aristotle was right about this much — communities are held together by need. These days we don’t have that much need for our neighbors, and hence we don’t have much in the way of community. (I think this is one of the main reasons so many women want to work, actually — workplaces are one of the few remaining sources of community — but that’s another topic.) That’s a serious loss, and I’m perfectly ready to countenance the possibility that it was better to skimp and risk an unpleasant death in a loving and supportive community, than to live a desperately lonely life in the safety and comfort of your well-furnished home.
However, if we do want to blame the economic changes (and there are other culprits that might be more easily handled), it seems to me sort of like a Humpty Dumpty situation — what’s broken doesn’t really go back together. I need to read more about the specific policy proposals before I definitely say that, because of course we could implement some stronger protectionist policies for small businesses and that sort of thing. I guess churches could try to offer no-interest loans to needy people in their congregations (the Mormons do something like that now.) But in general, it seems to me that the rise of the large corporation was more or less inevitable as transportation and communication became so much easier. It was natural barriers more than philosophical ones that kept this from happening in the period of the medieval guilds. I know Belloc likes the “reclaiming the swamp” analogy; to me it seems more like trying to move tectonic plates back where they used to be.
Anyway, you don’t have to respond to any of this, but I feared I might be frustrating you by not saying more about how this all seems to me, so there you go. I recognize that I have a lot of points of sympathy with the distributists, so I’d like to like them. Maybe Chesterton can persuade me of at least some of it.
It seems to me that advocates for Distributism tend to me middle class folks who have a lot of time on their hands and not much personal responsibility in life.
Unlike the working class folks who actually produce the good and services we consume or the upper class folks who provide the capital and vision that drive and grow our economy, the typical “Distributist” tends to contribute nothing, economically specially, in modern life. They don’t typical work by the sweat of their brow (although they advocate more of us should be doing this, so that we can “personally” produce “all” that we need to survive), nor do they take personal risk with their with very lives and fortunes along with working 90 hour weeks to start and grow a business which ends up employing people and helping the community.
They call tax collection tyranny, yet how would they impose their distributist dream on the nation? We can only assume that the government would dictate the do’s and don’ts and redistribute the wealth more fairly, all in accordance to the Distributionst social vision. To me it sounds like every other revolutionary ideology - wanting to exchange one form of tyranny for another.
Clara,
I will try to make a coherent reply at some point today. I have a sneaking suspicion that not everything I wrote yesterday made sense. My brain is a little fried by work and too many musical commitments, oddly enough(directing two choirs for weddings, singing in a Pentecost quartet, performing a Mozart Mass with some friends, organizing a concert at a Catholic school and preparing music for Holy Week). I work under a CFO(oh, the great irony) and am currently compiling and reviewing the budgets which every department submits to him at the beginning of the year. While the theoretical side of these things is more interesting to me, I am a bit bogged down in the pragmatic at present. (:
Since you are more concerned about the practical side of distributism, I should mention that my boss, an intelligent and well-read Catholic with a businessman’s perspective, found Belloc’s economic writings very practical. He has only a slight acquaintance with distributism and considers himself still very skeptical, though sympathetic. Yet, he always speaks of Belloc’s economic writings with great respect. I believe the most relevant works are The Servile State, The Restoration of Property and The Crisis of Civilization. If you prefer Chesterton, however, you might look at The Outline of Sanity or What’s Wrong With the World. An essay from Chesterton’s The Well and the Shallows. sparked Pearce’s interest in distributism.
In any case, I will try to formulate my own thoughts for you later.
Clara,
I’d recommend a read-through of The Servile State, which isn’t really distributist as such; the sorts of failings and issues it identifies could — in my only partially tutored view — largely be dealt with within a pretty Capitalist system if most of the actors were, themselves, Catholic or at least participants in a proper natural law framework of society. In fact, it’s Belloc’s view in that book that many of the bulwarks against capitalism, like minimum wages, etc, that actually aggravate the situation by changing viewpoints — some people start thinking of themselves as the sort who get paid a minimum, X, protected by the Gub’r'ment; whilst the others are more a master-class who takes care of the people and provide their jobs. The idea being that what you want is shared responsibility and risk, as far as possible, since it personalizes work and makes real the process of capital improvement and investment for the largest number of people. As I’ve argued before, I think that many of the goals of the distributists can be achieved more readily in today’s technological economy than they could in the earlier economies following the industrial revolution.
Well, I certainly might be wrong in my assessments of how loans work… but part of the question I’m asking is whether something like that can be part of Church teaching in the same way that, say, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is part of Church teaching. I don’t really think so, actually. It certainly isn’t a theological truth. And while there are certainly moral considerations embedded within it, they are complemented by a particular understanding of wealth and capital and how these work… in short, economic questions. That was originally the point of the post. We can’t really take economic, or economically-charged statements as dogmatic in the same way some other things might be, because the Church is not infallible on those same questions.
The Catholic Encyclopedia(which I realize is not a definitive source) speaks to this in two places: “To investigate what constitues good or bad, just or unjust, what is virtue, law, conscience, duty, etc., what obligations are common to all men, does not lie within the scope of jurisprudence or pedagogy, but of ethics; and yet these principles must be presupposed by the former, must serve them as a ground-work and guide; hence they are subordinated to ethics.The same is true of political economy. The latter is indeed immediately concerned with man’s social activity inasmuch as it treats of the production, distribution and consumption of material commodities, but this activity is not independent of ethics; industrial life must develop in accordance with the moral law and must be dominated by justice, equity, and love. Political economy was wholly wrong in trying to emancipate itself from the requirements of ethics”
AND
“The best usage of the present time is to make political economy an ethical science, that is, to make it include a discussion of what ought to be in the economic world as well as what is. This has all along been the practice of Catholic writers. Some of them even go so far as to make political economy a branch of ethics and not an independent science.”
Supposedly, Alasdair MacIntyre makes an argument against economics as a science in After Virtue(88-108, University of Notre Dame, 1981), but I have not had a chance to read it yet myself.
More authoritative than any of the preceeding is this quote from Centesimus Anno: “Christian anthropology therefore is really a chapter of theology, and for this reason, the Church’s social doctrine, by its concern for man and by its interest in him and in the way he conducts himself in the world, ‘belongs to the field … of theology and particularly of moral theology.’”(55)
The Church’s economic teaching is clearly part of its social doctrine, so there is definitely strong reason to believe it is part of the Church’s doctrine. Besides, the social encyclicals often make explicit claims about human nature which a mathematical science could never sufficiently address. For example, there is this passage from Rerum Novarum: “For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation, for the brute has no power of self direction, but is governed by two main instincts…It is the mind, or reason, which is the predominant element in us who are human creatures; it is this which renders a human being human, and distinguishes him essentially from the brute. And on this very account - that man alone among the animal creation is endowed with reason - it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only things that perish in the use, but those also which, though they have been reduced into use, continue for further use in after time.”
Now, certainly I can agree that not everything a person uses a loan for would necessarily be productive. Paying for grandma’s surgery, for example, probably won’t be. And yes, the capitalist does need a way to deal with obligations to the non-productive. But to go back to Raindear’s question… yes, it seems to me that my arguments might be applied to, for example, food. And that doesn’t necessarily seem inappropriate. Suppose you and I are both very poor people, looking for a way to get ourselves food for a day. I am (let’s suppose) in better shape than you, but you have a bit of money that might be used to buy lunch… but only for one of us. I could get a day’s work, but it’s physically demanding and I won’t be strong enough to get the job done unless I have some food. So you give me the money and go hungry all day, but then I, having now been able to complete the day’s work, give you the money back, plus a few dollars’ interest. And then we both get a decent evening meal. This seems like a classic sort of case of both of us benefitting from your usurious practice, which enabled me to get work and you to get the interest. Yes, the profit came from my industry and not yours… but does that mean that you’re taking advantage of me? I don’t really see it that way. Labor is my contribution to the deal, and capital is yours.
I do not believe your example would fall under the distributist definition of usury, because in this case the loan is clearly productive and profit is sure to follow. If, however, the man well enough to work ate his meal at the other’s expense and then found that, through no fault of his own, the job was no longer available and he could not repay as he had planned, I would think it wrong for the other man to take him to debtors’ prison on that account. Besides, that is an extraordinary case because both men are destitute. Under more normal circumstances, a man starving(through no fault of his own) would have a right to assistance from the more fortunate, who would in turn have no right to profit from assisting him(though he might choose to repay them out of gratitude). And if a man were not starving, than food would not be a directly productive good for him.
Here is Belloc’s explanation of the condemnation of usury, taken from The Crisis of Civilization:
“Usury in the sense of an economic evil does not mean the taking of interest on a loan. It does not mean the taking of interest higher than some permitted minimum. It means that taking of interest upon a loan of money alone (or still worse, upon a mere promise to lend money, an instrument of credit) whether that money be invested soundly or no, whether it represent productive energy or no. Usury is, properly speaking, the taking of increment upon a loan of money merely because it is money, or worse still the taking of such increment upon a credit-instrument.
The reasons for condemning interest upon money alone, as distinguished from profit, are twofold: First, it is asking a tribute from Society as the price of releasing currency hitherto withheld from its proper function of acting as the circulating medium of exchange; secondly, it is arranging a claim for payment of a share in profit which may, but also may not, exist.”
I will readily concede that I haven’t read as much on distributism as I want to, in no small part because it’s extremely difficult to find the material. Truly, I did make an effort. I’ve read some blogs and articles and such things as can be found online, but the university library on my husband’s campus had exactly…zero books on distributism.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at that. My community is rather extraordinary in that regard, so we are well stocked. In fact, you might look into interlibrary loan.
I managed to find a couple of books that had a few pages on it, but that’s all. I’ve looked in bookstores and the only one I’ve seen is the Pearce book (which I flipped through, but didn’t buy… I’ve read a few of Pearce’s books before and wasn’t overly impressed. He always seems to me like rather a muddled man.) I recently broke down and paid the full price to order a few recommended books online. It’s much more fun to look through a stack before picking the one(s) you actually want to read, but there it is. So anyway, I hope to read more soon. I have seen Clark’s writings, by the way, and also found them a bit unfair at points.
Pearce lacks the precision of a trained philosopher, which I am sure you find very frustrating, but on several occasions I have heard him lecture and was particularly impressed with how ably he fielded questions. I often find that distinguishes the extraordinary scholar from the average one.
However, as an academic (in training), I don’t really take the mere existence of a handful of new books on a subject as much evidence of its reasonableness. In academic libraries, one can find whole shelves of books on all sorts of ridiculous subjects and ludicrous theories.
True, but in this case the publishers are significant – ISI and IHS.
Before I forget — for the Aristotle, check out the Ethics, book 5. Particularly chapter 5.
Thanks.
You don’t have to answer these, since I may find the answers myself when I get a chance to read the stuff I ordered, but just offhand, here are some things about distributism that I wonder about:
First, do distributists deny that, in the sort of world they advocate, there would probably be a lot more hunger and general want? Anyway, it certainly seems to me that there’s a lot less now than in the medieval-guild world that they take as a model. Maybe you’ll just think I’ve been drinking the Economist kool-aid for too long, and I suppose any stats that they publish about that tend to be somewhat speculative. But I’m definitely under the impression that there’s a lot less hunger, less infant mortality, less lack of clean drinking water, and so forth, in the world today than at almost any other time.
There is an interesting article about the inefficiency of industrial farming here
Infant mortality rates have certainly improved, though that might be attributed to factors not necessarily dependent upon our present economic system(e.g., improved standards of sanitation).
Oh, but back to the hunger issue. The efficiency of capitalism is one reason it helps in the long run. The other is sort of related. As I understand it, the distributist answer to unexpected hardship (i.e. a small business failing for whatever reason) is community-based. If you’re a dairy farmer and your cows all suddenly die of some livestock disease, then hopefully your neighbors will step in and offer some assistance while you figure out what to do next. The thing is, though, that disasters often strike entire regions all at one time. Droughts, for example, can cripple all the farmers in a large region, all at the same time. However much goodwill your neighbors have, it won’t help if they’re equally destitute. And that used to be the reality pretty much all across the world — you just never knew when hard times might suddenly hit, and you and all your neighbors might be suddenly penniless. Of course capitalism doesn’t completely solve this problem, but it definitely helps. Even leaving aside the question of insurance, large businesses have enough capital and enough flexibility to recognize pretty quickly, “Hey, there are lots of destitute farmers in this region, so if we build a factory, or our corporate headquarters, or a massive getaway resort, in this area, we’ll be able to get all the labor we need.” I guess that would, in the distributist view, put all the farmers into the slavery of wage labor, but it certainly seems better than starvation.
I think the answer is usually diversity. For example, you may lose your crop of wheat, but hogs and sheep might survive the drought, providing you with meat and wool to sell.
Or maybe not. As you see, I don’t quite buy into the claim that ‘a man’s labor should under ordinary conditions be enough to support him and his family’ — should it? What are ‘ordinary’ circumstances?
Pope Leo said: “Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.”(Rerum Novarum, 45)
So the ordinary circumstances would seem to entail that a worker be “frugal” and “well-behaved”.
However, if we do want to blame the economic changes (and there are other culprits that might be more easily handled), it seems to me sort of like a Humpty Dumpty situation — what’s broken doesn’t really go back together. I need to read more about the specific policy proposals before I definitely say that, because of course we could implement some stronger protectionist policies for small businesses and that sort of thing.
Actually, it would even help if the government stopped subsidizing large corporations like Walmart. Right now, the balance is in favor of big business.
I guess churches could try to offer no-interest loans to needy people in their congregations (the Mormons do something like that now.) But in general, it seems to me that the rise of the large corporation was more or less inevitable as transportation and communication became so much easier. It was natural barriers more than philosophical ones that kept this from happening in the period of the medieval guilds. I know Belloc likes the “reclaiming the swamp” analogy; to me it seems more like trying to move tectonic plates back where they used to be.
Anyway, you don’t have to respond to any of this, but I feared I might be frustrating you by not saying more about how this all seems to me, so there you go. I recognize that I have a lot of points of sympathy with the distributists, so I’d like to like them. Maybe Chesterton can persuade me of at least some of it.
Yes, I am anxious to read that book Third Ways, because he considers all of the attempts to restore a human model of economics and why they failed.
Just in case it is not clear to all readers, the “non-bold” text in my comment above was quoted from Clara, whereas the “bold” remarks are my own.
I forgot to include this quote, which is relevant to our earlier discussion of the relationship between justice and economics:
“Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. Destroying through forgetfulness or ignorance the social and moral character of economic life, it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect. But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life - a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. This function is one that the economic dictatorship which has recently displaced free competition can still less perform, since it is a headstrong power and a violent energy that, to benefit people, needs to be strongly curbed and wisely ruled. But it cannot curb and rule itself. Loftier and nobler principles - social justice and social charity - must, therefore, be sought whereby this dictatorship may be governed firmly and fully. Hence, the institutions themselves of peoples and, particularly those of all social life, ought to be penetrated with this justice, and it is most necessary that it be truly effective, that is, establish a juridical and social order which will, as it were, give form and shape to all economic life. Social charity, moreover, ought to be as the soul of this order, an order which public authority ought to be ever ready effectively to protect and defend. It will be able to do this the more easily as it rids itself of those burdens which, as We have stated above, are not properly its own.”
Pius XI, Quadregesimo Anno, 88
Clara:
What the Church has seen fit to invoke its Magisterium on, it has seen fit to invoke its Magisterium on.
“We can’t really take economic, or economically-charged statements as dogmatic in the same way some other things might be, because the Church is not infallible on those same questions.”
And, of course, the Church has declared that life begins at conception. But that’s not a moral question, it’s a medical one, right? And the Church is not infallible on questions of biology or of science or of medicine. Ergo, abortion lies outside the Church’s purview.
I quote from this source (http://www.catholicculture.org/library/view.cfm?recnum=646):
“Session X of the Fifth Lateran Council (1515) gave its exact meaning: “For that is the real meaning of usury: when, from its use, a thing which produces nothing is applied to the acquiring of gain and profit without any work, any expense or any risk.”
So too, Pope Benedict XIV in his encyclical Vix Pervenit, says: “The nature of the sin called usury has its proper place and origin in a loan contract [mutuum]. This financial contract between consenting parties demands, by its very nature, that one return to another only as much as he has received. The sin rests on the fact that sometimes the creditor desires more than he has given. Therefore he contends some gain is owed him beyond that which he loaned, but any gain which exceeds the amount he gave is illicit and usurious.”
Note again that a mutuum is “a loan of a fungible, i.e., perishable, nonspecific good, whose use consisted of its consumption” (New Catholic Encyclopedia).”
The Church has said 1) usury is a sin, 2) consisting of the taking of interest on a non-productive loan, 3) a thing which can be identified. There is no question at all whether the Church “can” speak on this, as she has already. See: http://www.ewtn.com/library/ENCYC/B14VIXPE.htm
Consider also the Church’s conciliar decrees, which a simple google search “usury” “council” “Catholic” will produce.
How that relates to modern economies, whether usury is frequent today or is a problem, whether distributists are correct in their understanding of usury, etc., is another thing altogether.
I hope to be able to write a lengthier response to this later, but for the moment, let me make a few brief remarks.
First of all, there seems to be an idea here that I want to make politics or economics into “independent” sciences not beholden to ethics. Heaven forbid! I do not think moral philosophy should be formed by politics or economics, but I do think the latter must be taken into account in the application of moral principles, and I also think that pragmatic questions enter into economic or political calculations at, shall we say, a much earlier point than they do for many other fields. This means that, necessarily according to the nature of the fields, judgments concerning economics or politics tends to vary more according to time and circumstance, and also to bring in a larger number of questions on which the Church is not infallible. Consequently, papal encyclicals, writings from Doctors of the Church, and so forth, may rightly be seen as somewhat less authoritative when they concern political and economic questions, and when they were written in conditions that vary considerably from our own. I would accept the Fifth Lateran Council’s definition of usury as dogmatic, though of course it isn’t clear whether it has much application. None of the other sources Tobias Petrus cites seem to yield what I would take to be dogmatic truth. As my catechist explained it to me, a papal encyclical is not a Magisterial pronouncement, and does not have the authority of, say, an ecumenical council. That doesn’t mean that we should just brush old encyclicals aside, obviously — even that which doesn’t seem directly relevant probably contains moral principles that we should take seriously. I don’t know that I’d be inclined to take exception to anything in the quote from Benedict XIV, except that the definition you gave of “mutuum” seems rather broad, disturbingly vague, and just generally problematic. But anyway, this is all beside the point. The main point is that we have to be more circumspect about the way we apply these sorts of documents, than we would if the subject were more theological or spiritual.
Maybe I’m complicating things too much. Let me put it this way. The Church can authoritatively draw theoretical distinctions between different kinds of loans. Phrased the right way, it might not involve any pragmatic considerations; these could just be moral claims, on which the Church can be infallible. The fifth Lateran Council’s definition of usury certainly looks that way to me. It’s sufficiently theoretical that it doesn’t seem to assume much at all about the pragmatics of the situation. But whether those theoretical distinctions have any application is another question, and economics is needed to answer it. So you might take my challenge to Raindear in this way: the distinction the distributists want to draw between productive and non-productive loans doesn’t seem useful to me.
Do you really want to contend the the Church’s infallibility extends beyond the realm of faith and morals? My catechist certainly emphasized repeatedly that this was the province of her infallible authority. You may want to show otherwise, but if so, I don’t think your abortion analogy really helps. Has the Church dogmatically declared that life begins at conception? It is sometimes mentioned, but it seems rather odd to regard it as a dogmatic statement, any more than you would say that the Church dogmatically declares that rain is wet or that men and women have different physical characteristics. Those things might be said by authoritative people in authoritative writings, but we don’t normally pick them out as “dogmatic teachings of the Catholic Church.” Likewise here: it is an obvious biological fact that life begins at conception. Even liberals concede that much.
Morally, the really interesting question regards the origin of personhood, or, as we might think of it, “ensoulment.” And actually, the Church does not make any dogmatic declarations about when that happens. St. Thomas thought it happened at the quickening. We tend to assume that it happens at conception, but anyway, the Church hasn’t taken a definite position one way or the other.
Okay, that’s more than I meant to write right now. More later, maybe.
“Maybe I’m complicating things too much.”
Yes, you are.
“rather broad, disturbingly vague, and just generally problematic.”
As is your interpretation of which loans are “productive.”
“Do you really want to contend the the Church’s infallibility extends beyond the realm of faith and morals?”
I never said it did.
“But whether those theoretical distinctions have any application is another question, and economics is needed to answer it.”
Yes, I already conceded as much.
“So you might take my challenge to Raindear in this way: the distinction the distributists want to draw between productive and non-productive loans doesn’t seem useful to me.”
Allow me to make it useful. First off, throw out the distributists for a minute. The Church herself distinguishes between productive and non-productive loans. Secondly, if an economist proves that a loan qualifies as “productive,” he has proven that it may be moral to take some interest on it. If all loans today qualify, then he has sufficiently provided moral justification for all modern loans. That is quite “useful,” even if it turns out that every last loan given in the modern world was “productive.”
“Has the Church dogmatically declared that life begins at conception? It is sometimes mentioned, but it seems rather odd to regard it as a dogmatic statement, any more than you would say that the Church dogmatically declares that rain is wet or that men and women have different physical characteristics.”
Perhaps I should say, a fact that is directly related to a dogma. If the Church declares, “Aborion is always murder,” then the absolutely necessary datum is that a zygote, embryo, or fetus is a human being, and one who cannot become guilty of a capital offense. The biological datum is necessary for the dogma to be true. The Church has condemned usury in the harshest terms, so the distinction between usury and loan-taking must be real.
Let me ask, do you deny that usury (the sin) can occur? Do you maintain that interest-taking is always justified? Do you maintain that any rate of interest is justified? If you say that in some instances it would be unjust to charge interest, or that there can be an unjust rate, then you have conceded that there is such a thing as usury.
“Likewise here: it is an obvious biological fact that life begins at conception.”
Says you. Zygotes can split into two or more zygotes. Two zygotes, or even two embryos, can fuse into one. From the biological point of view, the claim that at conception we are dealing with a discrete individual (individual=can’t be divided!) is problematic. Do individual human beings split in two? Or do multiple individual human beings merge into one? If *only* the science of biology were involved, who would know for *certain* that a zygote or embryo is a human individual. The Church surely is providing some authority here — the type of life present in zygotes is indeed sufficient to regard that single-cell organism as a person, regardless of the capability of more than one person to arise from it, or of the capability of multiple such persons to merge into one (to use biological language; souls cannot merge or divide, of course).
Likewise with usury: the Church is most certainly capable of judging what is and is not a sin. Economics cannot do that. As there are degrees of productivity which render interest-taking wrong, the Church necessarily has the capacity to determine it. The Church Fathers most certainly condemned people for taking advantage of the poor via usury. If there is no theoretical distinction between loans which may bear interest and those which may not, then the Church’s entire moral teaching is off. People can go to the confessional and say to the priest, “I am guilty of the sin of imprudence in my business dealings.” The priest does not reply: “Well, if you say so; I’m not competent at all to help you examine whether you’re really guilty or not. Prudence lies, by definition, with you. You made a choice, and I can’t say anything on it. If you say that you were imprudent so be it.”
“the Church necessarily has the capacity to determine it.”
Taking into acount economic data. But “taking into account economic data” should be but a step in the discussion about what is just. You seem to be making it the end of the argument. As the economists have a say, they have the final word. No, the Church does, after taking into account what the economists say.
What they say might not be good enough.
“As my catechist explained it to me, a papal encyclical is not a Magisterial pronouncement, and does not have the authority of, say, an ecumenical council.”
This is not a precise formulation of the truth of the matter. An encyclical may or may not be the vehicle for either ordinary or extraordinary magisterial teaching. The same may be said of the statements of ecumenical councils, the pronouncements and canons of which may or may not be the vehicle for either ordinary or extraordinary magisterial teaching. If a Pope makes an ex cathedra pronouncement in the course of an encyclical, or repeats ordinary magisterial teaching, then that content is infallible. They do carry a certain degree of authority.
From Vix Pervenit:
“One cannot condone the sin of usury by arguing that the gain is not great or excessive, but rather moderate or small; neither can it be condoned by arguing that the borrower is rich; nor even by arguing that the money borrowed is not left idle, but is spent usefully, either to increase one’s fortune, to purchase new estates, or to engage in business transactions.”
In other words, in and of itself, the fact that someone lent money that someone else invested in business does not *in and of itself* justify interest-taking. The encyclical goes on to state that a person may claim interest due to other titles that go along with the loan, but not simply on account of the loan by itself. The Pope’s words seem rather more explicit than the simple distinction between productive and non-productive.
http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2006/0607uan.asp
“As Noonan makes clear:
As far as dogma in the technical Catholic sense is concerned, there is only one dogma at stake. Dogma is not to be loosely used as synonymous with every papal rule or theological verdict. Dogma is a defined, revealed doctrine taught by the Church at all times and places. Nothing here meets the test of dogma except this assertion: that usury, the act of taking profit on a loan without a just title, is sinful. . . . This dogmatic teaching remains unchanged. What is a just title, what is technically to be treated as a loan, are matters of debate, positive law, and changing evolution. The development of these points is great. But the pure and narrow dogma is the same today as in 1200. (Noonan, 399–400)”
Let me put it this way: In determining whether a given practice is usurious, the economists are witnesses, it is absolutely true. They simply aren’t the judges or juries. The Church has the authority to set the abstract rules of justice, it is the job of the economists in concrete instances to abide by the rules. The Church mandates a just wage, one that can support a family. If an Indian company can do so with $5 a day, and an American company must pay $100 per day, then each company is required to pay that. The just wage will vary with economic conditions, but s