What’s Wrong with the World

I notice that when the Cardinal says that "libertarianism" views human beings merely as consumers and therefore excludes the poor, he leaves out the enormous extent to which free-market economics, including fairly doctrinaire libertarianism, views human beings as producers and entrepreneurs. As so often happens in these conversations, there is a truly bizarre conflation between a kind of Keynesianism and free-market economics. There is a reason why the latter is called "supply side" rather than "demand side." And there is a reason why Keynesian economics has often tried to stimulate the economy by inducing people to engage in more consumption. Viewing human beings as essentially consumers is scarcely classical free market economics!

When even a fairly die-hard libertarian thinks of impoverished people in impoverished parts of the world, the first questions he will be asking concern things like government corruption, violence, disorder, and crime, security of contract and property, various ways in which government and social forces are preventing the _production_ of wealth, and the possibilities for micro-capitalist endeavors among the poor. And whatever the failings of libertarianism as a full-scale Philosophy of Everything, when it comes to the problem of Third-World poverty, those questions are exactly the right questions to be asking. Nor are they amenable in all cases to strictly economic solution! It may be that a country is simply too war-torn and violent for wealth to be produced. It may be that government corruption is so endemic that the prospects for rooting it out are poor. So far from excluding the poor, such questions treat them as real actors and potential producers in their own right. Such questions seek to find out what the fundamental structural problems are that are preventing human action (a good libertarian phrase if ever there were one) from producing prosperity and human well-being in these countries.

So as you hint, the Cardinal simply does not know what he's talking about.

Thanks Lydia, I think you rounded out the perspective here perfectly!

Lydia,

I particularly like what you say here:

When even a fairly die-hard libertarian thinks of impoverished people in impoverished parts of the world, the first questions he will be asking concern things like government corruption, violence, disorder, and crime, security of contract and property, various ways in which government and social forces are preventing the _production_ of wealth, and the possibilities for micro-capitalist endeavors among the poor. And whatever the failings of libertarianism as a full-scale Philosophy of Everything, when it comes to the problem of Third-World poverty, those questions are exactly the right questions to be asking. Nor are they amenable in all cases to strictly economic solution!

I have probably mentioned him already on this blog, but in case I haven't or for those who may have forgotten, the brilliant Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has argued convincingly in his book The Mystery of Capital that a big problem in the third world with respect to why capitalism hasn't taken root is that there is a weak system of legal property and property rights (despite the fact that informal systems of property exist and people take control of land and farm, build buildings, etc.) For more see this excellent interview.

From this biblical view he says “no to an economy of exclusion and to inequality in income”

That's pure nonsense. There is nothing in the Bible about inequality in income. Especially in the Gospel, practically every example or parable Christ provides that displays use of money or payment of money or amounts of wealth has NOTHING WHATSOEVER about an intent to achieve equality with it. When Nicodemus talks about righting any of his injustices with a fourfold return, Christ does not rebuke him for not making the poor around him equal to himself. Christ's parables show some being given more and others being given less, and this is God's plan for mankind. As far as I can see, equality is JUST NOT THERE.

And I don't see the Cardinal or the Pope doing exegesis on specific Gospel passages to pull it out, either. My belief is that this is because it isn't there, but perhaps I am wrong. Please, someone show me Christ being specifically concerned about one disciple having less than another (as distinct from being in need).

So far as I can see, the truth is quite other. God in His infinite mercy and providence gives to one great intelligence, to another little. He gives to one great energy, to another he gives listlessness. To one He one many opportunities for forgiveness of sins, to another just a few. To some He gives all the opportunities and riches of the Church's patrimony of faith, doctrine, and liturgy, to others He gives a barest chance to hear one missionary. To some He gives health, to other a sickly constitution. NOTHING remotely within man's power can change the entirety of these truths so that all men are "made equal" in all things, and it cannot be man's mission to attempt to do so.

Even of the things that man can plausibly change if he makes the effort, even if all men are made equal in material wealth for a moment: one man will set half of it aside for using tomorrow and the next day, one man will put it to use to make more wealth, and one man will spend it in a spree of delightful and generous party - and in 3 days, the equality of wealth will no longer obtain. To put an end to inequality would require putting an end to freedom of choice, to free will. And yet it is God's plan that man be given the free opportunity to sin or to be guided by a lesser sort of prudence, even though that will bring about evil and (AHHH!!!) inequality!

At some point I am going to do a long post about equality of wealth being no fundamental part of the good of mankind.

I couldn't agree more, Tony. Preach it! And the parable of the talents supports your contention as well.

(As an aside: Matthew, not Nicodemus.)

Sorry, it was Zacchaeus I was thinking of, but somehow Nicodemus came out.

A charitable reading would seem to indicate that what both the Pope and the Cardinal are are criticizing is not income inequality per se, but income inequality resulting from what they view as injustice. Now if they happen to believe that injustice is inherent in wealth inequality, you've got a point. But I don't see it, and only an ideological reading would construe them as Levellers, whether that reading comes from the left or the right.

Why don't you (at least you Catholics) try reading them with the same amount of leeway that you guys give libertarians like Woods and Fr. Sirico?

You got me there, Tony. Matthew was a tax collector, but it was Zachaeus who said he would return four times whatever he had taken unjustly.

Thomas Woods does sometimes get extreme in his libertarianism (and interpretations of history, as well). As for Fr. Sirico, I've never seen or heard him say anything that requires charitable interpretation even from a Catholic point of view. With, I suppose, the exception of the fact that one time I heard him try to say that Pope Benedict wasn't calling for a one-world government "with teeth" when he actually was. In other words, it's only when Fr. Sirico ties himself in knots, poor fellow, trying to accommodate the sillier things the popes say without just saying, "This is nuts!" that one has to cut him some slack and try to understand. But that of course wasn't what NM meant.

NM,

You suggest I "try reading them [the Pope and Cardinal] with the same amount of leeway that you guys give libertarians like Woods." But in this very blog post I take Woods to task for a false philosophy of government (libertarianism) and claim that his own ideas are utopian.

only an ideological reading would construe them as Levellers

I don't think that's true at all. This absurd talk of an "economy of exclusion" (when we have the most integrated and "inclusive" global economy in the history of mankind) perhaps leaves a little bit of room for doubt, but explicit demands for "equality of income" look pretty dispositive on the question of whether we're dealing with Levellers. Also, of course, it makes sense to take in the totality of what the Pope and the Cardinal have had to say, and to the extent that the Pope in particular has made any practical suggestions at all, they have taken the precise form of a world authority whose role it would be to see to this "inclusion" and "equality"--which, it should be noted, is in direct contradiction with Catholic social teaching, based on the endlessly inconvenient principle of subsidiarity.

The assumption that the Pope isn't a leftist on economics--and a drearily conventional and cliche-addled one at that--is the truly blinkered one, given the sum of what we know not only of him but also of his public comments on the topic. Any man who cites youth unemployment as literally the greatest evil stalking the earth has long since passed into "parochial South American socialist" territory, and isn't in a position to be read "charitably."

Oy vey! Should I be glad I'm not a Roman Catholic then?

There's a better, more balanced handle on the matter here, I'd say, than in some uber-predictable Nogelhausian response:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-pope-francis-challenges-the-right-and-left/

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-pope-and-the-right.html?_r=0

NM, your calls for charitable readings are being embraced by everyone but the Pope and the Cardinal. They rely on feeble caricatures of the defense of free markets, comparable to someone who reasons from the Argentine "model" of capitalism to a general critique of capitalism.

By the way, NM, I thought you were a Catholic. My mistake I'm I was wrong.

From this biblical view he says “no to an economy of exclusion and to inequality in income”... This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. ... Inequality eventually engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve... As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality,[173] no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.

Sage is right that Pope's Francis's words really do represent a position that inequality of material wealth is per se injustice, and ALL forms of economy that stand in the way of complete equality are, by that very fact, unjust. In order to change the character of these expressions to something less absolute, he would have had to employ at least SOME qualifiers, which he chose not to do. He might have said "Excessive inequality" or "This kind of inequality" or "Inequality is the major contributor to many social ills."

If we wanted to be charitable in reading the Pope's words, one might propose this: he doesn't really think that his presentation on the topic is exactly right, but he is making an exaggerated case for equality in order to counteract the exaggerated stance of "free" market theory, fighting one overemphasis with another.

I will leave it to the reader to consider whether such a reading really would be charitable (saying Francis is just as wrong as the other side would present some challenges, wouldn't it)?

Another "charitable" interpretation is that the Pope really doesn't know precisely what he means, and it comes out all higgledy-piggledy, and we shouldn't take his words for a definitive position, because he doesn't intend them that way. This interpretation would be tantamount to saying "take what he is saying that makes sense as valid, and what doesn't make sense as his own little foibles, and don't worry about the incoherencies." Which is a lot like what some right-ward pundits are saying anyway.

Or, we might suggest (well, I will, anyway) that the Pope is overly (even extraordinarily excessively) fond of a rhetorical ploy of intentionally employing locutions that are riddled with small defects, errors, and inconsistencies as a way to (select as many as you wish) (a) force the reader to think about the matter for themselves, (b) encourage the reader to STOP WORRYING about technically perfect language and just get out there and love and evangelize already, (c) to play head games with the media so they remain off-base and tip-toeing around him, or (d) [insert other]. This interpretation would have the advantage (in being charitable, that is) in saying that the Pope is intentional about his goof-ups, rather than unintentional. It would do nothing to re-characterize them as non-goof-ups.

So, is the Pope just the Yogi Berra of the theological world, or should we ascribe some other reason to the parts of his thoughts that don't make any sense?

And, by the way, none of this provides any reason at all for refusing to give him all the obedience and allegiance due to his office, for those like me who are Catholic.

Tony,

You are really batting "1000" in this thread. Bravo.

Meanwhile, in that quote you pull, notice that once again we have:

1) the straw-man characterization of the real world as it exists today ("As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation" -- where, oh where in the world do we find the "absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation"?!)

2) begging the question ("by attacking the structural causes of inequality" -- who says the "problems of the poor" are related at all to the "structural causes of inequality"?! Only those who think of the economy as a zero-sum game, which it is not.)

"So, is the Pope just the Yogi Berra of the theological world, or should we ascribe some other reason to the parts of his thoughts that don't make any sense?"

Well, two good friends of mine, one, a self-proclaimed "old school" neoconservative (i.e., a fan of Kristol Sr., but not Kristol Jr.) Catholic writer/editor whose name you all would certainly know; the other, a classicist and translator, also a Catholic, but more of a moderate paleo, both attribute a fair amount of the misunderstanding of Francis's writings on these matters to a few things:

One, the fact that the Pope speaks both Spanish and Italian, which has caused problems with some of the translations. Even the Vatican translators have apparently gotten some things wrong at times.

Two, the complete unfamiliarity of the English-speaking press with Catholic social teaching and hence, their inability to communicate it accurately.

Three, the inability of many American liberals and conservatives to see beyond their own versions of the left/right binary, which causes them to put a decidedly American left v. right spin on what he says.

They're not saying that these things cause all the inconsistencies, but that they are strong contributing factors.

Personally, I don't thing that Francis is any deep economic thinker. But that doesn't make him some sort of economic clown. For the record, when I want Catholic social teaching/economics explained Fr. Albino Barrera's my go-to guy. I'm also looking forward to reading the new book by Stratford Caldecott on the subject.

NM, I am perfectly fine with the possibility that the English writers have mis-interpreted him. That can happen readily.

It didn't happen as readily with the prior 2 popes, though, even when they addressed French and German and Spanish audiences, as well as Italian.

Yet that leads to another possibility to the mis-understandings: that Pope Francis is using his Spanish and Italian in ways that English interpreters don't expect and can't follow, even though they could follow JPII and Benedict when they spoke to the same audiences. And this might be because he is using expressions that are less standard usages to convey new emphases, or because he is being obscure and convoluted and inconsistent. Or, to put it nearly the same, where the prior 2 popes thought ahead about how to convey their thought clearly in spite of language barriers, and exercised care in formulating expressions that could carry across the divide, this pope doesn't care to make that effort or to constrain his spontaneity of word choices to be more successful in communicating. Which could be either Yogi all over again, or it could be a calculated stance on the importance of spontaneity.

However, the quotes I gave above are from Evangelium Gaudium, and the Vatican website's English version, so THOSE English expressions are not instances of non-Catholic English writers failing to get the catholic ideas. And they are not momentary lapses into spontaneous wool-gathering. They are crafted with time and planning, and translated at leisure by qualified Catholic experts. If we could identify a large divergence in tone or thought between his off-the-cuff remarks to reporters and his planned-in-advance writing, I would be a lot more comfortable with the theory that most of the oddity of his reported ideas is related to poor grasp by reporters / translators.

I am tempted to make Francis's quip my own: "It goes in one ear and out the other". And apply it liberally, as he seems to do. Like (Holy) Father, like son?

Yes, Francis is certainly not a "great communicator." But I don't believe the problem in understanding him can be laid entirely at his feet, and many knowledgeable Catholics seem to agree.

~~begging the question ("by attacking the structural causes of inequality" -- who says the "problems of the poor" are related at all to the "structural causes of inequality"?! Only those who think of the economy as a zero-sum game, which it is not.)~~

This is incorrect, and in fact begs its own question. Only a person previously committed to some version of "supply-side" economics would argue that what's being said is dependent on a zero-sum view of economics.

Critics of late capitalism have long argued that while it is very good at wealth production, it's not nearly so good with distribution. It's probable that what he's talking about are "the structural causes of inequality" that inhibit just distribution, not creation/production.

Seriously, do you guys read any contemporary Catholics who write on the social teaching, and who don't try to put the Sirico/Nogelhaus spin on it? Barrera, Schindler, Medaille, Cavanaugh?

NM,

You say,

"Critics of late capitalism have long argued that while it is very good at wealth production, it's not nearly so good with distribution. It's probable that what he's talking about are "the structural causes of inequality" that inhibit just distribution, not creation/production."

I think this is a fair observation and one that is worth exploring. I remain...deeply skeptical of such an argument, but I can at least appreciate that such an argument can be made. For example, I'm certainly open to the idea that aspects of globalization (i.e. unrestricted immigration!) are harmful to the poor -- but sadly I can't even find common ground with the Catholic church when it comes to these issues. So I fear that engaging folks like Barrera, Schindler, etc. will be an exercise in futility :-(

I've read more Barrera and Medaille than I have Schindler and Cavanaugh, but from what I've read I'd say that none of these guys is at all anti-market. They all believe in the necessity of markets and praise them for what they accomplish. But they also see the limits of markets, and thus are not afraid to call a spade a spade when it comes to what they would call market failures.

I find Barrera especially interesting because in addition to his STL (which I gather is roughly equivalent to a Masters in theology?) he's also got a Ph.D. in economics from Yale. A lot of the technical economic material in his books frankly goes over my head, but I get a lot out of the stuff that's more in the moral theology line.

Y'know, NM, the "Nogelhaus" thing may go over well among those who already agree with you, but here it just looks like some sort of in-house childishness (in some other "house") and hence detracts from the attempt to get others to take your position seriously.

No prob, Lydia. I'll refrain. But it IS easier to type than Novak/Weigel/Neuhaus...

As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality,[173] no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.

Well, since virtually EVERY SINGLE nation on this Earth has rejected the absolute autonomy of markets, (they all have limits and regulations - it is illegal to sell human body parts worldwide, pretty much, for example), we have already done what he asks.

But that faux pas is not the worst of this passage. The "solutions" to the "world's problems" generally don't lie in economics anyway - or at least, the solution to the gravest and most important problems, especially sins of pride, but also lust, sloth, anger, etc. Those vices play into economic ills, but they do not need bad economic structures to get their force and coverage. Christ did not come to primarily fix our economics, he came to heal our souls of evil, and he was quite content to leave people in poverty (still is). To speak of the "world's problems" and really mean those of bad economic structures (not even being more general in inclusively talking about "unjust social structures" which would include unjust penal systems, degenerate educational systems, evil medical practices) is just ridiculously too narrowly focused for the expression used.

And, of course, pride is the root source of sins, including social ones. That's been in our tradition for ages. Inequality is as much a condition given to us by nature as a condition caused by man's behavior - nature gives us basic resources spread unevenly, not sin. Sure, greed leads to more inequality, and this is deplorable - but NOT SIMPLY because of inequality as such. It is not deplorable when a rich man has 10 times the wealth of a well-off doctor who has all he really needs - the inequality should not give rise to a feeling of disgust for the rich man's possessing so much more than the doctor.

"Well, since virtually EVERY SINGLE nation on this Earth has rejected the absolute autonomy of markets, (they all have limits and regulations - it is illegal to sell human body parts worldwide, pretty much, for example), we have already done what he asks."

Probably a better word than "autonomy" would have been "priority," or maybe even "authority," as that seems to be what he's getting at; in the modern global economy market concerns tend to trump all others. You'd have to consider him a complete dunce if you truly believe that he doesn't realize that markets have legal and regulatory limits.

"Inequality is as much a condition given to us by nature as a condition caused by man's behavior - nature gives us basic resources spread unevenly, not sin."

Scarcity is an evil resulting from the Fall, and inequality comes from scarcity. Capitalism does a great job of countering scarcity by production, but it doesn't have a good mechanism for distribution, so the fruits of that production aren't always distributed justly.

"Sure, greed leads to more inequality, and this is deplorable - but NOT SIMPLY because of inequality as such. It is not deplorable when a rich man has 10 times the wealth of a well-off doctor who has all he really needs - the inequality should not give rise to a feeling of disgust for the rich man's possessing so much more than the doctor."

Is there a point when it does become deplorable? If not 10x, is it 50x? 100x? 1000x? The CEO of my company makes approximately 500x more per year than I do. Who in the world needs that kind of money, let alone deserves it? Is there such a thing as "obscenely rich"?

"And, of course, pride is the root source of sins, including social ones. That's been in our tradition for ages."

Yep. Avarice used to be in there too, but it was downgraded to "self-interest" a couple hundred years ago and subsequently ignored.

Is there a point when it does become deplorable? If not 10x, is it 50x? 100x? 1000x? The CEO of my company makes approximately 500x more per year than I do. Who in the world needs that kind of money, let alone deserves it?

That right there, NM, is where you left the road. You seem to forget: "Thou shalt not covet" is the 10th commandment. I'll answer you outright: No. There is no such point in and of itself. Nowhere in Scripture nor in the natural law do we find that taking person n's income and performing the mathematical operation of multiplication upon it allows us to come up with an amount that nobody else (such as person m, for example) should be making, to conclude that it is "deplorable" for person m to be making that amount because it is more than x times the amount that person n makes. In fact, person n shouldn't even be _thinking_ in terms of "Person m makes 500x more per year than I do. That's terrible."

~~That right there, NM, is where you left the road. You seem to forget: "Thou shalt not covet" is the 10th commandment~~

It's not coveting to recognize an inequality, and wanting to see it redressed. Tell it to my disabled friend and her mentally ill teenage son who get $86.00 a month in food stamps.

"Nowhere in Scripture nor in the natural law do we find that taking person n's income and performing the mathematical operation of multiplication..."

No kidding. It was a rhetorical question. And the 500x thing is simply an example from my own experience. I could just have easily said that "the average CEO makes XXX times his median employee."

In any case, I got my answer, at least from you. One can never be too rich! YOU seem to forget James 5:1-6.

By the way, the Scripture, the Fathers, and the natural law all speak to the necessity of the wealthy helping the needy. If one is wealthy, and is living a Robb Report lifestyle, he's not helping enough, and is therefore robbing from the poor.

It's not coveting to recognize an inequality, and wanting to see it redressed.

It's envy and covetousness to think that a mere inequality between yourself and someone els is the kind of thing to which the category of "redress" applies.

~~It's envy and covetousness to think that a mere inequality between yourself and someone els is the kind of thing to which the category of "redress" applies.~~

Did you miss what I wrote above? You can take my situation out altogether, as it was simply a particular mathematical example that I'm personally familiar with. The point I was making still stands.

By the way, the Scripture, the Fathers, and the natural law all speak to the necessity of the wealthy helping the needy. If one is wealthy, and is living a Robb Report lifestyle, he's not helping enough, and is therefore robbing from the poor.

Why do you think I compared the CEO to the well-off doctor?

Let me state this as clearly as I can: EQUALITY or INEQUALITY is not a condition that the Gospel cares about between people. Not alone, as a per se matter of evil.

If the doctor working for GM is making 300,000 per year, and the CEO of Google is making 300 million per year (a thousandfold differetial), the 1000x is not something that makes the CEO's pay evil. There may well be something that DOES make the CEO's pay an evil matter, but it is not the 1000x. Not per se. And you cannot find anything in Scripture that shows to the contrary.

What you CAN show, from Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, is that the CEO making tons more than he needs and more than people in need are making, and not choosing to USE ANY OF THAT EXCESS to relieve their need, is an evil. Again, it is not solely the differential, nor even the differential taken together with the fact that others are in need, but all 3 conditions: He has more than he needs, they have need, and he doesn't do anything with his surplus to relieve their need. All 3.

There is absolutely no way to reduce that aggregate of 3 conditions to "INEQUALITY". Just no way. You can propose (as some would) that "well, that's really what the Pope meant, all 3 conditions, he was just using a shorthand to describe what happens when a person makes so much more than others: he creates an inequality, he gets more than he needs, and others are in need, and he refuses to relieve them of their need." But that won't wash either. For, (1) the fact that he makes more, even MUCH MORE more than others doesn't prove that he makes more than he needs: a friend of mine is single and in good health, another friend of mine has a wife with cancer and they have 14 children, the latter needs MUCH MORE than the former. (2) The Pope's clear implication is that the social structures should be formulated so as to prevent A from ever acquiring more than B, even if A were to simply turn it around and give B his surplus so that they end up equal - the social structures should be preventing the inequality in the first place. And this is just ridiculous as a the sole intelligible interpretation of the Gospel message to help the poor. If a rich man gives every bit of his surplus to the poor, and keeps on getting more surplus, no inherent injustice is committed. And if he does not adhere to and love the wealth as an end, using it only for good (his own and his neighbor) and is willing to cease to have it if and when God asks that of him (proven by the fact that he gives away his surplus regularly and only using what he needs), there is nothing in his soul that answers to the sin of greed.

Untouched whole and entire by the Church and the Gospel, by the way, is the possibility that A has more than B but A has not enough for his own needs, much less surplus. The mere fact that A has more than B is not a sin on A's part, nor is it true that A is morally obliged to share what he has with B so that they both have less than they need, just equally.

It's not coveting to recognize an inequality, and wanting to see it redressed. Tell it to my disabled friend and her mentally ill teenage son who get $86.00 a month in food stamps.

Again, you conflate "X has need and Y has more and has surplus and refuses to give away surplus" with simple, sheer "Y has more than X", as if saying Y has more than X directly implies that Y has surplus and has refused to share it with X.

Is there a point when it does become deplorable? If not 10x, is it 50x? 100x? 1000x? The CEO of my company makes approximately 500x more per year than I do. Who in the world needs that kind of money, let alone deserves it? Is there such a thing as "obscenely rich"?

Bill X is at least 200 % as smart as Bob Y.

Jane is at least 300 % prettier than Rita.

Our Mary the mother of Jesus is endowed with blessings and graces (full of grace) far beyond those not only of any other man or woman, but any other angel as well.

Each one of these is (a) caused by God in His Providence, and (b) not remediable by man no matter what we would do, and (c) NOT EVIL.

God DOES NOT HATE INEQUALITY. He revels in it, delights in it, makes it and re-enforces it.

Nature does not hate inequality. Man and women are equal in some ways and not in others, by nature. The complementarity of the sexes is natural and good, not evil.

Man in holiness does not hate inequality. The honorable, courageous man is praised above then ordinary. The refined minds and truer thought of the Doctors is praised above the thought of plodders. The skill and the beautiful work of the Masters is praised above that of amateurs. Those endowed with more by God and nature should not destroy, erase, or hide their greatness, they should manifest it for the greater glory of God, and we should praise God by praising their greatness.

Inequality is not evil.

"What you CAN show, from Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, is that the CEO making tons more than he needs and more than people in need are making, and not choosing to USE ANY OF THAT EXCESS to relieve their need, is an evil. Again, it is not solely the differential, nor even the differential taken together with the fact that others are in need, but all 3 conditions: He has more than he needs, they have need, and he doesn't do anything with his surplus to relieve their need. All 3."

Well, of course. I thought that would be understood by all concerned. That's why I mentioned the "Robb Report" lifestyle.

But my point about income is that there is NO ONE ON EARTH who "needs" an eight-figure salary. Such a person ipso facto has more than he needs. This is why the Fathers could say that anyone living in luxury was robbing the poor.

Perhaps you'd be happier with the word "inequity" than "inequality"? Because that seems to be what the Pope is getting at. The word "inequality" in this instance may be inapt.

My last comment cross-posted with Tony's. I see now that he and I were definitely reading "inequality" differently. By it I was meaning "inequity" while he seemed to be taking it more literally.

"But my point about income is that there is NO ONE ON EARTH who "needs" an eight-figure salary. Such a person ipso facto has more than he needs. This is why the Fathers could say that anyone living in luxury was robbing the poor."

NM,

Again, I find myself sympathetic to this particular point; but at the same time wondering what the heck government or public policy could possibly do about such a state of affairs that wouldn't make the situation worse. In my own personal situation, at times I feel like I live a life of luxury despite the fact that I actually live a relatively modest lifestyle (I'm a bureaucrat after all!) -- but I compare myself to the poor around the world and to people who lived in the past and I'm just so grateful for the modern world and its abundance. I also worry that my children take their comfort and well-being for granted and when they whine about getting new clothes or the latest electronic gadget (never mind the clothes and gadgets they already have) I can certainly appreciate how capitalism has the potential to breed entitled and greedy consumers!

All of that said, I think Tony's recent comments are spot on and furthermore, it seems like you and Catholic social thinkers generally ignore all the bad things that can happened when we attempt to take from the CEO who doesn't "need" his eight-figure salary and distribute his excess to the poor. Governments just don't have a good track record of doing this effectively in a way that can meaningfully help the poor flourish (and actually, most of the time we seem to help the poor do the opposite).

So I remain open to the possibility of government action -- I'm just not sure what form that would take (until we first get the government out of the way of people who want to create wealth and are trying to help the poor on their own; you know people like the Little Sisters of the Poor!)

Most of our attempts to address inequality only exaggerate it, by empowering a clique of lobbyists, politicians and bureaucrats with discretionary power over vast resources that are not their own. Some fraction of national income is redistributed while a larger fraction of political power is concentrated. In other words, plutocracy depends upon the connivance of regulators and legislators; and we have little evidence anywhere that piling up more regulations, and concentrating political power via the mechanisms of redistribution, reduces the opportunities for the corrupt connivance. Quite the contrary.

I am actually not prepared to grant that there is some single thing called capitalism that is "bad at distributing wealth" and therefore needs to be corrected in some forced fashion by non-economic means applied to the economic system. If the flow of wealth all over the place is not happening, I'm inclined to think that one or both of the following general categories are in play:

1) There is some governmental stupidity or corruption blocking the more beneficial (to everyone) exchange of goods and services.

2) There is some systemic and non-economic problem, such as theft, violence, fraud, etc., that is preventing the economy from behaving normally but that cannot be corrected economically at all and that certainly cannot be corrected by targeting the allegedly "unfair distribution" of wealth.

Examples of both of these abound, but neither is a problem with something called "capitalism." Indeed, examples of both abound in strongly *non-capitalist* systems. Market-deadening regulation, thugocracy, civil war, government corruption, children raised to be criminals rather than to work honestly, caste laws, contract breaking (e.g., employers flagrantly refusing to pay workers what they promised and hiring thugs to beat them if they complain)--all of these and many more happen at least as often in less "capitalist" as in more "capitalist" countries.

NM, I can certainly understand using "inequality" for the similar but different term "inequity". And I grant you that very often, if not universally, when a CEO makes 1000x as much as he needs, he is guilty of one or many or a whole boatload of inequities. Often he has arranged his company to do inequities to the supplier, to the customer, to the community, for example. But the important point is that the sheer inequality of his income is not, itself, an inequity, i.e. is not STRUCTURAL defect as such (nor does it imply, necessarily, illegal or immoral sideskirting of structural rules). If he turns around and every year uses 999x of those 1000x as much as he needs to succor the poor, his income on its own is not an inequity of any sort.

But the Pope, mind you, does indeed seem to be saying that the inequality itself, regardless of how it comes about (with or without cheating, conniving, thieving, market and social manipulation...) and regardless of what he chooses to do with it is an injustice, an inequity in the system in the sense of a defective system all of its own.

I am not quite as leery as Jeff of social structures designed to remediate the poverty of the poor, even when they (a) do it off the backs of the rich, and (b) do it with government involvement. I am very much opposed to designing such social structures so as to either simply tax away great wealth on no other basis than its greatness, or to use law to preclude the accumulation of great wealth even in principle, as flawed in two essential ways: first, taxing great wealth merely because of it's greatness alone, as if "to have even for a moment more than 10x your need" is itself a state of affairs that requires GOVERNMENT interference, is to defeat subsidiarity. If a man wants to give away vast amounts of his wealth, that ought to be preferred over government taxing it and giving it away, for several different reasons (only some of which Jeff and Paul point out). To tax it merely on account of its greatness and no other reason, then, is to prevent his being able to make the choice of whether to give it away, it is to prevent the better thing. In many ways, the existence and meaning of free will is God's insistence that the right and opportunity to choose well or ill is more important than making sure the right outcome occurs in each instance - otherwise God would step in each time I was about to damage my kids' welfare with a stupid or rotten choice and unravel my freedom to make that choice, and He doesn't. There is a preferential option for freedom in the economy of salvation, God given and stated.

Secondly, to use law to establish barriers to even the possibility of accumulating great wealth would imply setting up formulaic barriers to the finding and development of great advancement of the wealth of society as a whole. Nobody can foresee, or even adequately guess at, how the next great leap forward is going to happen so as to see whether this or that barrier to creating wealth will block it or not. (EG, nobody in 1950 predicted that software would be a source of enormous wealth, and if we had erected structures that precluded the possibility that individuals could not accrue enormous wealth via that pathway, we might well have blocked off the development of the software as a whole - including all the manpower multipliers it brought. Where would office productivity be without software? Back in the "Ms. Secretary, take dictation" days.) To intentionally foreclose such possibilities merely because they might ALSO result in windfall accruals of wealth to individuals, necessarily would suppress creativity and productivity (and skew market reactions to otherwise intelligent choices) to stifle development in totally unpredictable ways (except for predictable in terms of the worse for total social wealth). It would be, in effect, to say "if EVERYONE can't be wealthy, then nobody is allowed to be."

This is not to mention the inherently corrupting nature of having government officials in charge of deciding such things.

Just to offset that: I do not object to scaled income taxes that land heavier on the richer than on the poorer. I do not object to property taxes that land on the propertied alone. I do not object to regulations that restrict industry for other reasons, such as proven damage to the environment that harms health. I don't object to private / public partnerships (with heavy doses of transparency) that utilize government resources for very limited help to private charitable activities (how about using government information and lists to forestall fraud in charity giving?) I don't object to government for emergency support for a disaster crisis that is larger than a smaller community can manage on its own.

The poverty of a man or a family is not normally a government-level disaster crisis that is larger than a smaller community can manage on its own. To treat it as so, to treat it as a natural, ordinary, necessary subject of government, is to reject it as a personal object of charity and responsibility, is to reject the whole arena as one subject to caritas at the personal level.

Now I could pick apart more of the Cardinal’s speech, which is full of attacks on silly straw men (hint: no markets around the world are truly free – the United State, Singapore and even Hong Kong tax income and regulate trade and investment

Shouldn't we then admit that the free market has never actually existed? The modern state created the conditions necessary for the free market.

As far as utopianism, allow me to cite Christopher Lasch's prescient thesis:

Now we see what was so novel about the eighteenth-century idea of progress, the distinctive features of which emerge even more clearly against the background of this republican critique of corruption and civic decline than against the background of Judeo-Christian prophecy. It was not the secularization of the Kingdom of God or even the new stress on processes intrinsic to historical development that chiefly distinguished progressive ideology from earlier views of history. Its original appeal and its continuing plausibility derived from the more specific assumption that insatiable appetites, formerly condemned as a source of social instability and personal unhappiness, could drive the economic machine- just as man’s insatiable curiosity drove the scientific project- and thus ensure a never-ending expansion of productive forces. The moral rehabilitation of desire, even more than a change in the perception of time as such, generated a new sense of possibility, which announced itself most characteristically not in the vague utopianism of the French Enlightenment but in the hardheaded new science of political economy.

- Christopher Lasch The True and Only Heaven, WW. Norton Company, 1991 pg. 52

I find it more than a bit utopian that we can assume that an economic order predicated on insatiable consumption is viable in the long term especially in a world of finite resources.

I too quibble with aspects of the Cardinal's speech and Francis's approach because I don't think they are radical enough. As far as "learning" economics from the shady Acton Institute, all I can say is that in an ideal world not only would the Pelosis and LCWRs of the world be formerly condemned, but so too would Acton, an organization which contradicts practically every aspect of Catholic Social Teaching. What should one expect coming from a organization funded by Dutch Calvinists, and headed by a "priest" who should have never been ordained?

"Ita",

Those of us who defend capitalism and relatively free markets do not believe they are "predicated on insatiable consumption" unless you assume the human condition (our wants and needs in a world of scarcity since the Fall) is equivalent to "insatiable consumption." Of course, like most left-wing critics of capitalism, you trads who don't appreciate the success of free markets and trade refuse to engage actual evidence of the kind we continue to present on the real human lives helped to flourish since the industrial revolution and bourgeois values took hold in the West. I mean, who cares about the corporal works of mercy we can achieve in a world of antibiotics, Norman Borlaug, and Ethos Water? As long as we are "radical" in our thinking and ruin "the conditions necessary for the free market" -- what could go wrong? We'll be fighting "insatiable consumption" man...just like Professor Lasch would have wanted!!!

Meanwhile, don't drop by this blog and post calumny against Father Sirico -- the next time you do it you'll be banned. If you want to make specific criticisms of Father's ideas go for it. To claim he should "never have been ordained" is unacceptable.

Yes like Marx I certainly appreciate the dynamism of capitalism, and its negative effects on traditional societies, I just don't (unlike you and Marx) celebrate it. You and I have rather different conceptions of what it means to "flourish" your statement only buttresses Lasch's insight. It is in free market capitalism where we find this notion of progress which has morphed into what we have today. The argument that all of this great stuff that makes modern life comfortable is somehow solely thanks to capitalism is so misleading. You can't point to a time where were it not for state intervention capitalism would not be able to function. The fact is modern life has gotten "better" in some ways largely thanks to the amelioration of some of captialism's worst effects.

Nothing I said about Sirico is untrue.

Yeah, we celebrate _all the time_ all kinds of bad things here. You'll see us constantly "celebrating" the free exchange of pornography and prostitution and advocating the legalization of human organ sales and...oh, wait, that wasn't us at all. In fact, Jeff expressly condemned doctrinaire libertarianism in the main post. I guess straw-manning is easier than engaging real people.

Ita, yours and Lasch's comments here have one thing strongly in common with the Pope in his EG: in virtually every significant paragraph of EG, the Pope's comments leave a large gaping room for - nay, they beg for - a "yes, but" because he presents but one half of the coin, and leaves the other half unsaid, unsuggested, a crabbed stingy, intentionally hidden existence.

Except, in yours and Lasch's comments, it's every sentence or clause.

Except when you are flat out wrong, of course.

It was not the secularization of the Kingdom of God or even the new stress on processes intrinsic to historical development that chiefly distinguished progressive ideology from earlier views of history. Its original appeal and its continuing plausibility derived from the more specific assumption that insatiable appetites, formerly condemned as a source of social instability and personal unhappiness, could drive the economic machine-

What's wrong here is that neither Jeff nor Paul nor Lydia nor I have in this thread or any other thread proposed or accepted so monstrous or murderous a notion of economics as could remotely be mistaken for one that derives from a "specific assumption that insatiable appetites...could drive the economic machine". To the extent that "modern" economic models (whatever that means given that there are at least 4 or 5 competing theories) would rely specifically on such a thesis, they have been condemned here. So, in putting such comments here, you are tilting at windmills, or just being an idiot.

just as man’s insatiable curiosity drove the scientific project-

I don't know whether to laugh of cry at such ignorant obfuscation. To castigate learning, science, education, and technological capacity as something inherently disordered is beyond belief. What about Aristotle and St. Thomas's observation that "man desires to know" and that "the object of the intellect is knowledge" in support of the definition of man as "rational animal", in support of the conclusion that man is a spiritual creature, in support of the basis for man being able to receive the Holy Spirit? What about Socrates dictum that "the unexamined life is not worth living"? Why don't you go further and object to, say, advances in theology, losses of superstition, etc? Damn that insatiable trouble-maker Socrates! He riles people up! And is Christ any better, He who said "I am the Truth", encouraging people's to know God? What next, that they will know their neighbor?

and thus ensure a never-ending expansion of productive forces.

...said with frosty indignation and curl of the lip?

Why don't you go further: ...and thus ensures the preservation of the lives of people who otherwise live miserable lives of destitution and die of malnutrition by age 20. And thus of the 90% of the people who would otherwise be forced to be farmers, enables many of them to go into other lines of work if they prefer. Thus makes unnecessary the bulk of the backbreaking work that turns men and women old and infirm before they are 45. Thus increases average lifespans from 50 to 70, just at the storied "threescore and ten", (though quite a bit short of the biblical 6-score that Moses exemplified). Thus prevents most of the deaths of mothers in childbirth.

Yes, those productive forces and results thereof are SO HORRIBLE!!!! Never ending reduction of life's drudgery labor, which allows men more leisure to contemplate God? So Horrendous! (or perchance to blog :-) instead? ) Never ending improvement in feeding the hungry, so that in the last 60 year the actual number of the dangerously hungry went DOWN while the total population more than doubled. What a wretched, despicable increase in productivity. How DARE those miserable humans desire to better their worldly condition! What offensive appetite.

Wait, wasn't Francis's point that we should be improving the lot of other men? But...but...those noble, holy, humble saintly poor - they don't WANT to be saddled with mere worldly goods, for the desire for earthy wealth interferes with love of God alone.

You are right, I guess Francis isn't radical enough, he doesn't go far enough, he doesn't take his thesis right out to the rabidly nihilistic bitter end and call for the unabomber - along with Frost and Witherspoon - to annihilate 98% of the population (if not more, of course), leaving only the ignorant, dirty, ill, unproductive, uncreative people who won't re-make a progressive society, who will be content to live Jansenist lives in abject misery loving God until they all die out. Utopia at last, (sigh).

Jeff: "I compare myself to the poor around the world and to people who lived in the past and I'm just so grateful for the modern world and its abundance. I also worry that my children take their comfort and well-being for granted and when they whine about getting new clothes or the latest electronic gadget (never mind the clothes and gadgets they already have) I can certainly appreciate how capitalism has the potential to breed entitled and greedy consumers!"

I agree here almost 100%. My answer, though, would not lie in government action. I too have a strong aversion to an economically activist state. As a starting point my recommendation would be a thorough reconsideration of desire, especially among Christians. To what extent have Christians' ideas of what they want and what they need been affected by the surrounding culture? Do we want more than we need, or perhaps need less than we think we do? How many of our problems in this area are related to the error that "economic freedom" means that we should always "have it (y)our way!"?

Lydia: "I am actually not prepared to grant that there is some single thing called capitalism that is 'bad at distributing wealth' and therefore needs to be corrected in some forced fashion by non-economic means applied to the economic system. If the flow of wealth all over the place is not happening, I'm inclined to think that one or both of the following general categories are in play:

1) There is some governmental stupidity or corruption blocking the more beneficial (to everyone) exchange of goods and services.

2) There is some systemic and non-economic problem, such as theft, violence, fraud, etc., that is preventing the economy from behaving normally but that cannot be corrected economically at all and that certainly cannot be corrected by targeting the allegedly 'unfair distribution' of wealth."

No offense, but that is a thoroughly ideological response, not unlike the equal and opposite responses of those on the Left. Faith in the system requires the system qua system to be foolproof. Any seeming failures must then be explained either by outside factors or by faulty applications of the system's methods.

Lasch is correct. The understanding that "self-interest" drives the economic machine is part and parcel of the capitalist idea. What limits, however, does capitalism place on self-interest? None. Hence, the appetites are indeed insatiable, because they're unlimited, and forever touted as same: -- "You can have it all!" "Have it your way!", etc. etc.

Schumpeter wrote about "creative destruction," but market advocates of today scarcely mention the "destructive" aspect of capitalism, if they acknowledge its existence at all. Do market forces really bring forth nothing but sweetness and light, and is their "potential to breed entitled and greedy consumers," as Jeff put it, really only a bug not a feature? Read a couple histories of 20th century advertising for some clues.

"I don't know whether to laugh of cry at such ignorant obfuscation. To castigate learning, science, education, and technological capacity as something inherently disordered is beyond belief."

But of course that's not what Lasch is doing, and if you'd read him you'd know that. There's a vast difference between Aristotle and St. Thomas, on the one hand, and Bacon and his descendants on the other. Scientific curiosity should not assume the aspect of Prometheus. Isn't that the lesson of Frankenstein? And along those lines the desire to improve one's lot should not assume that of Midas.

market advocates of today scarcely mention the "destructive" aspect of capitalism, if they acknowledge its existence at all.

Coming from someone so ostentatiously fixated on who has read this author and who has read that author, this is a remarkable comment.

No offense, but that is a thoroughly ideological response,

Yet it's amazing how often it turns out to be right. Again and again and again.

I also question the sharp distinction between wealth production and wealth distribution. It's artificial. Making a great new kind of widget that many people find useful will involve employing people, buying materials, renting space, etc., all of which are _distributing_ wealth in the course of _producing_ wealth.

Hence, the appetites are indeed insatiable, because they're unlimited,

I take issue with this, NM. There are two ways to look at the increase in material good on this score, and what you have said ignores the difference.

On the one hand, there is a natural limit to the sheer amount of food a person can consume healthily. If you can consume 3,000 a day, and you amass enough for 9,000 calories a day for the foreseeable future (past the point the food will spoil), you simply have too much - sheer excess simply and absolutely. In that case, spending still more on food for yourself is inhumane, a waste of what might be put to better use feeding someone else.

Yet, what about the character of that food. Suppose you examine its nutrient value, and you find that many of the food items are low in value. So you spend more time, effort, and money finding better, healthier foods to eat, organically grown, higher protein values, grown without excessive harm to animals and the environment, etc. And in the course of that, you end up spending 3 times as much on 3,000 calories as you used to. THAT increase in expenditure cannot simply be called "waste" and cannot be called "withholding your surplus from those in need." Even though you could manage without such spending. The good to which you put it is a good suitable to the overall hierarchy of human values.

Now take goods that are not about mere subsistence of the body, but impact other facets of the physical, emotional, and spiritual development of the person. For 5,000 years, people lived without electric lights, so it can be done. But to do so NOW would mean, also, to give up most of a person's possibility of being educated, which is a FAR higher human value than the cost of a few kilowatts of power - money that "could have been used to feed a hungry person." Using light for that purpose rightly accounts for the hierarchy of human goods.

Or take a house. I know that our houses are much larger than that of the ordinary joe's house back in 1800. Part of that is because it was a great deal harder to heat more square feet of house back then, so even if you had handed the ordinary joe a bigger house, he might have had to turn it down because he couldn't heat it. But aside from that: a bigger house, more space, is a necessity if you are going to have people living in the house until age 22 instead of 16; and a bigger house is going to be needed if you are going to have be able to study in enough peace and quiet (apart from the orbit of screaming babies or shrieking kids playing) to accomplish difficult education. And if Dad is going to work from home on professional assignments which require some independent space. That is to say, human values and certain opportunities to develop the human person have expanded to the reach of the ordinary joe, so that the ordinary joe is capable of a college education, and this is a GOOD thing, not something to be begrudged of mankind until no person is hungry. The accoutrements of life that are compatible with and properly suited to those greater human developments of the spirit are a perfectly satisfactory way to view the use of goods as a general matter.

The same goes with other pursuits of true leisure: a pipe organ in a church is, in one sense, a luxury: no first century church had a pipe organ. But it is impossible to say that organ music with polyphony for worship of God is a disordered way of using material goods - even though the money could have been used directly for the poor. Using those resources for it is a good use, and therefore HAVING those resources is not having "excess" simply and absolutely.

Generally, the contemplative life of a monk in a monastery consumes physical resources that the monk never replaces with his own work, resources the monastery gets through donations. Yet the contemplative life is THE highest form of human activity we have on this Earth, and the fact that not everyone can pursue it doesn't mean that the ones that DO pursue it are doing something ill thereby - even though the donations could have been used directly for the hungry. Putting resources into this use is, indeed, a worthy way of allocating the world's goods. It is not an ill use of surplus.

Around the whole of western society, more people (indeed most people) have access to better education, more knowledge, more and better music, more opportunity for higher pursuits than any other culture that has ever been on the Earth. Not everybody uses their access well. Indeed, very many of "the masses" use their opportunities to repeat and expand their occasions of mere recreation, instead of higher pursuits. In that, many uses of those resources can be called "waste" and "excess," because they indulge in a surfeit of recreation (even aside from recreation that is itself degrading). But the SHEER FACT of having those resources necessary to pursue higher things easily, readily, fruitfully, with less effort, is not ITSELF excess simply and definitively. Even though much of that wealth could instead be converted to the use of the poor. If a person of modest means inherits enough to pay for his kids to go to college, he has not inherited "excess" simply - even if he is foolish and wasteful and greedy and spends the money on entertainment.

Here is the critical point I am aiming for: In our society, for nearly anyone but the richest 5% or so, our typical wealth has not yet reached any definite "natural" limit to the total amount of resources a person can personally use well for development of the person and worthy noble pursuits. Even the dad who makes 200,000 a year could use that entire amount (well, it's going to be 140,000 after taxes) on worthy, appropriate pursuits to the betterment of the human person for his family, especially education costs, music training, etc. Yes, these are "luxuries" to a very poor person, but they are not beyond the scope of truly human development of the spirit. Therefore, for all but the highest end of maybe 5% (that's a guess), we don't have pure, definite excess. And because of probably astronomical costs of theoretically foreseeable advances in medicine and other goods, we aren't going to arrive at such an upper limit anytime soon.

Why do I raise this? You cannot go around pointing a finger at an economic system in which the vast, vast majority of people have not reached any natural limit on fruitfully usable wealth, and charge "insatiable, unlimited" and expect to get anywhere convincing.

Oh, I hear your response: it is not simply the amount that people have is in excess of any natural limits, it is that (a) they don't USE it well, but much more that (b) the system itself doesn't provide any limits.

The answer to (b) is simple: you are looking at the wrong factors to supply the limits. An IV is a system for delivering medicine to the bloodstream directly. It has no theoretical limit to the system - you can put as large a bag (or as many bags) as you wish, it doesn't limit how much. This is not a defect of the "IV system", it is a feature that allows something outside the system to choose how to use the system depending on choices that take into account a greater scope of goods than just "get some medicine in".

Similarly, a choir is a vehicle for making and delivering music. It has no internal limits on how much music it makes, nor what kind. A choir can produce wretched music or evil music or good music - it is not the structure of the system itself that supplies the additional factors needed, they are supplied from outside the system.

A similar thing can be said of the (relatively) free market: As properly understood, an "economy" and a "market" are limited-scope vehicles for delivering goods, services, supplies, resources, knowledge and incentives to persons. It is not a complete and total system on its own, so it needs moral input and direction from outside the system to regulate it and provide limits. The fact that the market must be put under human control for human goods is not somehow a defect of the system.

Incorrectly understood markets, and faulty theories about the market and about capital resources - theories which are defective applications of the market - run under the name "capitalism" but are not the sole claimants to the name. If these faulty theories masquerade a "totalizing" approach to market theory that pretend that no further input is needed to the system than a-moral valuations of preferences between goods, they are wrong.

We are such a long, long way off from the global conglomeration of markets and economies that can be expected to produce a totality of more goods than can be used humanely and fruitfully by the whole human race - so far off from it that we cannot even foresee it happening, nay, we cannot even say what it would look like because it is so foreign to our actual state. Even if we were to feed and clothe all people, there would still be room for spending vast sums on overcoming illness and genetic disorders, overcoming loss of limbs with artificial limbs that respond to brain signals, exploring the solar system (and beyond?), exploring fields of knowledge that require vast efforts - all things that cannot be discounted as simply inhumane uses of resources.

Until we can foresee somehow reaching that natural limit, an economic system that is built to "produce more" is going to look right, not defective. If nothing else, the "more" that we produce here that is locally in excess can simply be GIVEN AWAY to those who have less than they can use, and so it is not a defect to allow that "excess" to be produced. And, should we ever approach such a natural limit for the whole of humanity (in the mists of the unimagined future), then the human persons whose job it is to exercise forethought and direction to the system can regulate production downwards. Without turning the (relatively) free market into something else.

Your example of the IV system is excellent, Tony. I've always been baffled and frustrated by the silly criticism of the free exchange of goods and services that it "has no intrinsic limit" and is therefore bad, somehow, tending to excess, etc. A screwdriver also has no inherent rules about what screws to apply it to and whether to tighten them or loosen them. Does this mean that a screwdriver is inherently destructive because there is no inherent limit to the number and types of things one can take apart with it?

Yeah, we celebrate _all the time_ all kinds of bad things here. You'll see us constantly "celebrating" the free exchange of pornography and prostitution and advocating the legalization of human organ sales and...oh, wait, that wasn't us at all. In fact, Jeff expressly condemned doctrinaire libertarianism in the main post. I guess straw-manning is easier than engaging real people.

Well Lydia, I'd say on the whole you do flog a lot of terrible ideas -even if you don't grasp it. Like this trite comment:

Your example of the IV system is excellent, Tony. I've always been baffled and frustrated by the silly criticism of the free exchange of goods and services that it "has no intrinsic limit" and is therefore bad, somehow, tending to excess, etc. A screwdriver also has no inherent rules about what screws to apply it to and whether to tighten them or loosen them. Does this mean that a screwdriver is inherently destructive because there is no inherent limit to the number and types of things one can take apart with it?

Yeah I guess Aristotle and Aquinas were big dummbies making silly criticisms.

I do applaud the OP for his albeit mild criticism of people like Tom Woods, however, I have never seen any other condemnation of some of the downright diabolical positions uttered by anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard, Rand or Hoppe. Figures who are quite popular on the right today even among so-called Christians. No instead I see some inane Lydia screed against Patrick Deneen. I am glad you guys have got your priorities straight.

Wood's "response" is a joke as well. If libertarians were being thrown out of the Church how does that explain the Acton Institute's power and influence, which has escaped any sort of condemnation? No mention is made of the self-proclaimed pre-Vatican II Catholic and anarcho-capitalist and all around darling of libertarianism, Judge Andrew Napolitano celebrating the passage of SSM on national television?-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajNybaF2-40

Another relatively high profile Catholic Anarcho-capitalist, Jeffery Tucker has made similar remarks over the years.

Where is the evidence libertarians are being "locked out" of the Church? I only wish this were true.
Also where is the condemnation from the traditional Right? Where the is kind of vitriol given to Pope Francis or Patrick Deneen for these very public statements coming from purported practicing traditional Christians like Tucker and Naplitano? Now Lydia says the she and the other commentators here don't support such blatant social-modernism but it is evident that such sentiments have indeed infected large elements of the conservative movement but most especially those associated with pushing free-market capitalism. I can't help but see this as the main reason why conservatism is such an ineffectual ideology with such ideological incoherence in the upper echelons of the movement.

I find Patrick Deneen to be so generally uninteresting that I don't write about him, because I usually don't read him. I cannot find any post of mine on W4 about him, either "inane" or otherwise. Perhaps I've just missed it, though I cannot remember ever writing such a post either. I recall making occasional comments in which I've used him as an illustration. What I do find when doing a site search on Deneen is that I participated in the comments thread on Paul Cella's wise post in which he took Deneen to task for Deneen's silly comments (inane, even) about Hobby Lobby, but I was merely one commentator among many.

Your out-of-nowhere hostility is getting pretty old pretty fast, Ita. I suggest you bag it.

"I also question the sharp distinction between wealth production and wealth distribution."

Explain, please, how a well-paid Wal*Mart store employee makes $11.00 an hour, while their CEO makes $11,000.00 an hour. The company mos def produces a lot of wealth, but quite a bit of it seems to be rather inequitably distributed to Mr. McMillon's wallet.

Lather, rinse and repeat, with thousands of other multi-millionaires, be they CEO's, entertainers, sports stars, etc.

"It is not a complete and total system on its own, so it needs moral input and direction from outside the system to regulate it and provide limits. The fact that the market must be put under human control for human goods is not somehow a defect of the system."

The philosophy that created and upholds the system has turned a Hobbesian selfishness into a virtue. The system is flawed because it is founded upon an anti-Christian understanding of both desire and self-interest. This is all in Mises, btw (although he sees it as positive). As a writer friend of mine put it:

"My main argument with [many conservatives] concerns their failure to see the real nature of corporate capitalism. They see its undeniable power as an engine of material achievement, but at best give insufficient attention to the fact that in principle it honors no principle. I don’t mean that most businessmen are personally unprincipled or dishonest—-I don’t think they are-—but that the system itself, as actually understood and practiced, is one straightforward thing: an engine for generating profit. It has no means within it to distinguish a licit from an illicit line of trade. Conservatives are only slowly waking up to the fact that large corporations are the enemies of much that they hold dear, considerably more dangerous today than utopian socialism...[C]orporate capitalism as we know it is, in the long run, inimical to the widespread possession of meaningful private property, as distributists have been arguing for decades. 'Liberty under God' must include taming the corporate as well as the individual appetite, and as far as I know the neo-conservatives have had little or nothing to say about this."

How can "taming the individual appetite" be reconciled with a system that encourages one to act out of "self-interest," all the while being unable even to hint at what a healthy self-interest might be?

Oh my mistake you were only prominent in the comments where you were dare I say, posting some of the more inane comments. I am glad you cleared that up. Rest assured most of your other posts here and elsewhere indict you anyway. As far as "hostility" is concerned given what I have seen of your behavior here and elsewhere I don't think I have much to worry about. Maybe you could spare the world your "insights" and leave the commentary to intelligent traditionalists like Deneen? At any rate I suggest you bag it for the movement's sake.

That, my friends, is an example par excellence of a troll acting his trollish best (i.e. worst). Ita's 6:21 comment is as stupid and worthless as they come.

Not only does Ita take this website to task for errors of others which we have ourselves denounced and rejected, he is then offensive in attributing so-called "trite" comments to the wrong source (if Lydia's defense of my IV example was trite, then it was my IV example which was the source of it, not Lydia). Then he pretends to base his objections on Aristotle and Aquinas, without ever giving a single quote, or even PARAPHRASE, of their thesis that would run counter to what we said: claims without any support for them. And idiotic blather about our *not denouncing* other atrocious actors such as Napolitano - as if it were our failing for not reporting EVERYTHING evil out there or something.

But of course he saves the best for last: he pretends to have the right to give posting orders to the people in charge here, instead of having the common courtesy of behaving like a guest when he is a guest.

That's trollism for you.

Ita, it is clear that you have NO IDEA what this site is about. I fail to see why you would bother to post here with so little to say about what we ARE doing - your interest obviously lie elsewhere. So feel free to go elsewhere, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

The philosophy that created and upholds the system has turned a Hobbesian selfishness into a virtue. The system is flawed because it is founded upon an anti-Christian understanding of both desire and self-interest.

Nice, Let's make one thing totally clear here: Your description is both wrong and flawed as a critique of our comments, because:

Hobbes and Adam Smith and his cohort DID NOT ORIGINATE "the system" that we have. And it is not their philosophy that "supports" what we actually have on the ground by any sort of intentional basis.

Let me show why. First: we don't have "a system" per se. What we have is an accumulation of many bits and pieces of many different ideas, styles, and pragmatic efforts by ten million agents over time, who all had different "visions" of what they were about - no single philosophy matches with the ACTUAL conglomerate we have. If you asked people like Sam Walton and Ari Onasis and John D Rockefeller, they couldn't care less what kind of economic theory some long-hair was spouting. Yes, there are a fair number of similarities with certain versions of the "capitalist philosophies" (plural, note) and facets of the state of affairs we have, but with all sorts of devolutions, exceptions, modifications, and so on all up and down the works.

Second, to the extent what we have is "a system" with a free market at all, it originated as at least partly free long, long before any of the modern economic theorists got their hands on it. That is to say, the "market" existed before any economist, and it exists now not on account of any economic system. People trade and sell and contract whether their acts comply with Smith, Hobbes, Keynes, or any other modeler - the modelers were trying to explain what happens, they weren't laying down laws that others must follow. And people don't give two hoots if their actions comport with any theory. To the extent that people's actions are consistent with a theory, it is not _for the reason of the theory* that they act so.

Third, however much Hobbes et al tried to make an account of selfishness as a virtue, individuals are responsible on their own for either acting from selfish reasons or not, and there are tons of actors in "the system" that clearly, patently, operate for other motives than selfishness. Like Elon Musk making the Tesla electric car patents available to everyone. He has not somehow "violated" the system. If "the system" that we actually have were something "created and upheld" by a philosophy of Hobbesian selfishness, he would have to be considered a criminal for doing this. Which he isn't.

Fourth (though along the same lines), two words: non-profit corporation. The COMPLETE reality we have on the ground just isn't well accounted accounted for by the philosophies that promote and project selfishness and nothing but - as John Mueller shows in "Redeeming Economics."

As an aside, to the extent that people REALLY ARE using economic affairs to pursue selfishness as if it were "good for everyone," we here at W4 have often condemned that, as being both wrong AND NOT ESSENTIAL to the free market's workings, even so much of the free market as we actually have in practice.

My main argument with [many conservatives] concerns their failure to see the real nature of corporate capitalism. They see its undeniable power as an engine of material achievement, but at best give insufficient attention to the fact that in principle it honors no principle.

Hooooooooolllllyyyyy Cow. After some 300 posts from Paul noting (some of) the ills of the usury crisis, which is nothing other than one facet of the degeneracy of corporate capitalism, how can you possibly imagine that we have nothing difficult to say to corporate capitalism?

At the same time, how can you possibly fail to note that our saying "businessmen must import MORALS into regulating how they generate profits" is, precisely, reading into the situation that commonly the system of "profit generating" is itself without moral constraints? It's like it goes in one ear and out the other. You are offended at some THEORY (which we also reject) of how to generate profits that accounts for profits by using appetite without accounting for morals, and WE are offended at businessmen who practice without morals - whatever theory (or, more likely, no systematic theory at all) they hold about profits. Your telling us over and over ad nauseum that "the system" is without principles is not something we have not recognized, we SAID that (insofar as there is some system in practice, anyway). The only difference is this: you want the government to impose the morals, we want the government (more often than not) to promote morals but (mostly) with more of a hands-off on actual demands, and mostly let individuals determine how to be moral and generate profits. (But not absolutely: we support laws that require truth-telling in transactions (which libertarians often don't support), and prevent fraud and theft, and prevent clear and proven damage to others through indirect means (including environmental damage), etc.)

Nobody here approves of Hobbesian selfishness, whether in support of profits or not. You have been tilting at paper straw men for years, NM, and it begins to tire. Do me a favor and describe a version of economy that you WOULD support, as opposed to "corporate capitalism." Then I will tear it to shreds by accusing your theory of all sorts of things that you don't think, on the off chance that what you do support is something remotely like something that has a passing resemblance to communism or fascism.

If Ita has a problem with my criticism of Deneen on Hobby Lobby, he should have taken it up at the time. The comments to that post were rather lively. Likewise, Ita should confine his fulminations against Napolitano and others to blogs which take notice of these personalities. I have no earthly idea why What's Wrong with the World should be obliged to answer for every failure of the American Right. Nor do I have any earthly idea why any rational reader of this website would imagine we think it news to hear there are failures on the American Right. This remark borders on the comical:

Now Lydia says the she and the other commentators here don't support such blatant social-modernism but it is evident that such sentiments have indeed infected large elements of the conservative movement . . .

Yes, we know that, Ita. Maybe one day you can calm yourself sufficiently to have a sane conversation on what to do about this problem.

But I suspect Tony is quite right: Ita would much rather troll than discuss, dispute, debate or even argue.

For some reason our site is a magnet for trolls who can't get their facts straight (but I repeat myself). Some of this stuff is downright amusing. (I chuckle every time Lydia posts on adoption, knowing the inevitable imbecile troll is to follow.) But most of it is dreary, draining drudgery.

Trolls like Ita are not readers; they are no conversationalists, much less debaters.

They are Onanists.

Tony,

Your comments are so incoherent it is truly difficult to even read let alone understand them. As far as citing Aristotle, I have Politics I.9- "And as their desires are unlimited, they also desire that the means of gratifying them should be without limit." Happy now?

I honestly didn't come here to troll, though I guess if trolling to you folks means have a predisposition against Lydia, than I guess I am guilty. My first comment I think more than showed good faith. I guess I went off the rafters after seeing Lyida's response. Her thoughts are just so excruciatingly bad I can't help but respond, especially given her anti-Catholic comments ( see her comments re. "Ultramonte" Catholics) But I suppose if you must* ban and therefore not allow me the privilege of responding to Lydia's ingenious, earth shattering "conservative" commentary, well I suppose I'll be able to make due..somehow

That's it, you're out of here. You're banned.

Why? Because you are a liar, you go around telling lies about people on this website. In particular for lying about Lydia and some completely imagined "Ultramonte" comment. She's never used the word.

Not that using the term would have been particularly nasty anyway, mind you. Several of our friends (Catholic and not) have criticized ultramontanes in these pages or in their own sites, and we take no objection to that.

You are also banned for excess stupidity as well as general trolling. It isn't a defense of trolling to say "but I had a predisposition against her". Calling people names without basis, making subjective judgments about people instead of tackling issues, merely positing stuff left and right without argument, attributing imagined errors to the WRONG person, and acting like a boor instead of a guest. Oh, and the fact that you can't (or won't) read:

it is truly difficult to even read

is another reason (not that the prior reasons weren't enough) - you have no reason to be here, so get the hell out.

"The only difference is this: you want the government to impose the morals, we want the government (more often than not) to promote morals but (mostly) with more of a hands-off on actual demands, and mostly let individuals determine how to be moral and generate profits."

Please. What I want is for Christians to reexamine their understanding of self-interest with an openness to the possibility that the reigning economic view of same is incorrect. This involves no government imposition of morals whatsoever.

As far as corporate capitalism is concerned, for a start I'd be happy with some sort of action designed to close the revolving door between Big Business and government. But a recognition of the problem of crony capitalism must include the realization that cronyism is an inherent problem of corporate capitalism itself. Once a corporation achieves a certain size cronyism seems to become an irresistable temptation. This is, of course, true on all levels -- local, state, and federal. But it is at the higher levels that the gravest threat to democratic republicanism occurs.

NM, you respond to my point about questioning the sharp distinction between wealth production and wealth distribution merely by making much (again) of the absolute difference between what an employee makes and what a CEO makes. I really do not think that this is addressed to what I said. It seems that you are not willing to admit that, in fact, wealth production *goes hand in hand with* wealth distribution (for the reasons I gave) unless *absolute inequality* between employees of the company is as small as you think in the abstract it should be. But we've already rejected inequality per se as a bad thing. At that point we are just talking in circles. The fact remains that wealth production involves employing real people and creating jobs (sometimes in other industries, even, from whence supplies come) and that this _is_ a form of wealth distribution. That it doesn't result in absolute equality is not the point. A rising tide can and does lift all boats even if all the boats don't end up at the same place. I honestly have never known why inequalities in and of themselves bother so many people when the lot of the relatively poor themselves has been made so much better in absolute terms by the prosperity of a country or system as a whole. And that this has been shown to be the case again and again where (relatively) free markets, security of contract and property, etc., are in place seems to me undeniable.

Lydia, my point is not that there's no distribution. It's that the distributive aspect of the system does not come close to the success of the productive aspect, and the gap between the two results in inequities, many of them unjust.

"A rising tide can and does lift all boats even if all the boats don't end up at the same place."

It doesn't lift the ones that end up being sunk by the rising water.

"I honestly have never known why inequalities in and of themselves bother so many people when the lot of the relatively poor themselves has been made so much better in absolute terms by the prosperity of a country or system as a whole."

Because unjust inequities are still unjust, that's why. Hierarchy and inequalities go hand in hand; that's a given. But just as with hierarchies, the problem isn't with inequalities per se, but with unjust inequalities. The fact that a peasant in China makes $.30 a day and works seven ten-hour days isn't justified by the fact that he may have starved if he'd have stayed on his farm instead of taking the factory job. On one level it is better to be exploited than to die, I guess, but this doesn't make the exploitation okay.

and the gap between the two results in inequities, many of them unjust.

Please, NM, you have to be more careful here. "inequities" are, by definition, unjust: an inequity is a lack of balance between what is and what ought to be. Inequalities are 'inequities' only in a different sense, and we have agreed that inequality of goods is not a per se injustice. So if there is an injustice, the injustice comes about not because of gap between success rates in production and success rates in distribution, but in UNJUST acts of distribution simply.

On the other hand, your so-called gap between a 'highly successful' production and 'not-so-highly successful' distribution cannot be stated in direct terms, only indirectly in the most general terms - i.e. that of "successful" vs "unsuccessful", for the object of production isn't "to be widespread" nor "equal to" something, the object of production is to make what didn't exist beforehand, and that is unequal to what was. And the object, the ideal of distribution isn't "to be equal to each other" either, it is to "to be equal to need as informed by qualifiers like desire, etc".

Without starting with a notion that "he got more than me" is a per se unjust situation, i.e. a per se inequity, seeing a result that "the system made it so that he got more than me" cannot be turned into "the system perpetuates inequities" without more information. It may well be that the system perpetuates injustices (indeed it does) but "he got more than me" isn't one of them.

What you need is a principle that says "he got more than me, AND I didn't get enough for my needs" is tantamount to saying "he got more than me, AND I didn't get enough for my needs, AND his productivity input wasn't worth any more than mine". If men were angels and all equally industrious and equally smart about how they go about it, then the inequality of what I got out of my work compared to what he got out of his contribution would be unjust. That is, in an ideal system without sin and accidents and defects of nature, we wouldn't need to add in factors of industriousness, intelligence, responsibility, foresight, prudence, risk-taking into the equation of a person's contribution to production. Yes, in THAT kind of a system, none of those factors would be factors that played into difference in productiveness in a person's contribution. And then they wouldn't factor into distribution either. But in THIS world, where there are differences in all of the above factors of production, all of those factors do RIGHTLY affect the equality of distribution because they affect the productiveness of input. As a result, the object of a sound market-based system of distribution, CONSIDERED APART FROM CHARITABLE GIVING, is distribution which equitably factors in need, desire, industriousness, prudence, and all the others. And in addition to that market-based system informed by morals (which is not complete within society) there must be additional components of society that, out of charity, take up the slack of need that cannot be met by that equitable distributive function.

There is no doubt that these do not come even close to explaining your (exaggerated) 0.30 per day Chinese fellow's production difference compared to the factory manager. That is indeed an inequity - slow starvation and continuous work until you drop are unjust working conditions. And trying to attribute this to what Lydia is upholding is just (again) a kind of a straw man.

~~What you need is a principle that says "he got more than me, AND I didn't get enough for my needs" is tantamount to saying "he got more than me, AND I didn't get enough for my needs, AND his productivity input wasn't worth any more than mine".~~

No, that is not the "principle" I'm aiming at. What I'm saying is "He got substantially more than me, AND I didn't get enough for my needs, AND his productivity input, while greater than mine, is not commensurate with the level of difference in remuneration, and thus not equitable."

"As a result, the object of a sound market-based system of distribution, CONSIDERED APART FROM CHARITABLE GIVING, is distribution which equitably factors in need, desire, industriousness, prudence, and all the others. And in addition to that market-based system informed by morals (which is not complete within society) there must be additional components of society that, out of charity, take up the slack of need that cannot be met by that equitable distributive function."

No doubt. I've read Mueller and agree about the missing "gift" aspect of markets. But charitable giving cannot be the sole altruistic/ascetic dimension of the system if distribution is going to indeed be just and equitable. As the Scriptures and the Fathers indicate, there must also be present a conscious avoidance of avarice, evinced by rejection of grasping and/or hoarding behavior. If this were followed "up front," as it were, the need for charitable giving after the fact would not be so great.

The problem is, the system neither rewards nor encourages this sort of "up front" charity, in that its engine is avarice, redefined as "self interest." Giving out of one's surplus is commendable, but the classical and Christian traditions indicate that one should not be seeking a surplus to begin with (excepting, of course, the wisdom of "saving for a rainy day"). In other words, it is not just the keeping of one's surplus that denotes greed, it is the seeking of one in the first place.

The example of the Chinese factory worker was extreme (by design), but the principle still holds. The difference between him and the Wal*Mart worker is not one of kind, only of degree.

The example of the Chinese factory worker was extreme (by design), but the principle still holds. The difference between him and the Wal*Mart worker is not one of kind, only of degree.

So the fact that China is still a Communist country doesn't make the example and the comparison even potentially problematic as an example of the evils of capitalism?

Btw, NM, since Wal-Mart is your preferred American whipping boy, I can't help remarking that it was noted a few months ago that the healthcare benefits Wal-Mart employees receive (presumably full-time employees, but I didn't check that) were better than Obamacare's requirements. Those darned rapacious capitalists. They're just not evil enough.

"So the fact that China is still a Communist country doesn't make the example and the comparison even potentially problematic as an example of the evils of capitalism?"

As you well know, Lydia, China is an odd duck of a Communist country. It is moving towards some strange hybrid of statism and capitalism (just like we are, actually, except from the opposite direction). But the example doesn't depend on the system -- inequitable remuneration is inequitable remuneration regardless of the system it which it occurs.

"I can't help remarking that it was noted a few months ago that the healthcare benefits Wal-Mart employees receive (presumably full-time employees, but I didn't check that) were better than Obamacare's requirements."

Well, that's fine. I'm certainly no fan of Obamacare. But I don't see how that works against my point. Is their CEO really 1000x more productive than their more highly paid store employees?

Btw, Walmart had a fun time with some inaccuracies about them, here:

http://blog.walmart.com/fact-check-the-new-york-times-the-corporate-daddy

But the example doesn't depend on the system

It could. I know nothing about the options that a Chinese laborer has for seeking higher wages from his employer or seeking other employment and how these compare to the options available in the U.S. Or how those options are constrained by the overall political system. Do you know them to be comparable or the same?

Is their CEO really 1000x more productive than their more highly paid store employees?

Your facts about what their "more highly paid" store employees make may need some tweaking, per the above link, but in any event, I think it's arrogant economic folly to ask those kinds of questions in the confident tone that suggests that the answer is obvious. Talk about comparing apples and oranges. I have no idea how one would even go about measuring the relevant productivity, the value to the company, and answering such a question in an unbiased and intelligent way. One might start by asking about the consequences to the company and hence, ultimately, to the employees and to prospective future employees if CEOs were paid what NM thinks they should be paid.

I would agree that society as a whole should encourage and promote businessmen (and, in general, all workers) to avoid greed, and this has implications on how one conducts business. This is part of what I meant by saying that the market-based system needs morals informing it. For example, I think it would be entirely correct for a board of directors (of a Fortune 100 company) to tell a prospective candidate for CEO that "the fact that you are seeking 5 million per year in salary plus bonus options that could total 20 million, AND you want a golden parachute, proves without any room for doubt that you are not morally qualified for this job." And it goes without saying that such morals would preclude direct injustices such as violating contracts, lying to cover up defects, etc. And would prevent most of the advertising nonsense like "you deserve it all" campaigns.

I am not equally convinced that putting proper morals about business practices into effect would ALSO prevent all very large incomes, though would preclude MANY of the current ones, and would prevent most of the current extremely large ones. That is, I strongly suspect that most of the current extremely large incomes are achieved on the back of at least some improper or immoral behavior. But not all. I think that perfectly wholesome, normal concepts of how to reward risk-taking means that once in a great while a man with vision and energy and patience will indeed come out on a business idea that rakes in hundreds of millions for himself, and that we should not expect that we need to re-organize the standards on which he received such large amounts 'because they must have been unjust to start with.' Sometimes accidental good fortune folds in with the virtues of the creative businessman, and he reaps a great multiple of what is common as benefit. (50-fold, or 80-fold, or a 100-fold increase). Solomon became fabulously wealthy even before he turned away from the Lord - because God decided to let wisdom show forth some of its effects into the world.

As to "desiring to be wealthy", I agree that we should not desire wealth for its own sake, and that we should always love God alone as the only thing we love at the top of the heap - all other loves should be in relation to that love of God, so all other things are loved on account of loving him. But that does not preclude desiring to amass a great deal of wealth, if the intent is to USE that great wealth for purposes connected to loving God: such as "building the Temple" (Solomon) or the Church in general. Such as building a hospital for the indigent, building a university, eliminating malaria, etc. So, for a person whose actual skill-set is, precisely, organizing and ordering large affairs affecting hundreds or thousands, desiring to amass a great deal of wealth for a great project for mankind's welfare is to be well-ordered, not "greedy."

And sometimes, such a great project for a large number of people is a business making a good product. Starting a large manufacturing plant to make a new product in a town that used to have a steel mill and has been living on the dregs of practically nothing since 1980 would be an example. If such a businessman doesn't live in opulent luxury from the mass of wealth he accumulates for this large enterprise, but instead lives modestly in dignified ordinary conditions, he is proving that the main motive for his accumulation of the amassed wealth was not personal gain but for the larger good.

Hmmm...then ya gotta wonder how the CEOs of Costco, Mondragon, plus many other foreign corporations manage to pay their CEOs only 10 to 15 times the salary of their average workers and still remain solvent and productive.

Again I ask: who NEEDS the equivalent of $11,000.00 an hour? If you can't say "no one" because of your adherence to a system, then that system has become an ideology.

Agreed, Tony. The classical/Christian arguments against avarice are mainly aimed at the amassing of great personal wealth. The persons in your two examples would not fall into that category. Neither would someone who has "accidental" good fortune of some sort.

But...I'd still say that much care should be taken that even the amassing of great wealth for a noble purpose should not come at the expense of the less fortunate. Some of the early industrialists were great philanthropists, but were often cavalier or downright callous about how they treated their employees. For instance, one can praise Frick's endowments of art museums in New York and Pittsburgh, but when it comes to HOW he made his fortune, he was quite the bastard. Avarice does not just pertain to the 'how much,' but also to the 'how.' And it doesn't matter one whit that what Frick did may have been legal at the time.

Yes, I agree that using your great wealth to endow a great work doesn't get you out of the need to acquire that great wealth justly as well. Putting workers doing steel work for 12 hour days in squalid one-room houses, for example, won't cut it to justify building a museum.

And that very often a CEO or vice president making 11,000 per hour will represent pay that is divorced from justice. Especially if at the same time he is (a) laying off people, (b) reducing wages or what they are willing to pay suppliers to increase the profit margin from an already satisfactory rate to a better rate, or (c) paying people much less than a family man's wage when they are doing a family man's job.

But I am simply unwilling to go there with you and use the 11,000 per hour mark, ON ITS OWN, as proof of an unjust income. It needs more information. In rare occasions, with fortuitous circumstances, a CEO who risks a large amount of his own resources and has it happen to pan out at 50-1 return and reaps what is the equivalent of 11,000 per hour income, is getting the RIGHT sort of benefit from the market compared to what he contributed to the venture. Saying "he doesn't need it" is to speak to the wrong question - of course he doesn't. It is not because he needs something remotely close to that amount that it is the right compensation to his contribution, it is that (in our for a moment hypothesized ideally organized market-place) the rationally and justly organized rules for how to measure a good compensatory scheme happened to arrive at such an amount in this case...and there is NO REASON to backwards modify those rational and just rules and procedures to preclude this enormous income merely because it is enormous. That's when moral thoughts about how you use your great wealth kick in, not a reverse rationalizing reflection on putting a collar on the income just because it was larger than we commonly expect. Sometimes a well-ordered just market will reward people with more than they need., in some cases with a LOT more. That's as much nature and God's providence as it is care in organizing the market-place and its rules.

The rules for just compensation and reasonable return have to be modeled to appropriately handle the more common situations more readily than to model exceptional events. So we should EXPECT that exceptional events result in unusually high incomes on occasion, just as we EXPECT that sometimes quite reasonable risks don't pan out at all,, and the ventures flop with all assets dissolving into mud. That't the nature of working with an unpredictable future. A rational and just marketplace has reflect this unpredictability appropriately, and nobody has ever managed to come up with a (sound) proposed mechanism that allows people (under subsidiarity) to take personally-chosen and accepted risks for plausible future gains, that doesn't allow for very LARGE personal future gains. You can't underwrite the risks entirely under the whole of society's affairs (i.e. have society buy out the risker's risk if he fails) without damaging subsidiarity and without distorting the prudence of taking the risks, (and damaging the ability of those with greater vision to implement that without convincing the whole of their cohort), so sometimes the risks HAVE to be personal. In justice that means a portion of the gains have to be personal, not wholly shifted to the rest of society. There is no just way for a society that observes subsidiarity to preclude the sheer possibility of a 100 million windfall year for some fortunate men.

"there is NO REASON to backwards modify those rational and just rules and procedures to preclude this enormous income merely because it is enormous. That's when moral thoughts about how you use your great wealth kick in, not a reverse rationalizing reflection on putting a collar on the income just because it was larger than we commonly expect. Sometimes a well-ordered just market will reward people with more than they need."

Again, agreed. But my argument would be not so much for collaring the income externally, but instead for systemic change that allows for and encourages self-collaring. The mere fact of the odd fortuitous event that makes a millionaire of of an average Joe does not negate criticism of the system's overall tendency towards (frequently unjust) acquisitive behavior, let alone the promotion of it. That the wealthiest 10% of the world's population control something like 80% of its wealth would seem to demonstrate the rule, rather than the exception.

but instead for systemic change that allows for and encourages self-collaring.

If it were limited to social mechanisms especially to promoting and encouraging, I am all for it. For example, events like Elon Musk's turning over all of the Tesla patents to the public should be a much more common thing than it is. 9Actually, the charitable giving deductions are one form of such promoting.)

On the other hand, "controlling the wealth" of 80% isn't really a good marker for the greed (not by itself). More often than not, those people who control a billion dollars, for 99% of the time, have that wealth tied up in productive enterprises that are good for society. The fact that they are the 55% share-holder of a $2 billion corp means they control the wealth (in a sense), and they could, theoretically, sell their 55% of shares for 1.1 billion, which they could live off of like emperors. The fact that they leave it in the corp means that instead they are promoting the wealth of society as a whole alongside their own wealth management. For people whose wealth isn't primarily shares of a portion of an ongoing concern, after some point they should be willingly looking at no longer taking any profit out of the enterprise even though the entirely just rules permit doing so, out of regard for other goods...but not always. If they know the average workers are well-paid, and they intend to continue to take profits out in order to fund OTHER campaigns not connected to the business, then yes, they might honorably and uprightly continue to take extremely high profits out and do those other charitable works. (It is less of an option for a person whose shares are in a publicly traded corp where many of the shareholders have very small holdings each: if the company has 300 million in -perfectly just - profits to distribute, and most of the shareholders will get 10,000 each while you as the 55% owner will get $165 million, you cannot chose to forego a just distribution of profits to the shareholders because "I don't need it". You have to be just to the little shareholders, too).

None of this applies to our common, systemically promoted vanity and greed and the unjust things people can do within the system merely because they are not outlawed. The fact that an act has not been outlawed is not equivalent to saying that it is a just practice.

~~On the other hand, "controlling the wealth" of 80% isn't really a good marker for the greed (not by itself)~~

Right, but I am not using the stat by itself, but as one among many examples of a tendency. I don't believe that CEOs, sports figures, actors, etc., are, in general, examples of the "fortuitously" wealthy, nor are they mere "holders" of the wealth intended for others. The vast majority of the time these folks know precisely what their contracts will be bringing them when they sign them.

If corporations have as their goal the making of money for their shareholders, then by definition all these other things are, however good they may be in theory, accidental. Thus, the corporate capitalist system is itself, as said above, simply an engine for creating profit. Moral factors do not figure except on a secondary level.

Why then should the 10% not desire to control 80% of the world's wealth? Why should the CEO not want to make eight or even nine figures?

To be able to separate the facts of a system from its "oughts" in such a way indicates to me that there are problems inherent in the system itself. And the thing is that Mises would agree with me here, but he would see this separation as a good thing.

I really don't think you can have it both ways. Either such a separation exists or it doesn't. If it does then the existing separation is either a good thing or a bad thing.

If corporations have as their goal the making of money for their shareholders,

And if some corporations have as their goal "helping the poor of X valley" or "education of the poor in Bangaladesh" and some corporations are formed out of Mom-N-Pop enterprises where the goal is to "make a better mousetrap" or "serve up good meals" then...it isn't in the nature of "to be a corporation" that their goal to be stated specifically and solely in terms of profits. When the Mon-N-Pop business becomes a Fortune 500 and they re-define their mission as "to make a profit" and what they mean by that is "profit without input of morals" then yes, that particular corporation has an immoral meaning. But that doesn't mean that the system of incorporating in order to pursue bigger fish than one person alone can do is vitiated because some corporations are vicious.

I'm talking about large for-profits, Tony. No critics of "corporatism" that I know of, either from the Left or the Right, have a problem with non-profits, small LLC's, etc. Heck, my own father was a small businessman with a handful of employees, although in his time such companies didn't incorporate. This error seems to come from an equating of the criticism of industrial/corporate capitalism with a rejection of markets. But as I have said before, no distributist, agrarian, anti-corporate conservative, etc., is against free markets properly understood. As a matter of fact, much of the critique presumes the market, and it is the deformation of the market by large companies that is precisely what brings forth the critique. These arguments are present in Chesterton and Belloc, in the Southern Agrarians and Weaver, in Kirk, and in contemporary agrarians and distributists like W. Berry and John Medaille.

In fact, the titles of Medaille's two books are The Vocation of Business and Toward a Truly Free Market. Do either of those sound hostile to markets?

To be able to separate the facts of a system from its "oughts" in such a way indicates to me that there are problems inherent in the system itself.

I'm talking about large for-profits, Tony.

What you are calling "the system" I would call limited facets of the system, and changeable facets of the system without making it a DIFFERENT SYSTEM simply speaking. It wasn't "the system" 60 years ago, and nothing about the changes since then are changes that amount to a revolution that cannot be undone (at least in theory) without another revolution. You want it to be "the system" that big corporations are favored, I would say rather that some changes IN the system favor big corporations, changes that can be undone.

~~It wasn't "the system" 60 years ago...You want it to be "the system" that big corporations are favored, I would say rather that some changes IN the system favor big corporations, changes that can be undone.~~

A system that promotes self-interest and inherently relates it to ongoing acquisition cannot help but favor ever-increasing size.

I'd say that this tendency to privilege size started to become more evident, at least in the U.S., in the Civil War era and into the Gilded Age. And thus by the immediate pre-WWI period there were already many critics of "bigness" and "industrialism." The tendency, however, was always there.

A system that promotes self-interest and inherently relates it to ongoing acquisition cannot help but favor ever-increasing size.

First of all, any and every system that produces new wealth "inherently relates" to that thing which is the temptation for all men toward greed. No system is free of men, so no system that produces wealth is free of temptations to greed.

When you say "a system that..." you are already assuming what you need to prove. Every formally designed and constructed system of man, every government, every venture, every large group, "favors" self-interest in some sense: at the least, those who are self-serving inevitably can use such a system to feather their own nests because they can use the rules in a self-serving way. That's not because "the system" is designed to promote self-interest, but because self-promoting people use the system for their own ends.

But again, when you view "the system" of the market place more formally, as "the notional place where transactions of goods and service agreements happen", in THAT system, self-promotion is not an inherent PART of the system any more than it is by nature in college or in Toastmasters chapters or glee clubs or the homeowners association. Yes, people who are self-promoting will use goods and service transactions to serve themselves, but it isn't due to there being a marketplace for such transactions that they do so.

I'd say that this tendency to privilege size started to become more evident, at least in the U.S., in the Civil War era and into the Gilded Age.

Whatever. It is still true that even the formation of certain regular patterns within the system that took place in that era were neither "the system" itself, nor constituted a fundamentally new system that is a different being than the old. What we have now is a tall, tall pile of bricks laid on the same foundation that the Gilded Age was built upon.

It is impossible for you to prove that the preponderance of today's social structures in America for constraining the market place are designed and intended to promote self interest, just impossible. There are too many subjective factors involved, such as (just to pick one example) a law that serves many distinct purposes both narrow and broad, inter-relatedly. So all you can point to is a sense that "too much" of the whole gamut of arrangements, patterns, rules, laws, customs and preferences are vitiated as responsible culprits in the "self-serving" aspects of the economy to say that they are only vicious elements of a system that is not entirely vitiated itself. It may even be that in order to right the ills of the current state of affairs, no bit-by-bit modulation of practices can fix it - but again, this is impossible to prove. At best, a large group of prudent men might make the judgment that it is too improbable to rely on, and call for a revolution. But I take it as undeniable that the economic arrangement we have now GREW UP without a properly-named revolution in economic matters (the changes occurred gradually over time, mostly without a grand-scale design), and therefore it is more plausible than not that the system is in fact still rooted in, and not essentially foreign to, the market place that we had in colonial times in America, and that the elements that we have now that are vicious are not constitutive of its core nature.

~~First of all, any and every system that produces new wealth "inherently relates" to that thing which is the temptation for all men toward greed. No system is free of men, so no system that produces wealth is free of temptations to greed.~~

The problem with the system is not the presence or even the ubiquity of greed, which as you say, is a fact of humanity, but the justification and promotion of it by redefining it as self-interest.

~~Every formally designed and constructed system of man, every government, every venture, every large group, "favors" self-interest in some sense: at the least, those who are self-serving inevitably can use such a system to feather their own nests because they can use the rules in a self-serving way. That's not because "the system" is designed to promote self-interest, but because self-promoting people use the system for their own ends.~~

Again, the problem isn't with self-interest per se. In one sense, as you say, we all operate out of self-interest. Capitalism, however, functions out of an erroneous understanding of self-interest.

~~people who are self-promoting will use goods and service transactions to serve themselves, but it isn't due to there being a marketplace for such transactions that they do so.~~

Markets are not the problem. The problem is with a system that encourages the use of the market as a means of acquisition/accumulation of wealth, understood (erroneously) as self-interest, exacerbated by the activity of large corporations which have been given the status and rights of "persons" but with few of the attendant responsibilities.

~~I take it as undeniable that the economic arrangement we have now GREW UP without a properly-named revolution in economic matters (the changes occurred gradually over time, mostly without a grand-scale design), and therefore it is more plausible than not that the system is in fact still rooted in, and not essentially foreign to, the market place that we had in colonial times in America, and that the elements that we have now that are vicious are not constitutive of its core nature.~~

I would disagree, and would say that the root of the vicious element was already present due to, among other things, the downgrading of the sin of avarice under the head of "self-interest." What was missing in pre-industrial times was the ability to bring these elements to flower in a large-scale manner.

The problem is with a system that encourages the use of the market as a means of acquisition/accumulation of wealth, understood (erroneously) as self-interest, exacerbated by the activity of large corporations which have been given the status and rights of "persons" but with few of the attendant responsibilities.

My goodness, you just keep digging the hole deeper and deeper. You can't just keep claiming over and over again "it's the system" when the very issue is, what constitutes the core of the system and what constitutes accidental accretions thereto. You are just assuming away, over and over and over again, that your preferred stance of thinking of "the system" as the conglomerate of all those features that push and expect people to push self-interest aside from or even in opposition to other goods, without any rationale for that AT ALL. In other words, you keep saying "la la la la la" with your fingers in your ears.

The colonials didn't invent a new system and put it up in place of an old - they borrowed and continued much of what they had before, for after all they both depended on and traded with the Old World heavily. The fore-runners of the colonials didn't invent a new system either, they built rather gradually on that of the renaissance which preceded Protestantism largely. The THEORIES that attempted to justify narrow self-interest rather than hierarchical self-interest as part of a community came long after all that and rarely were those theories the driving rationales of the men who made actual market decisions.

~~You can't just keep claiming over and over again "it's the system" when the very issue is, what constitutes the core of the system and what constitutes accidental accretions thereto.~~

The difference is that what you view as accidental accretions I see as endogenous outgrowths. And obviously our view of the "core" is different.

"The THEORIES that attempted to justify narrow self-interest rather than hierarchical self-interest as part of a community came long after all that and rarely were those theories the driving rationales of the men who made actual market decisions."

The practices were already tending toward narrow self-interest, and had been for quite a while. It is true that the theorizing came after the fact, but it came as attempts at justification for what was already occurring, not as theoretical rationale for some new sort of behavior. By the time that industrialism became wedded to capitalism the narrow self-interest idea was already entrenched.

Then what you are calling endogenous outgrowths are outgrowths of what we had under the early renaissance, and those were outgrowths of the practices of the late medieval time, and those were outgrowths of the early...at least back to Roman and Greek times...and Phoenician times.

In other words, what we have now is not different in nature from what we have always had - the current system has been in place for 3000 years. Pretty much ever since the Pharaoh ceased to own all property around. The greed has been in place for 3000 years. The entrenched narrow self-interest has been in place for 3000 years. If the greed was there and then a justification came along in a theory that made people happy to use it to justify their greed - that ain't a change in nature.

Details, man, if you can't provide details that make the case in the clear then it is pointless to say another word. In my view the theories about selfishness as appropriate for the market are not constitutive of the market, because hardly anybody actually makes transaction choices based on those theories. And the execs who push for laws to feather their companies' nests don't do it because "it's good for the market", they do it because it makes a profit and they don't care whether that's good for anyone else. You had the same kinds of things going on with the Dutch East India Company, and the Romans granted monopolies of sorts to senators. It's all of a kind, only more so.

Details:

Increased attention began to be paid to the nature of the acquisitive drive as evinced by the advance of "commercial" England and Holland in the 17th century. It became clear to many that economics and politics were becoming more closely connected, and that wealth-seeking per se might have to be looked at differently, given this and related developments. What was formerly described as avarice began to be viewed as having certain beneficial results.

The theological/philosophical preparation for this was made by the victory of nominalism in the late Scholastic period, and the subsequent rise of Protestantism, which served as its main cultural carrier. Virtue ethics had begun to wane, slowly being replaced by a ethics of consequences. This, combined with the historical occurences mentioned above, caused a rethinking of the ethics related to wealth-seeking and wealth-creation, resulting in such works as The Fable of the Bees. Over time views such as this began to be more and more accepted, and eventually "avarice" was replaced in economic discussion by "self-interest," with use of the older term being restricted to describe immoral or illegal wealth-getting.

"The greed has been in place for 3000 years. The entrenched narrow self-interest has been in place for 3000 years. If the greed was there and then a justification came along in a theory that made people happy to use it to justify their greed - that ain't a change in nature."

Yes, but up until the 17th/18th centuries the markets had not yet taken on the qualities of a system. You always had greed, you always had markets, true. But you did not have A) the acceptance of a philosophy which encouraged avarice, and B) a system in which such a philosophy could take root. The line between hierarchical self-interest and narrow self-interest was blurred, and eventually almost disappeared altogether.