Last
week we saw how, as advancing technology displaces people at an accelerating
rate even from jobs formerly believed to be immune to that sort of thing, “the
Millennials” are trapped in a situation in which they are forced by
circumstances into divvying up a decreasing amount of production allocated to
labor.
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| Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J. |
“Production
allocated to labor”? Don’t we mean “production due to labor”? No.
For a variety of reasons, many of them analyzed in detail in The Proletariat: A Challenge to Western
Civilization (1937), a study by solidarist labor economist Dr. Goetz Briefs
(a student of Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J., and a member of the Königswinterkreis discussion group),
labor has been garnering more than it is due in terms of strict distributive
and commutative justice.
Louis
O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler came to the same conclusion, independent of
Briefs, and both advocated the same solution as Briefs.
Nor were they alone. William
Thomas Thornton came to the same conclusion nearly a century before Kelso and
Adler published The Capitalist Manifesto
(1958) in his treatise, On Labour: Its
Wrongful Claims and Rightful Dues, Its Actual Present and Possible Future
(1869, 1870). So did Charles Morrison in
his 1854 An Essay on the Relations
Between Labour and Capital. Before
either of them, the “radical” politician William Cobbet made a strong case for
expanded ownership. It was, however,
Pope Leo XIII who perhaps expressed the solution best:
We have seen that this great
labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private
ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor
ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people
to become owners. (Rerum Novarum, §
46.)
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| Leo XIII |
Obviously
(if we believe the pope) you don’t have to be “labor” (or “labour”) in order to
qualify for ownership of capital — which, despite the denial, even hysteria of
the socialists, is precisely what Leo XIII was talking about . . . as were Cobbett,
Morrison, Thornton, Briefs, Kelso, Adler, and a raft of others all through
history.
The
problem was that the obvious solution always came up against a seemingly
impenetrable barrier: the presumed necessity of past savings to finance new
capital formation. What has been called
“the slavery of past savings” presents us with two unacceptable alternatives.
One, we accept the natural law
rights of life, liberty, and property as inalienable. This means that whoever provides the
financing for new capital, owns the new capital. Thus, if the rich, who by definition have a
monopoly on past savings, finance new capital with their savings, they will own
the new capital. If, however, the poor,
who by definition have no savings at all, finance new capital . . . .
Okay,
we see the problem. Under the past
savings assumption and respecting the natural law, most people cannot own
capital. Ownership of capital is
concentrated in a diminishing number of increasingly wealthy people. Technological advancement aggravates this
situation in two ways. 1) Technology
produces more wealth than labor, so owners of capital can accumulate more
wealth faster and faster. 2) Advanced
technology in its initial stages is very expensive, and costs more than anyone
can possibly save out of labor income.
This
is capitalism.
Two, we change the “rules” — the
natural law — to get us what we want.
All rights become alienable.
Whoever has the most power decides who (if anyone) owns anything,
including new capital. The State, rather
than the human person, becomes the source of rights.
This
is socialism.
Tomorrow
we’ll look into freeing ourselves from the slavery of past savings that forces
us into either capitalism or socialism.
