Redeeming the system

[rug]

Catholicism and capitalism

Oct 20th 2014, 11:04 by B.C.

A NEW paper published by Theos, a London-based religious think-tank, will raise hackles on the right and left alike, if only because of its title: "Just Money: How Catholic Social Teaching can Redeem Capitalism". Advocates of capitalism will certainly retort that the system has no need of redemption. The core meaning of the word redemption is something like "to secure the freedom, or the very existence, of someone or something at a price...." And as a supremely efficient instrument for resource allocation and price discovery, so the argument would go, capitalism should have no need of any external agency to purchase its right to exist. It just needs to be allowed to do its job. At the other extreme, critics on the left will retort that capitalism is so wicked that it cannot be redeemed by anything, least of all the doctrines of Catholicism.

Yet the paper by Clifford Longley is well worth reading, if only because it presents in readable language ideas which normally lie buried deep inside closely argued papal encyclicals and other cerebral writings. Mr Longley explains some of the key concepts in an elaborate body of thought which began to emerge in 1891 with a document called Rerum Novarum which accepted with qualifications the ideas of a free market in capital and labour. They include not just "solidarity"—the idea that all members of society must look out for one another's welfare—but "subsidiarity" or the widely devolved distribution of power. Catholic Social Teaching (CST) seeks to chart a middle way between unrestrained capitalism and dirigiste socialism by stressing the vital role of civil society: all the institutions, from the family to voluntary associations and churches, that stand between the individual and the state.

Mr Longley also stresses the need to cultivate virtues such as trustworthy behaviour and dismisses the idea, which was fashionable a decade ago, that the market has its own mechanisms for driving out untrustworthy behaviour. He recalls the Catholic teaching that accepts the idea of private property ownership, but with the qualification that the proprietor must be a good and socially responsible steward.

Much of his paper is devoted to a critique of the financial and economic boom that preceded the crash of 2008. It is implied that if the "market fundamentalism" and "neoliberalism" of that frothy era had been tempered by a good dose of CST, the collapse might have been avoided: and that CST is the answer to averting such tragedies in future.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2014/10/catholicism-and-capitalism

http://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/publications/2014/10/09/just-money-how-catholic-social-teaching-can-redeem-capitalism

IMO capitalism is irredeemable.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

1. A quote from Pope John Paul II would be apropos

In his encyclical Centesimus Annus , issued on the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, and dealing in large part with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, John Paul II wrote

...can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?

The answer is obviously complex. If by "capitalism" is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a "business economy", "market economy" or simply "free economy". But if by "capitalism" is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.

The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World, as does the reality of human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries. Against these phenomena the Church strongly raises her voice. Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. The collapse of the Communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution. Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.

[rug]

2. The tension is between private property and capital, use and ownership.

I remember the Cold War propaganda warning that the Soviet state will own your toothbrush. That's patent nonense. It's no more true than the state owns the life-saving vaccine a doctor is injecting into your veins, at no personal cost.

The Catholic social doctrine is that the use of things - property - is part of the natural freedom that we were created with. That's true as far as it goes but that does not describe capital. Capital is the concentration of property, wealth and the means of production way beyond personal use and far beyond the natural and legitimate use of property. It is concentration of natural resources in the hands of few who will determine how they will be used, for private purposes. It is, in the end, the loss of freedom, both political and God-given.

It's a safe bet that the well at which Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman about her five husbands belonged to the village and not to the stockholders of a water company.