By Daren Jonescu ——Bio and Archives--February 15, 2012
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"[S]ome opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.... [B]y degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.... To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself."Might not the same words have been written by Engels, Trotsky, Mao, Guevara, or any one of a thousand tin-pot dictators and Christian social justice activists? The same, however, cannot be said of Leo's next point:
"[Socialists] hold that by... transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are... emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community."And here, startlingly, begins a defense of private property so clear in its reasoning, and so doctrinally consistent in its Thomism, that it ought to be read during every homily at every Sunday mass in America between now and November 6th, 2012.
"It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own. If one man hires out to another his strength or skill, he does so for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of his needs; he therefore expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just as he pleases.... But it is precisely in such power of disposal that ownership obtains, whether the property consist of land or chattels. Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life."Could Milton Friedman have stated the case more forcefully? And Pope Leo's demolition of socialism is not finished. Merely arguing that freedom supports and respects the natural motives of human achievement is not enough; one must also make the ethico-political case for liberty. Thus, Leo continues (if you are a Catholic, I hope you are sitting down—if you are a member of the clergy, pinch yourself before reading further):
"What is of far greater moment, however, is the fact that the remedy they propose is manifestly against justice. For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation."Animals, Leo explains, are invested by their nature with the capacity to satisfy their basic needs by instinctive interaction with their immediate environment, whereas man must depend upon his reason. And due to this fact, "it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession.... "For man, fathoming by his faculty of reason matters without number, linking the future with the present, and being master of his own acts, guides his ways under the eternal law and the power of God.... Hence, man not only should possess the fruits of the earth, but also the very soil, inasmuch as from the produce of the earth he has to lay by provision for the future.... There is no need to bring in the State. Man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body.... "The fact that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race can in no way be a bar to the owning of private property.... "Truly, that which is required for the preservation of life, and for life's well-being, is produced in great abundance from the soil, but not until man has brought it into cultivation and expended upon it his solicitude and skill. Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature's field which he cultivates—that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right." Here we have a developed theory of inviolable property rights. And if you want the Catholic argument against the assumptions underlying Obamacare, EPA regulations, and today's whole smorgasbord of socialist disdain for natural rights the world over, Pope Leo follows with this: "So strong and convincing are these arguments that it seems amazing that some should now be setting up anew certain obsolete opinions in opposition to what is here laid down.... Those who deny these rights do not perceive that they are defrauding man of what his own labor has produced.... Is it just that the fruit of a man's own sweat and labor should be possessed and enjoyed by anyone else? As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor." In sum, Pope Leo XIII offers the Catholic case for property rights: A man's labor and time are his life; hence, the wealth and product resulting from his labor and time are natural extensions of his very life. To deny his right to these results is to deny his right to his own life—that is, to deny his ownership of himself. And that, as Leo makes clear, is the essence of socialism, and a direct violation of God's will:
"The authority of the divine law adds its sanction, forbidding us in severest terms even to covet that which is another's: 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife; nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his #, nor anything that is his.' (Deut. 5:21)"He further explains the social results of allowing the leftist argument to insinuate itself into policy—an account that seems remarkably prescient today: "And in addition to injustice, it is only too evident what an upset and disturbance there would be in all classes, and to how intolerable and hateful a slavery citizens would be subjected. The door would be thrown open to envy, to mutual invective, and to discord; the sources of wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation." Pope Leo's argument along these lines runs for some fifteen beautiful paragraphs, comprising, in sum, a magnificent paean to freedom—to real, practical freedom on this earth—and offers to American Catholics tired of their Church's political weakness a reason for renewed pride in their faith, and proof positive that there need be no conflict between their Catholicism and their constitutionalism. And then, lamentably, things begin to go horribly wrong. The explicit argument remains consistent in defending property rights, but the tone changes as Leo focuses on the question with which he began, namely how to alleviate the "misery and wretchedness" of "the teeming masses" who live a life "little better than slavery." For brevity, I offer a compendium of tell-tale language from the latter half of the encyclical: "Of these duties, the following bind the proletarian and worker...." "[I]t is one thing to have a right to the possession of money and another to have a right to use money as one wills...." "And the more that is done for the benefit of the working classes by the general laws of the country, the less need will there be to seek for special means to relieve them...." "Justice... demands that the interests of the working classes should be carefully watched over by the administration...." "[W]hen there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and badly off have a claim to especial consideration. The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government." Though repeatedly reverting to his earlier plea for the respect of natural rights, there is a strain of nascent leftism in these later statements. On their face, they are presented as calls to Christian charity, and explicitly distinguished from legal duties; however, the language is increasingly imbued with the kind of class warfare talk that, though not intended by Leo, inexorably tends towards notions of social justice that seem to require the state to "do something." And the indeterminateness of what the state is required to do, or how exactly one would know when its actions have achieved their purpose, is the heart of the problem, and the germ of the Church's gradual shift towards a position ever-more aligned with "proletarianism." Finally, Leo, one the Church's last great defenders of liberty and natural rights, offers this:
"Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner."Regardless of Leo's subsequent qualifications, the principle here is clear, as is the fundamental theoretical error. The principle is that the state ought to have the authority to ensure "sufficient" wages for the workers. The problem with this, as we now know all too well, is that the abstract and malleable nature of this use of the concept "sufficient" lends itself to infinite reconsiderations based on relative conditions of the moment. Here, following the common nineteenth century folly elevated to the level of philosophy by Marx, particular conditions of a transient moment of history are assumed to be the natural and inevitable result of "capitalism" and "greed," and hence in need of a legal remedy, not in the form of greater economic freedom, but rather of less.
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Daren Jonescu has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He currently teaches English language and philosophy at Changwon National University in South Korea.