Political Traditionalism and Its Adversary, "Conservatism"

Started by LouisIX, April 05, 2016, 12:50:54 PM

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Quaremerepulisti

Quote from: james03 on September 04, 2016, 08:49:14 PM
This is the lead up to his call for collective bargaining.  He starts with a strong statement for property rights and goes on to call on limits to government.  Then he mentions the need for government to look over the rights of the working class.  Then he arrives at his solution to current problems (which he lists), which is collective bargaining.  Here he mentions that the right to collective bargaining is rightly protected by the state.  It is a well balanced approach.  No where does he call for redistribution of wealth or a minimum wage.

True, but he also does say this:

Quote14. The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth.


LouisIX

Also, social teaching must be taken as a whole. While Rerum Novarum does not discuss a "minimum wage," several other pre-conciliar encyclicals do indeed discuss a just wage, and not merely in relation to something which one must discuss in the confessional.
IF I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

ludimagister

Although I largely agree with Louis XI's take on political and economic matters, I wish someone would address Lambda Phage's post at #106. I'm not competent to do so, but it seems a point that needs answering by critics of capitalism.

Graham

Pre-industrial countries having certain characteristics that resemble capitalism is taken as proof that capitalism is traditional. But Lambda was unable to be consistent about that over the course of a single post, since he couldn't help but describe older societies as (woefully) "agrarian and mercantile." Traditional societies were not characterized by generally free markets in land, labour, and capital. Land - ever heard of the manorial system? Labour - heard of guilds, or again, of the restrictions placed on labour mobility by the same manorial system? Capital - heard of barter, necessitated by the widespread scarcity of money, or perhaps of restrictions on lending at interest? Someone with more interest in economic history could greatly enlarge the list, but I think that's enough.

I won't argue that capitalism and traditional social organization don't have several points of intersection. He's right about low taxes, for instance. But the central pillar of capitalism, that the market should be self-regulating and free from interference, and even more so the corollary that everything or damn near it should be included in the market, could not be less traditional.

Lambda Phage

#124
Quote from: Graham on September 05, 2016, 05:55:48 PM
Pre-industrial countries having certain characteristics that resemble capitalism is taken as proof that capitalism is traditional. But Lambda was unable to be consistent about that over the course of a single post, since he couldn't help but describe older societies as (woefully) "agrarian and mercantile." Traditional societies were not characterized by generally free markets in land, labour, and capital. Land - ever heard of the manorial system? Labour - heard of guilds, or again, of the restrictions placed on labour mobility by the same manorial system? Capital - heard of barter, necessitated by the widespread scarcity of money, or perhaps of restrictions on lending at interest? Someone with more interest in economic history could greatly enlarge the list, but I think that's enough.

I won't argue that capitalism and traditional social organization don't have several points of intersection. He's right about low taxes, for instance. But the central pillar of capitalism, that the market should be self-regulating and free from interference, and even more so the corollary that everything or damn near it should be included in the market, could not be less traditional.

You essentially missed the point of the post. The point was two fold. The second and only minor point was not that capitalism is traditional, but merely, as you say, that it does have points of intersection with traditional society, whatever "traditional society" actually means. In other words, the point is that it was not as abrupt and revolutionary as typically claimed, but that there did exist a historic precedent to it, one whose earliest form really only existed in the Catholic world. Again, there is not an economic historian out there, as liberal as he or she may be, who thinks Marx got really anything right about history. For some moronic reason, 19th-20th century Catholic writers (and Popes) granted that Marx got his history right but his solutions wrong, when in fact he got it all wrong. The growth of capitalism was slow and gradual, evolutionary, so gradual that it only came to fruition in the West where it had a thousand years to unfold, and there are a billion different ideas out there as to why this only happened here.

The larger point was that the traditionalist narrative of industrial capitalism, with its foundation in the writings of Leo XIII, is absolutely false. It completely inverted the reality of the situation. Capitalism did not result in the "utter poverty of the masses" as the good Pope implied, but in fact has raised the real wage of the unskilled laborer to more than 10 times his pre-industrial earnings. To date it is the only economic system ever put in place that actually alleviated the utter poverty of the masses. He of course had no way of knowing this, and like Pope Francis simply regurgitated the imprudent words of the men who advised him on these issues. Turns out they were wrong. He inadvertently condemned a hundred thousand years of human social history. Using the standards listed by him, his own era was more economically just than any previous era, yet he considered the socio-economic condition of his own era to be unjust. He was the first Pope in 1800 years to write about this. Yet every complaint about wages and distribution levied at capitalism was only worse in times past.

You can try to falsify the words of Dr. Clark on land, labor, and capital, but you're out of context. He said generally free. You can similarly find dozens of examples of modern land, labor, and capital to show that our markets are also not completely free. For example, for some reason people think guilds are analogous to unions but they're really not. They're more analogous to groups like the AMA which hold a monopoly on who can practice medicine and fight primarily for the benefit of employers rather than employees (see Steven A. Epstein's Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe). I however think that is a good thing. Our markets are not truly free now either, but compared to the world in the past outside of western civilization it is completely fair to characterize both our markets and pre-industrial English markets as generally free.

For the record, the deification of the ideological tenets you point out at the end have been non-essential to capitalism as it has actually played out and still plays out in the real world. When economic historians speak of capitalism they are speaking of the form of economy and economic policy that has generally been in place in western civilization since the mid 18th century, though there are a growing number of scholars who would push that date into the 17th century or earlier because of the fact that it was gradual and lacking any sort of demarcation (see for example Roman Studer's The Great Divergence Reconsidered). True, unregulated markets are essential to capitalist policy but typically the policy has been enacted as a means to stimulate commerce and generate wealth rather than as a means to achieve some sort of ideological end. Remember when I speak of unregulated markets I mean it in a relative sense, since as a whole the market has never really been completely unregulated but compared to the alternatives can fairly be called "unregulated." Unregulated markets typically take the form of a lack of the characteristics of a command economy. It's not so much a thing as a lack of a thing. To wit, unregulated markets have been around for a lot longer than the ideologies which deify them, and have existed prior to capitalism itself. Ideologues will pen their words but they're not essential to the policy.

Adam Smith wasn't really a modern or industrial capitalist for that matter. He lived before modern economic growth really took off and could not fathom a world in which sustainable economic growth took place. His words mean nothing to me nor to any of the actors currently putting policy in place.  Consider this: There has never been an economic system in which there was no regulation. There has never been an economic system in which the government does not intervene in the market in some situation or circumstance. Most people will admit this. Most people will also admit that the West has been living in a captalist system for the past couple hundred years. Therefore there is clearly a discrepancy between the real policy and the words of ideologues. The real reason every western nation on earth adopted capitalist policy within the last few hundred years has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with the simple fact that it creates wealth, for the individuals, for the community, for the State, and for the entire nation. In other words, it works.

I think it is beyond idiotic that traditionalist Catholics are trying to solve problems that are not actually problems instead of trying to put the faith back to where it belongs. Nobody has any reason to be so concerned with "just wages" or "income inequality" when they are objectively better than ever. This world has always been fallen and will never be perfect. Those who advocate unprecedented alternatives to capitalism in order to enact a "just wage" or reduce "inequality" even more are working for something that has never existed. They are trying to make heaven on earth and in doing so are doing exactly the same thing as secular liberal humanists, which is precisely why every Trad who takes up the mantra of economic/social justice is an utter sell out. Not only are they fighting a make believe battle but in the battles before us with real lasting consequences they are doing more harm than good by giving others unjust cause to hesitate.

Graham

Quote from: Lambda Phage on September 05, 2016, 09:56:20 PM
You essentially missed the point of the post.

[...]

The larger point was that the traditionalist narrative of industrial capitalism, with its foundation in the writings of Leo XIII, is absolutely false. It completely inverted the reality of the situation. Capitalism did not result in the "utter poverty of the masses" as the good Pope implied, but in fact has raised the real wage of the unskilled laborer to more than 10 times his pre-industrial earnings. To date it is the only economic system ever put in place that actually alleviated the utter poverty of the masses.

I didn't miss that point, I just wasn't concerned with it. My point is that capitalism is thoroughly anti-traditional.

QuoteYou can try to falsify the words of Dr. Clark on land, labor, and capital, but you're out of context. He said generally free. For every one restriction you list of the middle ages you can probably find another in the modern economy as well.

They were not generally free, though. They were very regulated, as even my short rundown showed beyond any doubt. If you have an argument here, it isn't that the traditional markets were free, it's just that even modern capitalist economies are subject to many regulations. That's a point I can appreciate - since it shows that the market economy is not at all a naturally occurring system as many of its proponents like to argue, but actually requires an intricate and artificial backdrop of laws and cultural norms in order to exist in even an attenuated form - but it does nothing to buttress the very mistaken idea that the middle ages (or any other pre-modern society, for that matter) had "generally free markets in land, labour, and capital."

That's really all I'm concerned with. You can take up the just wage stuff with Louis.

Graham

For the record, I do think the argument you're posing is challenging for Louis or anybody with a similar perspective on social justice, and needs addressing.

Lambda Phage

#127
Quote from: Graham on September 05, 2016, 10:47:11 PM

My point is that capitalism is thoroughly anti-traditional.

There are many scholarly texts refuting just that. Beginning with Henri Pirenne's Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. He thought anyone who did not see the workings of capitalism in medieval cities was a fool. Robert Lopez' The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages addresses the rise of commercialism during the middle ages. Steven A Epstein's An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000?1500 pays homage to Pirenne's earlier title. A History of Business in Medieval Europe by Edwin Hunt is another which gets bonus points for debunking Max Weber's made up theory on the Protestant Work Ethic. These last three titles were published by Cambridge. Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms published by Princeton which I have cited at length is definitely the most comprehensive of the more recent titles.

For less scholarly but probably more palatable to Catholic laity would be Rodney Stark's Victory of Reason and How the West Won. I have not read the former but have read the latter. I also read his recently released Bearing False Witness where one of the myths he debunks is the myth that Protestantism or secularism invented capitalism. Thomas Madden's book Venice: A New History, also credits the medieval italian city states as being the first place on earth where capitalism really took hold. Madden's an orthodox Catholic who a lot even here probably like and respect.

No the system as we know it today has not always been in place as is, of course not. But there are precedents and a truly organic development - that is all I mean. The economic policies of the late middle ages similarly were not always in place, nor were the ones of the early middle ages.

QuoteThey were not generally free, though. They were very regulated, as even my short rundown showed beyond any doubt. If you have an argument here, it isn't that the traditional markets were free, it's just that even modern capitalist economies are subject to many regulations. That's a point I can appreciate - since it shows that the market economy is not at all a naturally occurring system as many of its proponents like to argue, but actually requires an intricate and artificial backdrop of laws and cultural norms in order to exist in even an attenuated form - but it does nothing to buttress the very mistaken idea that the middle ages (or any other pre-modern society, for that matter) had "generally free markets in land, labour, and capital."

Well, I guess it's a matter of perspective then. The original post that mentioned the freedom of medieval markets was a direct quote from A Farewell to Alms. Stark has said the same thing. To be sure, it's not like I can say it's my argument, I'm just repeating what these guys say. But knowing what I know about how the rest of the pre-modern world functioned outside of Christendom, I see no difficulty in believing them and have no problem re-iterating it. Ancient Rome was a command economy compared to the economy of Christendom, and medieval China was similar to Rome in that regard. The sphere of Islam was in a league of its own. Basically, my response is: If you think that's regulation you ain't seen nothing yet.  :D

Lambda Phage

Though I would add that I still think the modern market economy is natural, though it is becoming more and more unnatural. I'd say it is natural because that's basically the way it all unfolded. Nobody had to seize control and consciously nix the whole pre-existing plan and start from scratch as we saw in most communist States.

Lambda Phage

#129
If I may also add, I think the reason food price controls, for example, used to be in place, was not so much because of tradition as it was because heads of state thought it actually worked. Once they found out it only makes the problem worse by leading to food shortages, they abandoned the policy. If a head of state feels compelled to secure economic prosperity for his people, which traditionally he did, then he'll adopt the policies which accomplish that, which is precisely what happened.

Despite what I said about Adam Smith, for what it's worth in Richard A. Lebrun's comparative study "Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke: A Comparison," Lebrun notes that de Maistre approved of Smith's economic thoughts. Lebrun is probably the world's leading scholar on Joseph de Maistre. And if you don't know who de Maistre was, he was basically the first european continental conservative, one of the first men to pick up a pen and write against the Enlightenment. And this kind of gets to the heart of this thread: I don't know how you can get more traditional than de Maistre and his explicit "altar and throne" Catholicism. Yet for so many reasons I would bet that de Maistre would be lumped in with American neo-conservatives, if not for his economics, than surely for his view on warfare. If somebody on this forum is going to think me a neo-con for citing Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, than at least I'll be in de Maistre's company. His political philosophy blows holes in the theory that there is a deep seated antagonism between conservatism and traditional forms of political philosophy (as does Bossuet btw). A particular difficulty arises when one realizes that this conservative lived and died before the "political traditionalists" frequently cited in this thread, namely the editors at Triumph and every Pope from Leo XIII onward, and all of the 19th and the 20th century Catholic writers.


Lambda Phage

Graham, I found the relevant passages in Clark in which he discusses the freedom of medieval markets, land, labor and capital.. He has almost a whole chapter written on it. I'll post again tonight with some excerpts. I stayed up way too late last night and life suddenly caught up with me this morning  :)

Lambda Phage

#131
Clark begins by scoring the incentives of economic life in England in 1300 against economic life in England in 2000. He characterizes England in 1300 by low tax rates, modest social transfers, stable currency, and low public debt. To England in 2000 he ascribes none of these. He picked these criteria because that's what the IMF says is needed for economic growth, though Clark argues that it's actually not true, or at the very least that those things are not sufficient for economic growth. This is actually the whole point of the chapter. He is arguing that institutions are not sufficient to explain modern economic growth because of the fact that the medieval pre-industrial world actually had better institutions in free market capitalist terms than does the modern world, yet the medieval world did not see any sort of prolonged, sustainable economic growth.

Anyways, he goes on to assign both medieval and modern england security of property and social mobility. To both he also ascribes free goods markets, free labor markets, and free capital markets. He ascribes free land markets to England in 1300 but not England in 2000. The only economic desiderata he says characterizes England in 2000 but not England in 1300 is intellectual property rights.

Since you seem to agree that taxes in the medieval world were significantly lower than in the modern world I'll leave out what he has to say on it. Moving on.

Regarding stable currency:

QuoteSince token monies cost little to create, the optimal inflation rate from a social perspective is always zero or less. That is when money has its maximum value as a medium of exchange and a store of value. However, by printing more money and creating inflation, governments can extract an inflation tax from the economy. Thus from a revenue perspective the government would favor a relatively high level of inflation, to the cost of society as a whole...

Weak modern governments rely heavily on the inflation tax, and many poor countries have been subjected to high inflation rates in recent decades. Inflation rates have also been high in even the richest economies during some periods over the past fifty years. However, in preindustrial England, and indeed in many preindustrial economies, inflation rates were low by modern standards. Figure 8.7 shows the English inflation rate from 1200 to 2000 over successive forty-year intervals. Before 1914 inflation rates rarely exceeded 2 percent per year, even in the period known as the Price Revolution, when the influx of silver from the New World helped drive up prices. In a country such as England, which had a highly regarded currency in the preindustrial era, the crown did not avail itself of the inflation tax, despite the close restrictions Parliament placed on its other tax revenues. Only in the twentieth century did significant inflation appear in England. By the late twentieth century annual inflation averaged 4-8 percent per year...

Even though there were periods of substantial inflation in some other preindustrial societies, other societies achieved long-run price stability. Thus in Roman Egypt wheat prices roughly doubled between the beginning of the first century AD and the middle of the third. But that reflects an inflation rate of less than 0.3 percent per year.

Regarding public debt:

QuoteAnother macroeconomic success forced on preindustrial economies by their low tax bases was the general avoidance of extensive public debt. Before the Glorious Revolution English public debt, for example, was minuscule since the government could service with current revenues a debt of, at maximum, less than 10 percent of GDP.

An immediate consequence of the greater taxing power of the government after 1689, however, was an increase in public debt. Figure 8.8 shows the ratio of public debt to GNP for England from 1688 to 2000. The fiscal stresses of the "Second Hundred Years War" with the French saw debt rise by the 1820s to record levels of nearly 2.5 times GNP. Peace and economic growth had reduced the debt relative to GNP by 1914. But the stresses of the wars of the early twentieth century again inflated the debt to 2.5 times GNP by 1950. Since then the debt has declined. But at more than 40 percent of GNP it still substantially exceeds that of England before the Glorious Revolution.

Assuming the public has a limited perception of the level and significance of public debt, it will crowd out private investment, reducing the capital stock, and thus reduce the overall output of societies. An unaware publice will not respond when governments finance current expenses with debt, as it would if it were aware and rational, by increasing its savings by the amount of the debt in anticipation of a future greater tax burden. Thus public debt will drive up interest rates and drive out private investments. Jeffrey Williamson, for example, argues that the huge accumulated debt of Britain during the period of the French wars was a major economic policy disaster that substantially slowed growth during the Industrial Revolution.

Regarding security of property:

QuoteAn indicator of the security of property in medieval England, and of the general stability of institutions, is the modest fluctuation in property values over time. Figure 8.9 shows the average real price of farmland per acre in England by decade from 1200 to 1349 relative to the price of farm output. There is remarkably little variation in the real price by decade. Medieval farmland was an asset with little price risk. This implies few periods of disruption and uncertainty within the economy, for such disruption typically leaves its mark on the prices of such assets as land and housing.

In comparison the figure also shows the decadal average of the real price of arable land in the district of Zele, near Ghent, in Flanders from 1550 to 1699, which shows dramatically greater variation. The reason for this is easy to infer from the narrative history of Flanders. In 1681-92 Flanders was the setting for the battle over Dutch independence. Ghent was recaptured from the rebels in 1584 after fierce fighting. Flanders from then was mostly Spanish, but the Dutch continued to raid the countryside until 1607. The fighting is reflected in the huge depreciation in land values in Zele: by the 1580's they had sunk to less than 20 percent of their level in the 1550's. There was also warfare in Flanders in 1672-97 during the wars of the Dutch and the Habsburgs against Louis XIV. Land values then also declined sharply relative to the peaceful years of the 1660's.

Thus the sometimes turbulent nature of high politics in England in the medieval period - there were armed conflicts between the king and the barons during 1215-19, 1233, 1258-65, and much of 1312-26 - had no impact on the average person. At the local level property rights were stable and secure.

The next two are probably the ones you'll be most interested in. First, on social mobility:

QuoteProperty and person might be secure, the objection will be voiced, but in a society in which there was a strict division between the noble class at the top and a mass of undifferentiated sevile peasantry at the bottom, this security was that of a stultified social order, not that of an economy pregnant with the possibilities of progress. This is yet another caricature of the preindustrial world. Case after case, study after study, shows that even medieval England was a highly fluid society in which people lived at every possible economic level, from landless wage laborers to wealthy, and in which movement between conditions was frequent.

Taxation records and manorial court rolls reveal from the earliest years enormous income and wealth disparities. Records of the 1297 Subsidy (a tax of movables), for example, suggest huge variations in wealth, even above the minimum value of possessions (about a quarter of the annual wage of a laborer) that made households liable to the tax.

Even at the lowest level, the laborers and peasants, there was an active land market from at least the early thirteenth century, which transferred even land notionally held by nonfree tenants to unrelated individuals. Thus peasants or even laboreres who were energetic and frugal could accumulate land and move up the rural social hierarchy. This fact shows up, even from the earliest years, in the great inequalities of land holdings. A survey of the royal manor of Havering in 1251, for example, reveals that, while four tenants held more than 200 acres of land each, forty-one held less than an acre and forty-six held between 1 and 3 acres.

Another factor responsible for the great social mobility and fluidity in Malthusian societies like medieval England was the accidents of demography. Figure 8.10 illustrates the distribution of the numbers of surviving sons for male testators in England, both outside London and in London itself, from the wills discussed in chapter 6. The distributions shown here would have been characteristic for the whole Malthusian era. Outside London one-third of males leaving wills had no surviving son, while 11 percent had four or more. Few fathers had just one son to whom all their property and position devolved. Instead collateral inheritance was frequent, as were cases in which, to retain their social position, the sons of larger families would have to accumulate property on their own. This meant that accidents of birth and inheritance were constantly moving people up and down the social ladder.

The data also illustrate the well-known fact that in the preindustrial era cities such as London were deadly places in which the population could not reproduce itself and had to be constantly replenished by rural migrants. Nearly 60 percent of London testators left no son. Thus the craft, merchant, legal, and administrative classes of London were constantly restocked by socially mobile recruits from the countryside.

Medieval England may have been a static society economically. But the overall stasis should not blind us to the churning dynamism of the social fabric, with individuals headed up and down the social scale, sometimes to an extraordinary extent. A substantial fraction of the landed aristorcracy of England, even in the medieval period, actually had its foundation not in long aristocratic lineage or in military success, but in successful merchants and lawyers who from the twelfth century onward were using their profits to buy land and enter the aristocracy. High Church positions were even more open to the lower orders. In the medieval period only 27 percent of English bishops, the clerical aristocracy, came from the nobility. The rest were the sons of lesser gentry, farmers, or merchants and tradesmen.

The social fluidity of medieval England was probably more the norm, rather than the exception, for the Malthusian era. Thus in Ming and Qing China, all the way from 1371 to 1904, commoners typically accounted for 40 percent or more of those recruited by way of examination into the highest levels of the imperial bureaucracy. And in China those with money, at least from the 1450's onward, could alternatively buy official ranks and titles. In ancien regime France the ranks of the nobility were similarly stocked from financially successful merchants and government officers from earlier generations.

And lastly, regarding markets:

QuoteMarkets in medieval England were relatively complete and competitive. Labor, for example, was not immobile and fixed to the land or traditional occupations. Medieval Europe in general had a surprising degree of geographic mobility. Given the low reproductive success of the urban population there had to be a constant flow of labor from the country to the city. Thus the records of a 1292 tax levied by Philip the Fair on the commoner households of Paris show that 6 percent were foreigners: 2.1% English, 1.4% Italian, 0.8% German, 0.7% Flemish, 0.6% Jewish, and 0.4% Scottish. A poll tax levied on aliens in England in 1440 revealed about 1,400-1,500 non-naturalized alien males in London at a time when the total adult male population of the city would be only about 15,000: nearly 10% of the population.

Goods markets were similarly open. The grain trade in medieval London was so well developed that private granary space was available for hire by the week. From 1211 onward local yields had no effect on the prices at which manors sold wheat. The national price was the only thing that mattered in predicting local prices.

The earliest surviving records of transactions in property from the twelfth century already show an active land and house market. Manorial court records, which survive in quantity from the 1260's, also reveal a very active land market among the peasantry, trading small pieces of farmland back and forth between families. The land market was certainly much less restricted than in modern England, where the decisions of planning authorities can change the value of an acre of land by millions of dollars.

I left out all of his citations and footnotes. My hands hurt enough from typing out what I did.

Nobody better ever say that Lambda Phage does not cite sources and provide data to support his arguments. The opposition, on the other hand, cites only the rehashed musings of old biases and falsified historical narratives.

james03

QuoteTrue, but he also does say this:

Quote
14. The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth.

"Extreme distress", "UTTERLY deprived", "extreme necessity".

So we adopt economic statism, tax the crap out of people, destroy work through regulations, make it basically impossible to have true Catholic hospitals, and Catholic relief societies because the government is sucking up all the tax money.  So the poor no longer are helped by the local community, and we say, "See, Pope Leo is all for getting the State to help these people".

That's your point?  Seriously?

So in a society where you have Catholic charitable hospitals and Catholic relief, how are people "utterly deprived"? 
"But he that doth not believe, is already judged: because he believeth not in the name of the only begotten Son of God (Jn 3:18)."

"All sorrow leads to the foot of the Cross.  Weep for your sins."

"Although He should kill me, I will trust in Him"

james03

QuoteAlso, social teaching must be taken as a whole. While Rerum Novarum does not discuss a "minimum wage," several other pre-conciliar encyclicals do indeed discuss a just wage,
Non sequitur.  No one is denying the concept of a just wage.  I am advocating the Catholic solution of using collective bargaining to determine it to avoid undue interference from the state.  You advocate setting up soviets to run the economy.
"But he that doth not believe, is already judged: because he believeth not in the name of the only begotten Son of God (Jn 3:18)."

"All sorrow leads to the foot of the Cross.  Weep for your sins."

"Although He should kill me, I will trust in Him"

james03

QuoteI think it is beyond idiotic that traditionalist Catholics are trying to solve problems that are not actually problems instead of trying to put the faith back to where it belongs. Nobody has any reason to be so concerned with "just wages" or "income inequality" when they are objectively better than ever

Lamda, you will appreciate this.  There is a story going around on the internet that goes over how Snowden escaped.  It points out that he hid out in the worst slums of Hong Kong.  The author of the article was trying to show how horrible it was for these people to live there, and yet they let him into their hovel, so what great people, salt of the earth.  It was the human interest piece of the article.  I have no problem with it, it sells.

The funny part is in the article it is revealed that these poor people living in squalor have: 1. an air conditioner, a refrigerator, running clean water, and a toilet.  The author informs us about the "rattling window unit" because he probably has bad memories of staying at a relative's vacation camp and how horrible it was to try to sleep with the rattling old air conditioner.  And he is appalled that the refrigerator is "small".  We also find out that Snowden sent the dude to the corner to pick up chicken at McDonalds.

I can only laugh.  Only a westerner would consider this a slum.
"But he that doth not believe, is already judged: because he believeth not in the name of the only begotten Son of God (Jn 3:18)."

"All sorrow leads to the foot of the Cross.  Weep for your sins."

"Although He should kill me, I will trust in Him"