Welcome To The Real

Catholics often argue over economic systems - which is best for Catholic life?

• Should we live in community, sharing all things as described in Acts? That is, should we embrace a theistic communism?
• Should we emphasize private property, as Peter did to Ananias and Sapphira and embrace Adam Smith's capitalism?
• Should we live as we fantasize the medieval Europeans did, with small farms and guilds, and become Chestertonian distributists? 
• Should we be Locke's democratic republic or Aquinas' gentle monarchy?

Everyone brings forward their favorite encyclicals to debate these questions.
What a waste of time!

The very conversation misses the whole point of what it means to be Catholic. Systems are human-made tools. Tools are not persons, tools are not moral agents. Tools are not Catholic or non-Catholic. They just are.

Persons are moral agents, so persons are Catholic or not Catholic. 
The difference between "tool" and "person" is infinite. 

There is no Catholic hammer, no papist nail. Saws do not make professions of faith.  There is no difference between an economic system and a hammer - both are tools. Thus, there is no Catholic monetary system, no Catholic system of governance.

Does my monetary system or my system of governance have to have a preferential option for the poor, does my system have to promote a sense of solidarity in order for me to endorse it as a Catholic?

No.

*I* have to have those things and do those things. So do you. But the system doesn't. You and I are morally responsible for these things because you and I are persons. The system is not morally responsible for these things because the system is a rock, a tool, a saw, a hammer. It is a thing. Things do not bear moral responsibility, only persons do.
The system is not a person.

Now, the Church has said that any system which does not recognize subsidiarity and private property, is doomed to failure. Subsidiarity is the source of personal responsibility, and private property is the source of charity - I can't give away something I don't own, I can't steward something that isn't in some sense my responsibility. Insofar as the system doesn't recognize persons and moral responsibility, it will fail. That pretty much sums up what the Church has to say about systems.

Ah, but systems are made up of communities of people, and does not the community bear moral  responsibility?

No.
No, it does not.


The grand economic system is not morally responsible or morally irresponsible, any more than a furnace is morally responsible or irresponsible when it makes steel or burns Jews. Both the economic system and the furnace are tools, nothing more. 

Now, personally, I have a lot of moral duties, but do systems have moral duties?
If they do, how do they manage that?
How would it go to confession?
What priest has the power to absolve capitalism or communism for its sins?
So, no, economic systems do not have to recognize moral duties because they cannot recognize moral duties. They are not capable.

It's like demanding that fire only burn wood and never Jews - wouldn't it be nice if we could make such demands? But we can't because fire is not a person. It is a tool. It does not take note of our moral demands.


Even human communities are tools, not moral agents.
Pope Pius XII specifically said there is no such thing as collective guilt in reference to German guilt for the Holocaust. The Second Vatican Council has said the same thing in reference to Jewish guilt for the crucifixion. There is no such thing as collective guilt.


That means the community cannot bear collective guilt when moral correct actions are ignored or even actively mocked. Only individuals can bear such responsibility. 

I may personally have a lot of moral obligations to various persons, but the system I advocate or attack cannot be advocated or attacked on the basis of the moral responsibilities it bears because systems do not bear moral responsibilities. Neither do communities. Only individuals bear these responsibilities.


I cannot hold a corporation morally responsible for it's actions any more than I can hold all Germans responsible for the Holocaust or all Jews responsible for the crucifixion - in every case, I would be assuming corporate guilt. In every case, I would be violating Catholic teaching.

According to Catholic teaching, the only corporate guilt that exists is original sin. Nothing else qualifies. So governments, corporations and the systems which run them, while run by people, cannot be held morally responsible for anything. Only the individual people running them can be.


How can this be?

The Only Catholic Economy

Only one truly Catholic economic system exists.

It is the economy of grace, the sacramental economy.

It is a Catholic economic system because it deals with grace, which is participation in eternity.

Every other economic system is not Catholic because it deals with mere time, that is, it deals with money. Contrary to popular belief, money is not a marker for land, goods or other property. Money is a marker for time. 


Time is the only thing everyone has access to, everyone owns. Everyone is equal in part because no one knows how much time anyone has. All we know is the amount of time each person has only decreases, never increases, so it becomes more and more valuable. That's why money works - we each trade time to gain things we would like but wouldn't otherwise be able to get because we don't have enough time.

When I spend my time learning a trade (and notice, it's called a "trade"), I can then trade the time I spent learning that skill for time I would rather not spend learning some other skill. Money allows me to trade my time for someone else's time. I might assist someone who has a talent for creating things by giving him some of my time (money) and asking for a portion of his time (money) as a return on my investment. Whether I'm a guild member or a shareholder, I've invested my time or time equivalents. Time eats away at money just as it eats away at me. Given inflation, money decomposes just like corpses. Jesus laughed at the man who stored up goods, because money is a marker for time, but it isn't time itself. Money can buy everything but time and grace.


Distributism claims land is the basis of wealth, which is just stupid. 
Capitalism claims capital is the basis of wealth, which is equally stupid.
Communism claims community is the basis of wealth, which is absurd.
Timeless grace is the basis of wealth.

That's why there can be no overlap between the Catholic economic system and other economic systems - Catholics deal in infinite, eternal grace, all other systems deal in finite, limited time. The sacramental economy is the only Catholic economy. There is no other. 

The Economy Gives Birth

The sacramental economy gives birth to the only morally responsible community: the Catholic Church. It is a morally responsible community not because it is primarily a community, but because it is primarily a person - the Bride of Christ. Grace, the breath of the Holy Spirit, makes Her a Person.

The Church is a Person first and primarily, a community second and consequentially. Because the Church is a Person, the Church can apologize, the Church can be reformed, the Church can bear moral responsibility.

If the Church were merely a community, it could do none of those things. When a Catholic parish calls itself primarily a Catholic community, that parish is, whether it realizes it or not, trying to absolve itself of moral responsibility. It is attempting to distance itself from the Person of the Church and the social doctrines of the Church.

Good luck with that.

Individual people have a LOT of obligations, but if we keep confusing systems with people, how are we going to be any different than the communists or corporatists or whatever-ists that we don't like? 

Corporatists think business corporations are real people. They are not.
Corporations are artificial persons, not real persons.
Corporations cannot be baptized, confirmed, anointed, married or given Eucharist.
They cannot be absolved, saved or damned.
They are not persons.

Communists think the same thing of communities.

The Church's social doctrine is not meant for communities or for systems.
The Church's social doctrine is meant for individuals: me and you. 


If we think it is meant for systems, we attribute to communities and systems something the Church has always denied. We attribute to them personhood. Personhood is held only by God, angels and men. IBM, Apple, McDonalds, Walmart, Google, Facebook: these do not qualify. 

The line between good and evil runs not through the community, but through every individual human heart. Only individual persons are morally culpable for actions. Only individual persons can be absolved for their sins or glorified for their correct responses to grace.

A calculating machine can be made up of gears and wheels, 
A calculating machine can be made up of silicon wafers and electronic gates.
A calculating machine can be made up of a series of people who each perform a step in the calculation.

From a moral perspective, there is no difference between these three things because each is a system, and a system is not a person.

Sure, the third system is composed of persons and the first two aren't, but that doesn't change the operation of the system. Systems are not persons, they are not morally culpable.

Systems are not Catholic or non-Catholic - they just are.

A community is Catholic only insofar as the individuals in the community:
(a) participate in the life of grace so that they are
(b) joined to the body of Christ who is a person.

But the Church is the only community which is a person, the only community that can carry grace or guilt. No other community can do this because no other community is a person.

Many people would like you to be confused on this point. They would prefer you to think that many different kinds of communities and systems are persons. It makes the Church seem common. Don't be fooled.


If anyone would like to argue about the merits of individual economic systems, feel free. Just don't call any of them Catholic, because none of them (except the sacraments) are.

Insofar as a distributist or communist or libertarian or capitalist or anything-ist tells you otherwise, they have a weak grasp of reality.

2012: The Year The Music Died

I got into a debate about who was the best Presidential candidate.

To be quite honest, I'm not sure that it matters.

Oh, sure, we can do better or worse in the short term with one versus the other, but in the long-term? Yeah, in the long-term, we're dead.

We can argue economic policy and governmental policy all day long.
Those things are important.
But none of them matter if we don't solve the social problems.

Indeed, if the social issues aren't solved, the economic issues will get worse. This is a very simple problem, a problem that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats nor the Libertarians want to solve. The United States is not pro-natalist. That's the source of all problems. As long as we aren't having babies, as long as we promote sterility whether by homosexuality or contraception or whatever, any change in economic policy is just moving deck chairs around.

We can only pay illegals to have our babies for us for so long - at some point, they will stop coming in because there isn't any advantage to having babies here versus having babies in Mexico or Central America or wherever. As soon as they stop providing us with children, we're dead.

Dueling Worldviews
The Catholic Church fought dueling for a thousand years before it finally fell out of common social usage. She condemned the joust in the 1100s and was still answering dubia about duelling in the 1860s. It wasn't until the culture changed from being honor-based to being money-based that duelling stopped.

Dueling didn't stop because the Church condemned it or because people became "anti-dueling" or "pro-life". It stopped because people stopped valuing honor so highly. They were no longer willing to kill to preserve it.

Dueling was a consequence of living in an honor-based society.

Same with being pro-natalist.
In order to be pro-natalist, the society has to value babies as a very high, if not the highest, good.
But when honor fell out of favor in this society, honor wasn't replaced with babies or with considerations of future generations. Honor was replaced with money.

The country isn't anti-natalist because it hates babies.
It is anti-natalist because it doesn't see the money-value of babies.
That is, when given a choice between making a baby and making a buck, most people choose the avenue that will turn them the buck.

Even when women choose to stay at home, many of them choose to do so BECAUSE IT IS CHEAPER than earning that second income, getting taxed on it, and paying for the child care. The time-value of money is now higher than the time-value of a baby, and this culture cares about time-value. So I don't care how pro-life people get in their survey answers. They aren't going to have babies because they are too busy trying to earn the next buck. The money is worth more than the baby.

A Slave of Mammon
Consider another example. Look at how William Wilberforce got slavery outlawed. Slavery wasn't making much money for England as a whole, but it WAS making a lot of money for a small, entrenched government interest group. That group successfully blocked ALL direct anti-slavery legislation.

Wilberforce finally beating them by passing an obscure shipping regulation which bled the money out of the trade. Now, if English culture had held slavery to be actually valuable, that law would have been amended to allow slavery to continue, and Wilbeforce's success would have been very temporary.

But, since slavery wasn't held to be socially valuable, the small, entrenched pro-slavery group was unable to get the law amended.

Notice: whether the law was pro-slavery or anti-slavery was of absolutely no concern to the larger society. No one else cared enough about the issue one way or the other to actually change the law.

So Wilberforce found it nearly impossible to change the law to be anti-slavery. Once it was changed, his opponents found it absolutely impossible to change it back to being pro-slavery.

The Problem With Going Back to the Future
The same is true in America about babies.
The problem isn't with pro- or anti-natalist legislation.
It's that no one cares enough about babies to actually have any.
We are too self-involved, too oriented towards turning the next buck.

And, given the growth of technology, are people becoming MORE or LESS self-involved as the years rush by? Let's put it another way: isn't Facebook primarily the quintessence of self-involvement - superseded only by Twitter?

I don't see how the fight to turn America pro-natalist takes less than several centuries.
It took the Industrial Revolution to destroy the honor-based society that encouraged dueling.
It will take a similar revolution to destroy the money-based that encourages sterility.

And, ultimately, when it comes to babies, societies can't afford centuries.

Now,
IF Santorum gets elected President
and
IF Santorum stays true to pro-life principles
then 
MAYBE we have a chance.

But if Santorum does NOT get elected, then the country is not interested in the pro-natalist tag that is being hung around Santorum's neck (much to his chagrin). And that means America is going to the dogs.

And Santorum's chagrin is why I ultimately don't trust Santorum.

The press is trying to paint Santorum as (horrors!) an orthodox Catholic.

In his interviews, Santorum keeps denying that he is an orthodox Catholic, in the sense that whenever a news-babe puts him on the spot, he denies social policies are an important part of his agenda. That means even *HE* thinks he can't win on a pro-natalist platform.

Which means America loses this time around, no matter who wins.
We lose because our society isn't interested in the only winning strategy: babies.
We aren't interested in the best long-term investment any human being can make.

God promised that Catholic Faith would triumph.
He did not promise America would.