I am glad that there was a meeting at the vatican 4-1-09 on solutions to our financial crisis. one thing that came out of it was that the global financial managers have sought profit before the common good and dignity of the person and that the essential rights of workers must always be respected and promoted. I believe the values of the free market system can only lead to slavery and sins that cry out to God for justice. Could there possibly be a new answer to the free markets that God would approve of. St. Joseph please help us.
To me, at least, saying the “free market” is good or bad is like opining whether the earth is good or bad. If a volcano explodes under your house and wipes you and your family out, it can be bad. If it feeds you and your family, it can be thought of as good.
A totally unfettered free market can be thought of as the law of Attila the Hun. Loot, pillage, feast and gorge. But a properly directed, but otherwise free market can be thought of as people coming together voluntarily to trade those goods and services which they are able, through talent or resources, to provide, in exchange for those which others are better situated to provide. On the other hand, the “free market” never produced anything as murderous and horrible as the tightly controlled “markets” of Stalin and Mao. So, what should restrain the worst instincts of mankind in the marketplace?
On the one hand, we have the rule of law, which presupposes a ruling person or body with the resources and will to enforce reasonable rules. Our system is not, and never was, an unfettered “free market”. There were laws governing commerce from the very first, and are now. They might be effective in restraining the worst while encouraging the exchange of goods and services that we must have, but they might prove inadequate in ways and at times. The advantages of the “rule of law” are that they are accessible. People can know in advance what the rules are. The disadvantages are that the unscrupulous often find ways around the rules or corrupt the rulers for their own advantage.
On the other hand, we have the rule of regulation, in which individuals or agencies have the ability to manage more or less at will. A disadvantage of that is that people often do not know what they can and cannot do. And regulation is not immune to corruption either. Indeed, some of history’s most regulated societies have been the most corrupt.
Part of what’s going on right now is the struggle between those who want perhaps more in the way of law and less in the way of regulation; versus those whose preference is the opposite.
It is interesting to read the Social Encyclicals. They presume a relatively free market system, but further presume a well-ordered society that ensures a reasonable, but not confiscatory, distribution of the goods and services produced by society.
Without going into tedious detail, it does seem to me that in the U.S. we have greatly departed from the positions of the Social Encyclicals and are headed in precisely the wrong direction from another wrong direction. From what has been a lack of effective regulation of some things, we are now headed toward extreme regulation of nearly everything.
What we do not have in any significant way, is a society that really tries to educate itself to the wisdom and decency of the true social teachings of the Church. Indeed, many churchmen are themselves infected by statism in the form of varying degrees of “Liberation Theology”; a philosophical position closer to secular Marxism than to Christianity. One of the real tragedies of that fact is the further fact that most forms it takes are just one more empowerment of the Huns who manage to loot and pillage, no matter what one calls the system.
