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ThomasJMullally
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I like your moniker…
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ThomasJMullally
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John Paul II, 1991, reprising Leo’s encyclical on assuring basic worker rights to in order to move beyond “survival” under capitalism:
"The Pope immediately adds another right which the worker has as a person. This is the right to a “just wage”, which cannot be left to the “free consent of the parties, so that the employer, having paid what was agreed upon, has done his part and seemingly is not called upon to do anything beyond”. It was said at the time that the State does not have the power to intervene in the terms of these contracts, except to ensure the fulfilment of what had been explicitly agreed upon. This concept of relations between employers and employees, purely pragmatic and inspired by a thorough-going individualism, is severely censured in the Encyclical as contrary to the twofold nature of work as a personal and necessary reality. For if work as something personal belongs to the sphere of the individual’s free use of his own abilities and energy, as something necessary it is governed by the grave obligation of every individual to ensure “the preservation of life”. “It necessarily follows”, the Pope concludes, “that every individual has a natural right to procure what is required to live; and the poor can procure that in no other way than by what they can earn through their work”.
A workman’s wages should be sufficient to enable him to support himself, his wife and his children. “If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accepts harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice”.
Would that these words, written at a time when what has been called “unbridled capitalism” was pressing forward, should not have to be repeated today with the same severity. Unfortunately, even today one finds instances of contracts between employers and employees which lack reference to the most elementary justice regarding the employment of children or women, working hours, the hygienic condition of the work-place and fair pay; and this is the case despite the International Declarations and Conventions on the subject and the internal laws of States. The Pope attributed to the “public authority” the “strict duty” of providing properly for the welfare of the workers, because a failure to do so violates justice; indeed, he did not hesitate to speak of “distributive justice”" – #8
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PeopleB4Things
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Thanks!I like your moniker…
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Lost_Wanderer
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Did you read my article? And by the way, since you despise Edison so much, you shouldn’t be on a computer. Or anything else that runs on electricity for that matter. Then again, don’t think going Amish will spare you such ‘capitalist indignities’ because even they shop at Walmart.Sure, dangle the lottery-odds prospect of vast success. This ambition is what is destroying the world. And Edison was an SOB…
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I’ll have you know that it was a lack of ambition that cost me that girl. Oh but hey, feel free to encourage more people to lose ambition and any aspiration. You’ll be indirectly responsible for demoralizing my enemies.
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ThomasJMullally
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John Paul II, in 1991, completes his reprising of Leo’s Rerum Novarum… this is only number #11 but still “pure capitalism” is being taken to task… I will try to copy over numbers 12 to 41 tomorrow where John Paul moves on to his own treatment, or here is the link to the full Encyclical: vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html
"Re-reading the Encyclical in the light of contemporary realities enables us to appreciate the Church’s constant concern for and dedication to categories of people who are especially beloved to the Lord Jesus. The content of the text is an excellent testimony to the continuity within the Church of the so-called “preferential option for the poor”, an option which I defined as a “special form of primacy in the exercise of Christian charity”. Pope Leo’s Encyclical on the “condition of the workers” is thus an Encyclical on the poor and on the terrible conditions to which the new and often violent process of industrialization had reduced great multitudes of people. Today, in many parts of the world, similar processes of economic, social and political transformation are creating the same evils.
If Pope Leo XIII calls upon the State to remedy the condition of the poor in accordance with justice, he does so because of his timely awareness that the State has the duty of watching over the common good and of ensuring that every sector of social life, not excluding the economic one, contributes to achieving that good, while respecting the rightful autonomy of each sector. This should not however lead us to think that Pope Leo expected the State to solve every social problem. On the contrary, he frequently insists on necessary limits to the State’s intervention and on its instrumental character, inasmuch as the individual, the family and society are prior to the State, and inasmuch as the State exists in order to protect their rights and not stifle them.
The relevance of these reflections for our own day is inescapable. It will be useful to return later to this important subject of the limits inherent in the nature of the state. For now, the points which have been emphasized (certainly not the only ones in the Encyclical) are situated in continuity with the Church’s social teaching, and in the light of a sound view of private property, work, the economic process, the reality of the State and, above all, of man himself. Other themes will be mentioned later when we examine certain aspects of the contemporary situation. From this point forward it will be necessary to keep in mind that the main thread and, in a certain sense, the guiding principle of Pope Leo’s Encyclical, and of all of the Church’s social doctrine, is a correct view of the human person and of his unique value, inasmuch as “man … is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself”. God has imprinted his own image and likeness on man (cf. Gen 1:26), conferring upon him an incomparable dignity, as the Encyclical frequently insists. In effect, beyond the rights which man acquires by his own work, there exist rights which do not correspond to any work he performs, but which flow from his essential dignity as a person." – #11
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ThomasJMullally
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Naaah… I always found that ladies come to you-- you can’t go chasing… and I thank God I never ended up with the ones who I was crazy about!Did you read my article? And by the way, since you despise Edison so much, you shouldn’t be on a computer. Or anything else that runs on electricity for that matter. Then again, don’t think going Amish will spare you such ‘capitalist indignities’ because even they shop at Walmart.
P.S.
I’ll have you know that it was a lack of ambition that cost me that girl. Oh but hey, feel free to encourage more people to lose ambition and any aspiration. You’ll be indirectly responsible for demoralizing my enemies.
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ThomasJMullally
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The office design and furniture business is emblematic of corporate waste. The big companies usually rent them and demand them removed as soon as the style changes, about a 5 year span. The article you cite is agitating for such marginally needed changes. (I live in New Jersey USA-- we have thousands of warehouses and landfills packed with the millions of tons cast-off plastics and fabrics from this business.)
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ThomasJMullally
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Are you the one who quoted Distributist theories? I was directed to this branch of thought, during this thread. I think it is what I was looking for!Thanks!
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Lost_Wanderer
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I used to think so to… until I found the One and then poof. Gone. Because I hesitated and didn’t want to seem ‘ambitious.’ Like you, I thought she’d just fall into my life. You might be content with thinking that you never needed to chase after anything and that all your crazy dreams were better off not being realized… but I’ve spent 16 years suffering from that sort of thinking.
I don’t know about you but if you went to the Family Section in this forum and started advertising the waiting game, you’ll be in for a really nasty backlash.
Just because you’re one of the lucky ones that got their prize from that lottery doesn’t mean there are those who realize it’s not a game for them. So if you’ll excuse me, I have a reputation to build and that of an undeserving nobody’s to destroy. (Oh wait, I think he’s pretty much dead already. Onto Phase 2 then.
)Then again, maybe if all the nobodies in the world heard you, they wouldn’t be giving me such a hard time. They don’t belong in this game anymore than I belong in yours.
Call me slave driver. Call me arrogant. Call me capitalist SOB just like you did Edison.But remember, even Genghis Khan gladly called himself a punishment ordained by God.
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Lost_Wanderer
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So then, you would rather Edison didn’t waste his 1000 attempts and not have invented the lightbulb to begin with? What you’re complaining about is essentially the same thing. Trial and error produces lots of waste but that doesn’t mean we’re not making progress.
What kind of society do you dream about? From your post, it sounds like a recipe for a stagnant civilization than a utopia.
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ThomasJMullally
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Well, I suppose my project is to encourage the dissolution of all inhumane, alienating bureaucracy, whether they are public or private corporations. Stagnation? OK but that is a negative word… I prefer the term: Peace
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ThomasJMullally
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Hesitations always happen, and they are not bad. Hesitations are usually built on some sort of inner morality. Who knows God’s plan? You need to accept your instinct at the moment. E.g. One door closes, you are free… then the next opens.
The bad part is, to bear such a strong regret.
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Lost_Wanderer
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On what planet has bureaucracy ever been chummy with innovation? You do know Steve Jobs hated bureaucracy right?
Look, I hate the b-word just as much as you but I can’t see why you have to needlessly smear a concept that’s only concerned with the improvement of well, everything!
And peace? As if people didn’t do any better for that cause compared to personal ambition. (Thank you for demonstrating that Mr. Chamberlain. You really did secure peace for your time.
) Quoting the immortal words of Nick Fury:For me, they are. Definitely. I assure you. The only good I see them serve is undermining my opponent.
(An advantage I have happily taken without the slightest remorse.)Funny, the ones I had were only based on fear. No thanks. I’ve had enough of that that I threw it in the streets and never looked back.
I’d rather open the doors I choose, not ones just tossed into my face and then be told to be content with my lot.
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Abu
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Such an example of ignorance is all too typical on this thread where the development of free enterprise carefully documented as distinctly Catholic, like all great developments to further mankind in true faith and reason, and showing great preference for free enterprise as arising from the monks, the great Catholic Late Scholastics and culminating in the incisive recommendation of St John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, has been ridiculed despite the clearly documented facts.
Others show their ignorance by trying to quote from the popes everything but the clearly documented support for free enterprise that they have come to realise is very Catholic and very well worth supporting.
The revered Fr James V Schall, S.J., incisively points out:
“But in fact, this re-distributionist theory was not the solution to dire problems but the cause of further poverty and, in addition, of much tyranny, however good may have been the subjective intentions of those who promoted it, including the papacy.” [Reference to Peter Bauer].
“Rather than seeking to understand how and why wealth is produced, papal thinking seemed rather to suggest that the problem was of greed and the failure of the political order. The ecclesial analysis, in other words, seemed to embrace modern theories of world order that were anything but solutions to the problems the papacy itself wanted confronted.
“In contemporary ideological analysis, the so-called misdistribution of the world’s goods seemed to be explained in terms of envy by the poor alongside the moral corruption of those economic systems that did in fact produce existing wealth in the modern world. The result of such a theory was that instead of examining the many cultural, political, economic and especially religious causes of why the poor were poor, the poor were told that they were poor because they were exploited by the rich, by those who knew how to produce wealth.
"As a result of this analysis, the poor need not learn how to produce wealth but instead they should insist, even violently, that what was rightfully ‘theirs’, on the basis of some exploitation theory, be ‘returned’ to them. Such theories not only proved statistically impossible – the world needs more wealth, not a redistribution of existing wealth – but justified decades of wasted energy and effort by the poor peoples themselves seeking a false solution to their own problems and blaming theories that did work to solve their own problems.”
Does Catholicism Still Exist, p 176-177]
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ThomasJMullally
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One cannot serve two masters, Abu, and I am only left to wonder why full respect for the brillliant message of John Paul II in 1991 would be so tortuous? vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html … Because it does not support the twisted viewpoints of Father Schall, the misguided Acton Institute, and yourself.
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ThomasJMullally
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Too bad-- you just want to go with the winners. The PR machine of capital, has lured a humble and sensitive man into the mindset of boundless ambition and hero worship. Chamberlain was an honorable man who made a decent effort, and has been blackballed by history books. Steve Jobs seemed so nice on TV, but really was a classic manipulator and slave driver, and his marketing hype has heaped onto society a cruel joke. And Edison did not invent the alternating current which changed history, Tesla did, and Edison was the vested interest who tried to kill it because it conflicted with his (far less efficient) direct current patents.On what planet has bureaucracy ever been chummy with innovation? You do know Steve Jobs hated bureaucracy right?
Look, I hate the b-word just as much as you but I can’t see why you have to needlessly smear a concept that’s only concerned with the improvement of well, everything!
And peace? As if people didn’t do any better for that cause compared to personal ambition. (Thank you for demonstrating that Mr. Chamberlain. You really did secure peace for your time.
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oldcelt
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You have hit on one of the major problems of the system in the US…the eternal-temporary agency. Once created, they are like the mythical vampire…no real purpose and really hard to kill.
But then I look and think, Is there any other system I would like to live under? Haven’t found one yet.
To answer the OP, No.
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minkymurph
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Capitalism is a bit like democracy. We keep reviving it, re-inventing it and believing it is the right path because we don’t know what else to do.
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ThomasJMullally
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Yes-- 535 in Congress and Senate and thousands in State legislatures. And every one wants to make up new laws, when they really should be spending the next 10 years just repealing old laws.
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