The discussion seems to have waned and turned from the main topic so I hope nobody will accuse me of hijacking the thread if I return to the oft mentioned cliche: the “idoltry of money”.
My essential claim is that cliches like “idoltry of money” serve to confuse and misdirect, not to explain and understand. The purpose of the cliche, of course, is to link “bad” contemporay behavior to the broken covenant by first temple Israelites by means of rhetoric alone without the burden of actually making an argument. It was unfortunate to see Pope Francis indulging in this.
The alternative to the reliance upon rhetoric and cliche is to analyze a situation, the actors and the choices which I will illustrate with Crossbones’ story.
Idolatry of money…well, let me throw this real-life example at you. I once worked for a corporation and there was an employee of mine that suffered from diabetes and it affected his health and his ability to do his job. He was a proud man and tried to continue doing his job without assistance, but I tried to do little things to make things easier (rearrange the room he worked in for less walking around (he lost a big toe) and created a procedure for his work that I could double check in case he did something wrong; I would catch it). Now, through the usual reorgs, he no longer worked for me, but there came a point where the company did layoffs and he was laid off. Now, I protested pretty strongly, as his health affected his job performance and he should have been told that he needed to go on disability. But that was more expensive. I consider what happened immoral.
I didn’t last much longer there.
So you ask what it is - to me, that’s what it is. An ill, suffering man was hurt because the money was more important than the right thing. Worship of money vs watching out for a fellow human being who was suffering.
Profits before people. Tsk, tsp, tsk.
But let’s look closer. Now it’s entirely possible that the above employee, let’s call him Sam, was simply part of the layoff just as others were. But let’s assume the worst, as implied, that he was discarded because he was an unpofitable employee due to his poor health. Clearly Sam suffered as a result of the layoff.
Notice, first, that we have Sam vs. “company”. But in reality there were managers who made the decisions for the company, a company being a legal entity. And not only managers but also shareholders. Who did the managers serve? The employees or the shareholders? And what was the situation of the shareholders? The usual assumption is that they are greedy fat cats but, in fact, most shareholders are ordinary folk saving and investing and very often they are retired and surviving on their pension. For all we know, there may be shareholders who are, themselves, only able to put food on the table because the company pays dividends. It is these flesh and blood people who hire the managers to run the company and it is they who will suffer if the company fails.
You might say, well, one unprofitable person doesn’t make a difference. But if you establish the principle that it is immoral to lay off unprofitable employees there will not be only one, I assure you. In fact, you will end up with employees who are unprofitable by choice and this has been demonstrated by the behavior of unions and by workers in communist countries.
But that’s not all. Because there are also other employees. Insofar as the company was in difficulty, as layoffs imply, not only the shareholders but other employees are at risk. If unprofitable employees are retained and profitable employees are laid off it is only a matter of time before the company will fall into bankruptcy and then every employee loses his job.
And what about customers. They are flesh and blood people too. Companies exist to serve customers but if the company employs employees who can’t do their job (due to ill health) then they suffer. At least until they switch to another company.
All of the above has nothing whatsoever to do with money. It is all about people fulfilling their respective roles. Money is just a tool used to aid in the decisions that each makes in the coordination of their choices and actions.
We could just as easily call this an incident of the idoltry of shareholders, customers, and other employees.
The bottom line is that for-profit companies are ill suited to the role of charity. That’s why we have charitable organizations. I think it’s great that Sam tried to continue in his job rather than take charity, I wish more people had that attitude. But in Sam’s case it was simply not practical and he needed to recognize that at some point. If Sam had the forsight to have saved and invested he could probably live off the dividends of his investments. Provided, of coures, that the companies he invests in are run profitably.
), and to ‘help’ them by imposing control over their lives. That’s really sad, because while they don’t have all the answers, the poor are among the most creative and resilient people I’ve ever been honored to meet.