Why is socialism bad by Church teaching?

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So there were no WMDs? Saddam USED WMDs against the Iranians. The fact they weren’t found is not proof they didn’t exist. The use of the word “stockpiles” in describing WMDs was unfortunate because people envisioned just that, stockpiles, just like the ones you see in pictures of U.S. military depots during WW-II, when they could have been spread all over the country, which was mostly wilderness.

Saddam gassed the Kurds in battle against Iran. Smells like a WMD.
 
I take this from Fr. Corapi:

“Don’t give a man a fish…teach them how to fish!” If you don’t, you deny man in living out and realizing his dignity among all of creation.
 
stteresasgirl said:
I take this from Fr. Corapi:

“Don’t give a man a fish…teach them how to fish!” If you don’t, you deny man in living out and realizing his dignity among all of creation.
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lIke get em off welfare… and teach em to work.
 
yampalin said:
The teachings of the Catholic Church are not literal interpretations of words written centuries ago. In the same manner, Rerum Novarum must not be taken literally, rather in the context of the time it was written.
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This is the same liberal argument that old rules, by virtue of their age, are irrelevant. It is a variation of the fallacy Appeal to Novelty:
A professor is lecturing to his class.
Prof: “So you can see that a new and better morality is sweeping the nation. No longer are people with alternative lifestyles ashamed. No longer are people caught up in the outmoded moralities of the past.”
Student: “Well, what about the ideas of the great thinkers of the past? Don’t they have some valid points?”
Prof: “A good question. The answer is that they had some valid points in their own, barbaric times. But those are old, moldy moralities from a time long gone. Now is a time for new moralities. Progress and all that, you know.”
Student: “So would you say that the new moralities are better because they are newer?”
Prof: “Exactly. Just as the dinosaurs died off to make way for new animals, the old ideas have to give way for the new ones. And just as humans are better than dinosaurs, the new ideas are better than the old. So newer is literally better.”
Student: “I see.”
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My high school chemistry teacher once told the class that no one has had an original idea, and of a student who once claimed to have had an original idea; the teacher told him to go to the library and research it out [this was loooong before the internet]. The student came back a little humbler because he had found that the ancient Greeks had thought of it.
Socialism does not have a single meaning, since not all forms of socialism preach the elimination of all forms of private property.
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Baloney, no matter how thin you slice it, is still baloney.
The same applies to private property, for there are many forms and meanings which must be looked at before considering it an absolute inviolate right under Natural Law.
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Church teaching allows for emergency situations. For example, a fire-fighting helicopter lowering a container and taking water from a private swimming pool to fight a fire.
I would therefore argue that since all persons have equal rights to the acquisition of property, it stands to reason that only the property necessary for the livelihood of an individual and his (or her) family may be considered an inviolable right under Natural Law, …
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Have you considered that this is a result of envy? I submit that no one but the individual would know what his needs are. For the government [and that’s what we are talking about] to decide who needs what would require an enormous amount of information about all of us. People forget that government doesn’t make decisions based on some altruistic motive; it makes them based solely on political considerations [mainly, how many votes can they get?]. I am not a fan of George Soros, but I heard him once say, “Government gives not to benefit the receiver but the giver.” Couldn’t agree more.

Besides, how can people have equal rights before the law if you grant the government the authority to deny some their rights to their property?
 
sedonaman said:
That would be true if most of the world consisted of Bush-haters. “…No one, including the intelligence services of governments opposed to the war, doubted before the war that he [Saddam] had WMD; and only a fool would have interpreted his years-long non-compliance with the inspections regime as implying anything other than that he had something to hide. Finally, it takes a Flat Earth Society-level of credulity to believe that not only Bush, but also Blair and dozens if not hundreds of their employees, would have risked political suicide and/or criminal prosecution to cover up their alleged knowledge that Iraq had in reality absolutely no WMD to speak of.” – “The Mustache on the Left,” by Professor Edward Feser, techcentralstation.com/010804A.html

So there were no WMDs? Saddam USED WMDs against the Iranians. The fact they weren’t found is not proof they didn’t exist. The use of the word “stockpiles” in describing WMDs was unfortunate because people envisioned just that, stockpiles, just like the ones you see in pictures of U.S. military depots during WW-II, when they could have been spread all over the country, which was mostly wilderness.
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All those who, for oil ,or just out of stupidity, have to defend their reasons for doing what they do. And they gather those around them who are of like minds.
 
Why is socialism bad by Church teaching?

It violates the Catholic principle of subsidiarity.
 
sedonaman said:
This is the same liberal argument that old rules, by virtue of their age, are irrelevant. It is a variation of the fallacy Appeal to Novelty:
My high school chemistry teacher once told the class that no one has had an original idea, and of a student who once claimed to have had an original idea; the teacher told him to go to the library and research it out [this was loooong before the internet]. The student came back a little humbler because he had found that the ancient Greeks had thought of it.

Baloney, no matter how thin you slice it, is still baloney.

Church teaching allows for emergency situations. For example, a fire-fighting helicopter lowering a container and taking water from a private swimming pool to fight a fire.

Have you considered that this is a result of envy? I submit that no one but the individual would know what his needs are. For the government [and that’s what we are talking about] to decide who needs what would require an enormous amount of information about all of us. People forget that government doesn’t make decisions based on some altruistic motive; it makes them based solely on political considerations [mainly, how many votes can they get?]. I am not a fan of George Soros, but I heard him once say, “Government gives not to benefit the receiver but the giver.” Couldn’t agree more.

Besides, how can people have equal rights before the law if you grant the government the authority to deny some their rights to their property?
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There is no freedom without private property.
 
sedonaman said:
That is an incomplete sentence. Would you mind explaining it?
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Do you really think that Bush and Blair would come along and say gee we were wrong. There were no WMD after all. Sorry everyone. I still believe that the VP was behind the war, he wanted that oil.
 
Monk21 said:
Do you really think that Bush and Blair would come along and say gee we were wrong. There were no WMD after all. Sorry everyone. I still believe that the VP was behind the war, he wanted that oil.
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The Oil companies a getting oil from Iraq at no better terms than they were before the war. No company that Cheney is affiliated with now or ever was affiliated with has gotten any sweetheart deals with the Iraqis. The idea that this war was started for oil is as ridiculous as the idea that Obama was not born in Hawaii.
 
The appeals of socialism are fueled mainly by:
  1. the desire of its political advocates to gain power;
  2. the desire of the hoi polloi to get something for nothing; and,
  3. the desire of the less well-off to punish “the rich” [def.: anyone with more money than me]. What they forget is that the rich, by the very fact that they are rich, have the ability to keep government from taking their money [and property] through the process of rent-seeking [lobbying to get their activities favored treatment in the tax code]. Not only that, but as we saw in Kelo vs The City of New London, they can even get the government to take away your property and give it to them. Government must get its taxes from someone, and if it is not the rich and certainly not “the poor,” then that someone ends up being the middle class who don’t have the means to afford lobbying. So punishing the rich ends up a waste of time and resources.
None of these desires pass Catholic social teaching muster. The pre-requisite of socialism is the taking away of everyone’s rights, except those of the self-Anointed ruling class. Someone else in this thread said that it violates the concept of subsidiarity, a good observation.

The fact of the matter is that God created all persons equal in only one respect: they are equally loved by Him. He did not create them with equal physical nor mental attributes. IOW, they have different levels of knowledge, skills, abilities, and physical traits. These always translate into different levels of incomes. For the socialist advocate, this is unbearable, for all should be equal in every manner. To him, God made a mistake by giving people unequal abilities, and he sees himself as correcting what God had wrought, forgetting that not everyone can be a university professor; someone has to collect the trash, and someone has to sweep the streets.

In the end, his schemes succeed in making the ruled equal in only one way: they are equally miserable. Dobbie Gillis observed in “Love Is a Fallacy” that it is a lot easier to make a dumb, pretty girl smart than it is to make a smart, ugly girl pretty; likewise, it is a lot easier to tear someone down to the lowest level than it is to raise someone up above it.
 
Pitcharan said:
Where is the question of translation when we are all using one english language. I verbatim quote you again:
and my response
.

And realise this: you are completely in error when you say that Socialists made the poor covet what belonged to the rich. You first of all fail to understand the spirit of the tenth as well all other commandments of God, which hang on these two commandments: 1. Love God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength; 2. Love your neighbour as yourself. Whatever the rich owned was earned under unfair laws enacted by past governements who had the mandate. The socialists used their mandate to make a different law. The socialist laws embrace God’s law far more closely than that of other feudal rulers and pro-rich pro-capitalist democracies.
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  1. Socialists do not embrace God’s law, they force people to give the money they earn. Thus, it is not love that influences their decision to do good, but the barrel of a gun.
  2. It is true, that in capitalist societies that people may be exploited at times; however, these people are not completely powerless. They can form protests and sit ins if they truly feel that their employer is being abusive toward them.
  3. How are the laws of the United States unfair? Please explain.
 
Pitcharan said:
…you are completely in error when you say that Socialists made the poor covet what belonged to the rich.
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The socialists say that the rich are rich at the expense of the poor [see your own comment below]. If that isn’t breeding envy, what is it?
You first of all fail to understand the spirit of the tenth as well all other commandments of God, …
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The existence of a commandment of God is not proof that the poor obey it. The myth that the poor are moral by the mere fact that they are poor is almost as widely believed as the free lunch.
Whatever the rich owned was earned under unfair laws enacted by past governements who had the mandate.
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“Unfair” by what standard? How do you know? What is your proof?
The socialists used their mandate to make a different law. The socialist laws embrace God’s law far more closely than that of other feudal rulers and pro-rich pro-capitalist democracies.
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And that’s why Pope Leo praised socialism to the high heavens. Here’s what he wrote in his encyclical, “On Socialism”:
“…We speak of that sect of men who, under various and almost barbarous names, are called socialists, communists, or nihilists, and who, spread over all the world, and bound together by the closest ties in a wicked confederacy, no longer seek the shelter of secret meetings, but, openly and boldly marching forth in the light of day, strive to bring to a head what they have long been planning – the overthrow of all civil society whatsoever. … the Roman Pontiffs Clement XII and Benedict XIV did not fail to unmask the evil counsels of the sects, and to warn the faithful of the whole globe against the ruin which would be wrought. Later on again, when a licentious sort of liberty was attributed to man by a set of men who gloried in the name of philosophers, and a new right, as they call it, against the natural and divine law began to be framed and sanctioned, Pope Pius VI, of happy memory, at once exposed in public documents the guile and falsehood of their doctrines, and at the same time foretold with apostolic foresight the ruin into which the people so miserably deceived would be dragged.”
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Are you smarter about God’s law than all these popes?

The U.S. has a large problem with aliens entering the country illegally on our Southwestern border. These aliens had to pay a coyote thousands of dollars for the privilege of risking their lives, and the lives of their families, to cross a burning desert just to get to a country to be oppressed by “unfair” laws. Makes sense to me.
 
I wish this thread would die, so I would quit reading it. Doesn’t seem that any lib’s are being convinced. I’ll say it one more time, and try, try, try to never look at this thread again.

The confiscation of the fruit of one’s labor by force, to be redistributed to others by an “all knowing authority” is neither justice, nor charity. I wish the USCCB would comprehend that social justice is socialism and has nothing to do whatsoever with meeting our obligations to be charitable.
 
markbrumbaugh
I wish the USCCB would comprehend that social justice is socialism and has nothing to do whatsoever with meeting our obligations to be charitable.
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We need to be a bit careful here, while there is much confusion over social justice.

Do We Need Social Justice Or Social Engineering?
This question is answered by Fr Torraco of EWTN on Nov-24-2003 to a Question:
What is “Social Justice”? When was this concept introduced in Catholic moral doctrine?

Answer by Fr.Stephen F. Torraco on Nov-24-2003:
The term “social justice” was introduced into Catholic teaching in the 19th century. On the one hand, it is intended, at least in part, to avoid the error of reducing what Aristotle calls “general justice” (devotion to the common good of one’s country) to LEGAL justice. On the other hand, consciously or not, the term “social justice” aptly reflects the political philosophy of the modern philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, according to whom justice is fundamentally a matter of achieving the proper institutions and external settings that would effectively mold human beings into model citizens. In other words, for Rousseau, justice is not rooted in nature as it is for Aristotle and for the Church’s teaching. It is something that has to be attained by “social engineering.”

Unfortunately, in the minds of many if not most, consciously or not, the term “social justice” is viewed more in a Rousseaunian than an Aristotelian way. From the vantage point of both Aristotle and the Church’s teaching, the phrase “social justice” is redundant because justice is already social: it is the social virtue par excellence. [My underlining].
 
Monk21 said:
All those who, for oil ,or just out of stupidity, have to defend their reasons for doing what they do. And they gather those around them who are of like minds.
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Monk,

Do you think that Saddam should still be in power? What do you think of him as a ruler?
 
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