Justice University

A think tank that shall remain nameless recently presented a study, the point of which was that free childcare is more important than free college.   At first glance this seems like heresy.   For around half a century at least, the constant mantra in the United States was to study hard, get into a good college and you’ll get a good job.   That is, assuming that there are any jobs to get, but that’s another issue. . . .

Today we address a problem that most (if not all) economists do not even think of as a problem — which may itself be the biggest problem of all.   How, after all, can you solve a problem that most people will not even agree exists?

What with the “canonization” of John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) coming up in a couple of weeks, we thought we would add our two cents as well as a few hundred words into the discussions that are raging.   (Canonization does not "make" someone a saint; it is a certification process.)  By and large, the discussion seems to be whether Newman was a liberal or a conservative.   From the interfaith viewpoint, however, it seems more to the point whether Newman was in agreement with the Just Third Way.

On April 14, 1865, an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth (1838-1865) entered Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC during a performance of Our American Cousin featuring Laura Keene (1826-1873) in the role of “Florence Trenchard.”   Booth, a pro-slavery Confederate sympathizer, shot and mortally wounded President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) four days after the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia under Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870).

We closed the previous posting on this subject with the comment that “America’s Prince of Cranks” — Ignatius Loyola Donnelly (1831-1901) — had influenced the interpretation and understanding of Catholic social teaching, and thus the natural law “written in the hearts of all men.”   At first glance this seems rather odd, since Donnelly left the Catholic Church and took up spiritualism, was a socialist, influenced theosophy, and may have inspired certain features of Nazi racial ideology.

One of the more interesting things we discover about Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his greatest work, Democracy in America (1835, 1840), is that the author — like Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) a generation latter in The American Republic (1866) — considered himself a Catholic writing as a Catholic.   What surprises many people is to find out that both de Tocqueville and Brownson considered the American system (slavery excepted) to be the closest to “Catholic” political theory.

Last week’s video of Mortimer Adler speaking on happiness made so many people happy that we thought we’d bring you another one by Adler to listen to . . . about how to listen!

In case you didn't know, George Bernard Shaw was as insistent that socialism is the universal panacea for all problems (as long as you don’t eat meat or drink alcohol) and that distributism is just another name for Fabian socialism* as G.K. Chesterton was adamant that Shaw was full of . . . nonsense.

Aristotle In classic Aristotelian philosophy, including that of Aquinas, distributive justice has only ever had one meaning: distribution according to a pro rata share of inputs.   In economic terms, distributive justice is “the most classical form”( Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church , § 201) of the virtue, t he out-take principle.   It is based on the market value of one’s economic contributions.   This is the principle that everyone has a right to receive a proportionate, market-determined share of the value of the marketable goods and services he produces with his labor, capital, or both.

On his death in 1985, Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. was eulogized as “the second founder” of his religious order, the Society of Mary.   Father Andrew F. Morlion, O.P., Ph.D., Belgian philosopher and founder and first president of the International University of Social Studies in Rome, referred to Father Ferree as “America’s greatest social philosopher.”   But who was he?

One of the things we find most consistent about socialism is its inconsistency, the ability to say one thing and do another with astonishing regularity.   This was brought forcibly home to us when we came across the writings of Robert Owen, considered the first of the British line of socialism.

Recently we received a quote from a news commentary on an allocution by Pope Francis to the effect that the head of the Catholic Church had abolished the natural law.   Not all of the natural law, of course, just the part that some people disagreed with and needed some credible authority to back them up regarding the alleged abolition of private property by Pope Francis (or any other pope).   Specifically,

There is a problem with having government pay for infrastructure . . . especially when we expect government to pay for everything else!   Of course, what is really at issue is that “the government” doesn’t actually pay for anything.   Either it collects taxes or borrows money . . . which it is supposed to repay by collecting taxes.

In the opening of A Tale of Two Cities , Charles Dickens noted that the French Revolution was a time so like his own day as to be practically indistinguishable.   Although Dickens was employing a literary device to bring the reader into the story, a similar observation could be made comparing the early twentieth century to the present time.

Many people think that replacement of human labor by capital and the alienation and social disintegration that results is a new thing.   It is not.    Economic and social alienation due to advancing technologies or changing economies has been around since the dawn of time.   It is just that the rate at which change occurs started accelerating about five hundred years ago.   For this, two factors are responsible.