Posted on 09/30/2005 6:45:41 PM PDT by JohnRoss
It's simply a very poorly written, poorly thought-out attempt to impose a limited-acceptance, mono-dogmatic, exceptionally narrow religious doctrine on contemporary global economics.
It's sort of like expecting the final score of the 1956 World Cup Soccer quarter-finals to determine the closing price of West Texas benchmark crude oil on February 23, 2009.
Even Sophomores at Notre Dame know that excessive footnotes do not logic make.
Socialism results in paragraph shortages. ;-)
I tried to file a court case on behalf of a train engine. Two guesses what legal theory I used.
Tomorrow morning. Meet you there...
Bump
yeah, like my post had anything to do with socialism...
Come on, smile. I'm sure the passage was insightful. Here, let me make it readable.
The model of an economy which both neoclassical and Austrian economics present, and the economic policies which Austrian economists usually champion, are not the obvious conclusions of economic reasoning as they would have us believe.
For economic activity always takes place within a legal, social and technological framework, and the structure of that framework to a great degree conditions and determines the shape which economic activity takes in any particular society.
There was no economic reason, for example, why the guilds of the Middle Ages, which controlled the urban economies of Europe and severely limited competition among craftsmen, need have come to an end, and the economy which resulted from the demise of the guilds was largely the creation of a changed intellectual climate, not the result of so-called economic laws.
Nor are limited liability corporations, which currently dominate our economy and which were created only in the nineteenth century due to emerging state general incorporation laws, the inevitable products of economic forces, but rather were brought into being by the free acts of legislatures. Market forces always work within a certain framework, and economic outcomes depend more on how these frameworks are structured than on the market forces alone.
Thus within broad limits human beings have the ability to structure the way in which they conduct economic activity, and the notion that there is only one way which is sanctioned by so-called economic laws is false. Human beings create their legal and social institutions and can alter them. There is no reason why these institutions cannot be designed or reformed in such a way so as to facilitate the application of Catholic social teaching.
(A concrete instance of how market forces always work within an institutional framework is the story of the Nova Scotia fishermen from the 1930s. "Their catch of fish and lobsters was handled by local dealers who in many cases kept the fishermen in a state of peonage. While Maine fishermen were getting about fifteen cents a pound for lobsters, the Nova Scotian fishermen were receiving as little as two cents a pound.
All other prices were scaled down in the same ratio. For everything they bought, however, from their scanty food purchases to nets and lines, they paid top prices, with the result that they were invariably bowed down with a load of debts. Appalling poverty, illiteracy, poor health and the worst possible housing conditions existed throughout this section." In order to better their condition, priests from St. Francis College helped the fishermen organize cooperatives.
By means of marketing cooperatives they were able to bypass the local middlemen and deal directly with wholesalers in large cities. In their first shipment of lobsters to Boston they received fifteen cents per pound net. The distribution of income before the establishment of the cooperatives was not the result of the operation of economic laws, but rather of the legal and social institutions within which these economic forces operated. These institutions were changed and a new set of institutions was created within which market forces could operate.
This is an illustration of the freedom men have to change the framework and thus change the way economic forces operate to bring about a more just distribution of income.
See Bertram B. Fowler, The Co-operative Challenge (Boston : Little, Brown, 1947) pp. 128-29.)
Good post.
I have always thought that "libertarian capitalism" wasn't any kind of theory at all, but merely a history of how people will eventually behave when cultural and religious norms are eliminated.
Thanks, but it's bornacatholic's cite. The author makes good observations but the observations, IMO, better support a laissez-faire prescription than his implied regulatory prescriptions. The good fathers who helped the lobster fisherman helped make the free market work by organizing the fishermen into a voluntary association with bargaining power.
Ping for later reading (both the article and the responses)
I agree. Regulatory efforts without cultural change are simply steps toward totalitarianism.
"In Hoc Transit?"
i.e. Someone pawned the subway car?
>I agree. Regulatory efforts without cultural change are simply steps toward totalitarianism.
For sake of argument.....
Did not Brown v. Board of Education lead to a climate where J.C Watts and Colin Powell could achieve their full potential as Americans?
I was thinking "in loco motive." But that would work, too.
Bump!
Well, no, not that I can see. Are you sure you know what Brown decided?
For the record Rerum Novarum the first modern encyclical re economcs, condemns socialism (I am doing this by memory) at least three times.
There is an old Christian axiom, the economy exists for man. Man does not exist for the economy.
Heinrich Pesch, S.J. is my hero, fwiw. Ethics and the national economy is Christian and rational
Think about it. When some of our earliest troops in RVN rotated back to CONUS in the very early 60s, they weren't allowed to fly to their home towns on Delta Airlines.
Did Brown et al address all that? No. But it lit a fire in the belly of most Americans that was stronger than any legal decision or government action could ever be.
The book "Tipping Point" speaks to the issue of how you can use a tipping point to your advantage. There are many. Fax system have been around for almost 100 years. Why, all of a sudden did we all have to have one.
Why, all of a sudden, did little, unused Arpanet become what we communicate on today?
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