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CatholicCritter -> RE: Early Church Father on Redistribution of Wealth (5/2/2008 3:00:51 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: c11bar
Check out this great article about the Church and the free market.
A Catholic Defense of the Free Market
"..............All in all, state power to aggress against property owners inevitably encourages man's most predatory instincts, giving him an incentive to devote less time to satisfying the needs of his fellow men and more time to using the state's machinery of coercion to loot them for his own selfish benefit. Since the release of such instincts will seriously undermine the common good, I see no reason that someone could not cite St. Thomas's principle and thereby be perfectly at liberty to oppose expansions of state power over the economy on these grounds.
Pope John Paul II was fond of the maxim that people should be treated as ends in themselves, rather than as mere means to ends. Only the market respects this principle, since transactions are allowed to occur only when both parties give their consent. No one may employ the state's machinery of violence against another to make the latter bow to his will, hand over his money, or otherwise act against his normal inclination.
According to John Paul II, "The moral causes of prosperity . . . reside in a constellation of virtues: industriousness, competence, order, honesty, initiative, frugality, thrift, spirit of service, keeping one's word, daring -- in short, love for work well done. No system or social structure can resolve, as if by magic, the problem of poverty outside of these virtues." These are precisely the virtues that the market economy fosters.
These ideas are not foreign to Catholic tradition: The Late Scholastics of the 16th and 17th centuries favored an economy very largely free of government controls, and John Paul II's Centesimus Annus(1991) reflected an increasing appreciation for the moral and material benefits of non-coerced economic exchange. The less heed we pay to slogans and propaganda, and the more we study the question on its merits, the more attractive does the market become."
very good read, although it's clear that we already have 'semi-free' markets and people are still being used as means and not ends in themselves. coercion comes into play when economic disparity forces others to do things. in a free market, there are and will be many who have little effect on said market and so are at the whim of what those bigger fish who CAN influence the market will do. there is coercion but it's a coercion that is organic or from within the confines of a market, not coercion that is external and forced, like Hilary has gone on record as supporting.
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