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On the Universal Destination of Material Goods
From the very first pages of the Book of Genesis it is clear that all creation is ultimately a gift from God and that man was created to be his steward of this creation for the benefit of all God’s children. As captured in Gaudium et Spes, a Vatican II document, “God intended the earth with everything contained in it for the use of all human beings and peoples.The Challenge of International Debt Relief
Proponents of third-world debt relief are lobbying for complete forgiveness of loans to poor countries in or by the year 2000. Some go on to argue that the citizens of these nations do not even owe the debt because it was borrowed by past corrupt governments for political and military purposes. All point out the moral issues behind debt relief, for such nations are unable to spend enough on education, health care, welfare reform, and infrastructure because they are saddled with the oppressive burden of large external debt.Modern misconceptions about monopoly
Much of the modern-day concern about the existence of monopolies is woefully misdirected. The government’s current assault against Microsoft provides good evidence of a very misinformed understanding about what constitutes a detrimental monopoly. As D. T. Armentano has pointed out in connection to the case, “[Microsoft] earned its market position by innovating a user-friendly operating system at minimal cost to the consumer….
Peace and Trade, Not Sanctions, Will Change Iraq
The Vatican has come under pressure from the United States to shun Iraq, the birthplace of the Prophet Abraham, during the travels of Pope John Paul II. The State Department is reportedly concerned that the pope’s scheduled December visit will be manipulated by Saddam Hussein “for political purposes.” No doubt. There are few heads of state anywhere whose political motivations are more suspect than Saddam’s; meanwhile, the pope’s motivations are unquestionably religious and humanitarian.John Paul II and the Problem of Consumerism
Pope John Paul II places his teaching about economics and the social order within the framework of his Christian personalism, in which the human person is the starting point of his analysis and the primary criterion of his evaluation. He has made the cornerstone of his entire pontificate the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that the true nature of the human person is fully revealed in Jesus Christ and that every person has a fundamental vocation revealed by the commandment to love, to give himself to God and to others.T. S. Eliot's Political 'Middle Way'
When the poet and novelist Robert Graves titled his account of the period between the two world wars The Long Weekend, he was summoning the sort of irony appropriate for a period that seems to us now a feckless pause between world crises. Certainly the “Roaring Twenties” retain a bit of luminosity, but the 1930s do not retain any sheen, in large measure due to the rampant, and eventually tragic, political polarization of the decade.Rediscovering the Sacred in Secular Spaces
A French woman was raised a Roman Catholic but reveals that today she no longer considers herself one. Indeed, she has taken herself off the church rolls. When asked why, one might expect from her the sorts of complaints usually leveled against established religion. But not in this case. Her answer came directly and without qualification: She could no longer afford to pay the taxes. It turns out that in France, to be a member of a church means to pay tribute to the state, which, in turn, supports various religious institutions.Common Law and the Free Society
Most would agree that the rule of law is an absolute requirement for any society wishing to enjoy order, prosperity, and freedom, but what is the nature of this law, that we claim ought to rule? The typical modern understanding is that law is something decreed by executive officials, legislative assemblies, or bureaucratic agencies. Often forgotten is that this view of law has not been the predominant perspective through most of Anglo-American history.The Role of Responsibility in a Free Society
One way to think about the role of responsibility in a free society is to imagine a society where freedom is absent. Writers from ancient times have drawn sketches of just this sort of society. These imagined Utopias–conjured up by Plato, Thomas More, and the medieval monk Campanella–have all been similar in their broad outlines. Property is held in common and distributed by the magistrates according to need. Children are raised collectively.Limitations of the Economic Way of Thinking
The noted ecological writer Bill McKibben began a recent article for Audubon magazine with the following suggestion for a thought experiment:
Scholastic Economics: Thomistic Value Theory
It has been seventy years since historian Richard Henry Tawney concluded in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism that, “the true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value.” By this, he appears to mean that Saint Thomas Aquinas’ writings in value theory entail the proposition that the basis of value of an economic good is the amount of human labor expended in producing it. Thus, Tawney adds, “the last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.” Tawney was, of course, mistaken.The Reformation Roots of Social Contract
Contrary to much secular thought, the historic emergence of a social contract that guarantees human liberty stems from the seedbed of Geneva’s Reformation. To be sure, a different social contract, the humanist one, had its cradle in the secular thinking of the Enlightenment.