Another Stab at Theses about my Economic Views

 

Another Summary of My Economic and Anthropological Position

 

The approach I represent is not fundamentally an economic theory at all. It is a philosophical and moral vision from which certain economic conclusions follow. It is based on these principles:

 

"So God created man in his own image." (Genesis 1:27)

 

Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.  (Matthew 25:40)

 

 

1. The economy exists for people, not people for the economy.

 This is the foundational principle. Human beings are not primarily producers, consumers, labor inputs, units of human capital, or bearers of preferences. They are persons, living souls. Therefore, economic systems should be judged by how well they serve genuinely human goods rather than by how efficiently they increase production, consumption, or GDP (=corporate profits). I do not deny that production matters. I deny that production is the measure of all things.

 

2. Human flourishing is richer than what can be economically quantified. 

I reject the tendency to equate well-being with income, consumption, or choice. A good human life includes such things as meaningful work, family bonds, friendship, rootedness in place, participation in a community, stewardship of nature, cultural continuity, meaningful education, opportunities for contemplation, moral and spiritual development. Many of these goods are difficult or impossible to quantify. Consequently, a society can become wealthier while becoming poorer in more important respects. My great-grandparents' farm serves as a concrete example. They were not rich in money, but many of their genuine needs were met through family, land, skills, community, and meaningful work. An economist focused primarily on monetary measures might misdescribe their situation. My father had to uproot us to make a decent living.

 

3. Economics rests on an implicit anthropology. 

Economic theories smuggle in assumptions about what a human being is. If people are understood as utility-maximizers, consumers, or preference-satisfiers, then certain economic arrangements appear natural and desirable. But if people are understood as beings ordered toward truth, love, community, beauty, and transcendence, as in Aristotle, Aquinas, Christian theology, Murdoch, Berry, or Schumacher, then economic life must be judged by different standards. The disagreement is therefore anthropological before it is economic.

 

4. Markets are legitimate but limited. 

I do not oppose markets as such. (I would never socialize my favorite restaurant, Old Hickory BBQ in Owensboro, Kentucky, in the same family for generations.) Nor do I embrace a simple socialism-versus-capitalism framework. The best economic order is likely some form of mixed economy in which different spheres of life retain their integrity. Markets may be appropriate for many goods. But markets should not determine the value of everything. Education, family life, religious life, citizenship, culture, health care, and the natural world should not simply become commodities governed by the same logic as consumer goods. Different spheres of life should be governed by different principles. The power of market actors - corporations - must be limited in strict ways, and taken away where necessary.

 

5. The contemporary global economy tends toward commodification. 

My criticism is directed less at exchange itself than at the tendency of modern global capitalism to treat more and more aspects of life as commodities. Labor, land, community, education, and even human attention are commodified. The result is that human souls appear as instruments serving economic processes rather than economic processes serving living souls. Does a person’s labor lead to some rich stanger’s profit – the only question that matters. A deep moral distortion.

 

6. Globalization pits worker against worker, farmer against farmer, region against region, country against country, humanity against the earth and its particular places. 

I am skeptical of accounts of "development" that focus primarily on aggregate measures such as GDP, wages, productivity, consumption, and economic growth. These measures may reveal something - roughly how much profit is being made - but they do not tell us  whether people are flourishing, communities remain intact, the nature of places are healthy, people retain meaningful control over their lives, relationships are strengthened or weakened, or people themselves regard the changes as improvements. For these reasons I find anthropology, history, literature, and local testimony more illuminating than abstract economic models. I would rather hear the voices of the people undergoing change than simply read a statistical summary of the change.

 

7. Poverty and exploitation are distinct questions 

I readily acknowledge that a factory job may be preferable to starvation. I do not romanticize subsistence agriculture or traditional societies: some work, some may not, some may have been damaged by external forces. (Eastern Kentucky up until King Coal took over is a tragic case for study.) Nor do I deny that industrialization has reduced some forms of suffering. But I reject the inference: Better than starvation, therefore morally acceptable. A labor arrangement may be less bad than the alternatives while still being exploitative or unjust. The fact that a multinational corporation provides employment does not settle the moral question of whether the relationship is ordered toward human dignity or toward maximizing profit from vulnerability.

      And benefits alone do not justify a system. How often did one use to hear: But Hitler built the autobahn and got Germany out of the depression.

 

8. Global corporations distort trade 

    Mainstream economics treats comparative advantage as if goods move internationally while capital remains relatively rooted. German trades its excess cars to South Africa and South Africa exchanges what it has too much of for this. This no longer describes the real world according to the economist that makes most sense to me, Herman Daly. When capital is mobile and labor is not, corporations are not simply participating in mutually beneficial exchange between places. They are able to play places against one another, seeking absolute advantage: cheaper labor, weaker regulations, lower taxes, cheaper land, and less resistance. The root evil is not trade as such. It is the commodification of labor and place. Human beings become “labor costs,” and communities become interchangeable production sites. This lets capital threaten one place with abandonment unless it accepts the conditions of another. What appears in theory as free trade can become, in practice, a system in which mobile capital disciplines relatively immobile workers, communities, and governments. Whole communities, regions, and countries are at the mercy of corporate power.

     Thus I reject the claim that contemporary globalization simply realizes the logic of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage presupposes relatively rooted capital and trade between distinct communities; but when capital itself is globally mobile, corporations increasingly seek absolute advantage by playing one labor force, legal regime, and place against another. The deepest evil is not exchange itself, but the treatment of labor and place as mere commodities.

  

9. Human beings are implicated in distant suffering. 

I reject simplistic notions of collective guilt. Yet I also reject the idea that we are disconnected from the suffering that sustains aspects of capitalist life. The clothes we wear, the phones we carry, the food we buy, and the energy we consume are linked to vast global networks of labor and extraction, controlled from the center of the multinational corporation. Much of the labor involved is oppressive; all is exploitative. I am talking about oppression and exploitation too vast to really imagine. The proper response is not sentimental guilt but the moral acknowledgment that our lives are connected to lives we do not see and doing whatever is in our power to respect the lives of others and indeed the planet. 

    The main danger is meaning-blindness. Modern systems allow people to enjoy benefits while remaining insulated from the human costs that make those benefits possible. Thus the concern is less with guilt, with wrong I personally to do others, but forcing oneself to see the world as it is, to see truthfully. As opposed to living thoughtlessly, allowing the ideology to imprison the mind.

 

10. Imago Dei is the ultimate foundation. 

   Beneath everything lies a theological conviction. Every human being possesses a dignity that exceeds every economic description. A person is never merely a unit of production or a consumer, a migrant or a cost factor. The doctrine of imago Dei – created in the image of God – means that every living soul is more than any function they perform. Economic systems are therefore morally evaluated by the extent to which they recognize, honor, and protect that reality. Or in philosophic terms for non-theists, Immanuel Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative (also known as the Formula of Humanity): we must act in a way that treats humanity, whether in our own person or in any other, always as an end in itself, and never merely as a means to an end.

 

Conclusion     

Human beings are bearers of intrinsic dignity whose flourishing consists in far more than material consumption. The purpose of economic life is to serve those genuinely human goods rather than to maximize production, profit, or growth. Markets are valuable tools but become destructive when they colonize spheres of life governed by other values. The moral test of an economy is not simply how much wealth it creates but what kind of persons, politics, communities, and relationships it makes possible.

 

I consider this in harmony with Catholic Social Teaching, even if the Church does not like to point out how radically the present economic system is in conflict with it.

 Further Biblical Passages / Economic Principles – All of which are meant to be taken literally, as I understand them. 

"The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." (Psalm 24:1) 

"You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy." (Deuteronomy 24:14) 

"The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out." (James 5:4) 

"Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one else." (Isaiah 5:8) 

"What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36) 

"What do you have that you did not receive?" (1 Corinthians 4:7)

 “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.” (Matthew 6:24) 

“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)

 

 Two Ideal Forms of Life

 Every form of life presupposes a picture of how the world must be to justify if, what the human being must be to make it right and natural. 

Worldview of the Dominant Capitalist Culture

    One way of describing the implied metaphysics of modern capitalism, especially in its contemporary American form, is that reality or nature consists in raw material awaiting transformation into wealth (or set aside to be consumed as “scenic”). Human beings are discrete individuals pursuing their own preferences within this world understood primarily as a stock of resources. Human beings are conceived first as autonomous choosers, consumers, producers, and owners rather than as members of communities ordered toward shared goods. Place is secondary to mobility; tradition to innovation; limits to growth; stewardship to control. Anything and everything can be bought and sold given formal consent. The highest social good becomes the expansion of choice, production, consumption, and economic growth. Human relationships are mediated by contracts, markets, and institutions rather than by obligations rooted in family, neighborhood, or inheritance. Value is determined by preference, success by accumulation, and reality itself by what can be measured, priced, and exchanged. What cannot readily be commodified – contemplation, beauty, play, fidelity, holiness, rootedness, love – is tolerated but increasingly marginal to the dominant logic of the system. (The top 1% own roughly three times as much wealth as the bottom 60% of Americans combined. And increasing.)

 

Worldview of Christian Economy

 In an economy shaped by Scripture, Aquinas, Berry, and Schumacher (among others), the world would be understood not as a collection of resources but as a creation, a gift possessing its own integrity and meaning. Human beings would be seen not primarily as consumers or producers but as souls created in the image of God, ordered toward truth, love, worship, and community. Economic activity would therefore be judged according to how well it serves these higher ends. Land would be treated as a trust rather than merely an asset; work as participation in creation rather than merely income generation; wealth as a means rather than an end. The virtues of stewardship, gratitude, prudence, justice, and temperance would take precedence over endless expansion. Communities would seek a degree of self-reliance, preserving local knowledge, local culture, and the health of particular places. Such an economy would still permit trade, property, enterprise, and markets, but all would remain subordinate to the common good and to the conviction that neither people nor nature exist for the economy; rather, the economy exists to support the flourishing of persons, communities, and creation under God. Well, it is a dream but hopefully one that will not die out.

 These two visions of reality and economy are radically antithetical.

  

Works 

Benedict XVI. Caritas in Veritate: Charity in Truth. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009. 

Berry, Wendell. "Christianity and the Survival of Creation." Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, Pantheon Books, 1993, pp. 93–116. 

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. 3rd ed., Counterpoint, 2004. 

Berry, Wendell. "Two Economies." Home Economics: Fourteen Essays. North Point Press, 1987, pp. 54–75. 

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Orbis Books, 1997. 

Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb Jr.. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. 2nd ed., Beacon Press, 1994. 

Francis. Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015. 

John Paul II. Laborem Exercens: On Human Work. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981. 

John Paul II. Sollicitudo Rei Socialis: On Social Concern. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1987. 

McMurtry, John. Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System. Kumarian Press, 1998. 

McMurtry, John. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. Pluto Press, 1999. 

McMurtry, John. Value Wars: The Global Market versus the Life Economy. Pluto Press, 2002. 

Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Harper & Row, 1973.