Well, It's Nice...But is Catholic Social Teaching Realistic?

Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission ^ | December 2003 | Christopher Zehnder

[Hermann the Cherusker]

My reaction - Storck is a socialist, even if he doesn't wish to call himself that.

With only one breadwinner in the family, it would be quite difficult to raise a family in southern California on $17.50 an hour; assuming full-time employment (and many grocery workers do not work full-time), that would come to only about $36 to $37,000 a year.

$17.50 for being a grocery clerk is insane. The job requires no talents and no knowledge, and most of the clerks don't bag your groceries either. Many stores are now moving to self-service checkout, which will be the end of most of these jobs anyway. Probably what the union is dreading.

As to cost of living in California, if you don't like your lifestyle choices - MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE CHEAPER! Is there some "divine right" to live in expensive areas one cannot afford? California is so damn expensive because so many people want to move and live there. If you don't like, move to the country.

Adding medical benefits to that salary, without any employee contributions, would seem merely to approximate a just wage.

Medical insurance is going through the roof. My company has had to raise our contributions and copays twice this year because costs are increasing at a double digit rate. I really think I could get a better deal for myself if I could buy a plan tailored to my needs, like I can for auto insurance. For example, I don't need a big annual prescription benefit, since my family is healthy and my wife does not use birth control pills. I also could do without coverage on simple doctor visits for check-ups (rather like insurance for oil changes on a car, no???). My costs (and everyone else's) are high because I am subsidizing unhealthy people who eat too much, smoke, are sedentary, and refuse to become healthy. And then they insist on ingesting massive amounts of pharmaceuticals to mask the results, rather than treating the base causes. I resent that, since it is no different than stealing money right from my pocket to subsidize disgusting behavior.

So, getting in the group, you get it in a discount.

Why not employer paid auto insurance, housing insurance, travel insurance, etc.? Wouldn't employer organized vacations be cheaper too? How about employer organized cooperative mortgage origination? How about slavery - the employer can do everything for us?

The problem is that we Americans tend to think a wage should be gauged only according to what the employer thinks is the economic worth of a remunerated activity and that to gauge it otherwise would result in economic ruination.

That's not at all true. I think most Americans are (or were) sympathetic to the idea that familymen should earn more, and then men should earn more than woman. And in fact, those used to be common arrangements in offices before they were outlawed by the goverment. But let people do it freely. And if someone doesn't like where he works, let him go get a new job. The best employers will get the best workers, and the worst will go out of business. This all used to be taken care of by morality in America. Good employers felt an obligation to provide rightly for their employee family. The problem today is an absence of morality, not the capitalist marketplace.

This notion, said Storck, descends from the economic thought of Adam Smith, which, he said, "radically distorts what actually goes on in an economy.

I suppose he's never read Smith then or run a business.

they're a power in the economy and they have been able (especially in the past) to get higher wages for their people. This is how the economy works. It doesn't work by some kind of automatic law of supply and demand or principle of input/output.

Gosh, when I went for my latest job a few years ago, I solicited myself to several companies and let them compete for me. The outcome of the bidding of demand was a mutually satisfactory deal that let me move back to my hometown and receive the best pay and benefits pacakge too. The company I now work for actually offered me 10% more than the salary I had told them I would like. Seems like supply and demand to me. There are relatively few people with my skills and knowledge, which I spent much time and effort and money to develop in 20 determined years of my 29 year lifespan. Therefore, I can command a good salary. I don't need the government to give it to me.

I am mystified as to why I should be forced to help out people who fritter away their years of education and make themselves worthless to most employers. No one is forced to be dumb and lazy. If you want a good life, go out and take it! Don't expect me or others to hand it to you for nothing.

The capitalist economy doesn't really allow that; it never asks the question, 'what is the economy for?' It only asks, 'what do you, as an individual, want to do?

They just don't get it do they? The economy, and economic laws are not here to produce morality and goodness. They produce money and goods through labor and investment. The moral application of these things requires a pre-existing moral people. If the Church is complaining about the moral state of the people in relation to economic matters, it needs to look in the mirror. The Church is the minister to souls and ethics and morality. The economy just hums along and makes life possible. Its not the fault of economic laws that people are immoral.

Unions, for example, were able to raise wages and the companies didn't go bankrupt.

What ones? Steel companies? Textiles? Railroads? Mining? I notice the Automakers are really "prospering" under unionism. They are next.

Namely, companies should not be allowed to do what Wal-Mart is doing. The problem is not that the one company's stores are paying too high of wages; the problem is that companies like Wal-Mart shouldn't be allowed to come in and undercut them.

This is pure corporate socialism, i.e. the false notion that companies have some mystical "right" to their marketshare, no matter what happens. Wal-Mart started off as a little Mom-And-Pop place too. They just grew by looking for efficiencies that others did not, and opening stores where there were none. No one is "forced" to shop there, and they didn't cheat by breaking the law.

The so-called occupational groups, which Pius was recommending, are the organizations that ought to handle these questions, not the government directly.

And who organizes those? What if you don't want to be a member?

where you have a society characterized by the ownership of very small businesses

I'm all for small businesses that offer a real service, and I patronize those around me that do. However smallness for the sake of smallness if silly. Why must I be limited to a little hardware store that doesn't carry all the things I need, when something like a Home Depot can be created? Why should I have to waste my time making seperate visits to butcher, baker, grocer, dairy store, etc., when I can go to a supermarket? Doesn't my desire to spend my time as I wish have a moral value?

And in situations where you need large entities, because of the technology involved, they would preferably be owned by the workers.

This implies these concerns will be bearing a large debt burden, because they require enormous amounts of start-up capital which were provided by stock owned by the wealthy. If you forbid large-scale ownership, the workers will not be able to provide the capital necessary. This also ties the workers to the company, rather than letting them have the greater freedom of investing their savings as they wish. The Enron debacle should be a lesson in this, where people were wiped out from investing their retirements in something that turned out to be a fraud. Personally, I think the current 401K system is working just fine. My one caveat with it is allowing mutual fund managers to do the voting of shares, rather than fund owners.

Restoration of Property, Hilaire Belloc provides a blueprint of differential taxation

The good old graduated income tax or a wealth tax? One of the tne planks of Marxism.

Even Catholics don't think this way, and they ought to think this way.

Quite respectfully, the Church is outside of her competence in dictating economic organization of society beyond preaching the requirements of morality. Some of the foolish among us have this silly notion that the Church's primary mission is to teach people the way to heaven not to teach state's economics and reorganize society. This stuff is as silly as the Gregorian Papacy trying to run the world.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

The major problem with this kind of approach is that the meaning of the term "just get by" these days is largely a function of a person's desired standard of living.

What! Everyone doesn't have a right to a $150,000 per year job and 5 weeks vacation and a free 3000 sq. ft. house on two acres? I have to work for it????

[tiki]

I am all for people making a living wage but if the company they work for goes broke because of their demands they lose it all. I've seen this happen more than once and then all the jobs were lost and the harm it caused to the whole community was immeasurable. So social justice could also be protecting more than the grocery checkers it could be about protecting a whole community. There are always 2 sides to a story and I'd have to see both of them.

People see corporations as rich and they think they deserve their share of the pie without taking the risk or at least generating their share of the profit by doing a good job. Supply and Demand should be allowed to work in the job place too. I guarantee that if it was allowed , with all the laws we have in place, anyone worth their job would be making good money and those who were just passing time to make a paycheck would be sadly disappointed.

[tiki]

Medical insurance is going through the roof. My company has had to raise our contributions and copays twice this year because costs are increasing at a double digit rate.

In our diocese we had to pay medical insurance for any employee who worked over 20 hrs a week. We have Cadillac coverage in a very poor area and it cost a bundle. Last year costs went through the roof and the costs really hit the Chancery and now their tune has changed quite a bit. Now the employees have to contribute to their own insurance and pay all the costs for their families. Our diocese insurance covers everything (like if you sneeze run right to the doctor and get a "free" prescription for some medicine that you don't need.)

In my own life I have catastrophic insurance that pays anything after the 1st $20,000 because I'm self-employed and that is all I can afford.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

A lot of people seem to forget that in most companies, of the money available for splitting between labor and profit, labor already receives 75-90% of it depending upon the company's other costs (materials, fixed plant, etc.). The notion that a company with a 5-10% profit is somehow screwing the workers who are getting perhaps 50% or more of the gross is ridiculous. Investment needs a return, or there will be no investment.

[TradicalRC]

Thomas Storck always struck me as a crypto-Liberation Theologist. Maybe it's because he seems to believe that Christ shares his anti-Bourgeois mentality. I still can't figure out why he's writing for New Oxford Review which is an otherwise fine publication.

I do not have a problem with unions or an ethos of fairness with regards to economics. I do have a problem with the heavy hand of Caeser being used to force everyone into complying with the socialist demands of anyone. The idea that only CEO's are greedy but not workers is absurd. Christ NEVER appealed to Caeser to do what he thought right and neither should anyone who calls himself a Christian.

I recall the story of someone asking a union leader what it was that he ultimately wanted. His reply: "More."

[RobbyS]

A tad high, but if one goes up the chain beyond the store level, the rate of compensation climbs rapidly and often for work that any college graduate could do. Everyone complains that Congress sets its own salaries but everyone also knows that so does upper management in the corporate world. And stockholders have a limited power to throw the bums out. Power struggles at the top level and public scandals are the usual causes for these guys to lose their jobs and even then they usually get a nice severance package. What they miss most of the power they once had.

[RobbyS]

The problem with union leaders is that they most want MORE for themselves. The NEA, for instance, has dozens of employees who make more than $200,000 a year. A doubt that one teacher in ten thousamd knows how much this teacher union pays in employee benefits. Our school once had a visit from one of these organizers. She came dressed modestly and in an inexpensive rental care and was very friendly with an old friend of hers who worked on our faculty. I was the union rep at the school and later I commented on how well the organizer had done for herself and was mildly complaining about how much such persons ewere paid. Her teacher friend smiled as if to say, Well. you are just jealous. So I asked her how much she thought the organizers was being paid. She gave some figure under $100,000. When I told her the more likely amount, she was absolutely STUNNED!
But then she composed herself and suggested I must be mistaken. Hard for a senior teacher earning $50 grand a year to accept.

[Onelifetogive]

A tad high, but if one goes up the chain beyond the store level, the rate of compensation climbs rapidly and often for work that any college graduate could do.

One of my MBA profs addressed this issue...

Basically, you can't pay someone enough money to work himself to death...but if you pay the guy above him an astronomical sum, he (and all the other people at his level) will work incredibly hard to get to that level.

i.e. If you paid 20 Sr. Managers $500K per year, they would kick back at the Country Club sipping brandy. But if you pay them $150K per year and their Boss earns $5 Million, they will work long, long, long, hard, competitive, thoroughly exhausting hours to try to earn his job.

[RobbyS]

You are assuming that the managers are working themselves to death or that such demons won't go to work for some company where there are fewer layers between them and the top jobs. The major oil companies, for instance, have always had too many layers for the lower ranking mangers to aspire to more than just the equivalent of $500,000 level that you propose. This was true 70 years ago, when Shell Oil was so muscle bound that it hads to contract out all its drilling work in the East Texas field, because the bureaucracy could not process the number of requests from its field superintendents. Every decision had to go through four managers between East Texas and Tulsa. many of them who had no clue about what needed to be done. This mentality, I understand, still hampers the efforts of the Majors to get into the Russian fields.

[Onelifetogive]

the rate of compensation climbs rapidly and often for work that any college graduate could do.

This indicates a total lack of understanding of business...

I am part of a startup business. We are about 70 employees in high tech. The managers of this company "created" it. The managers of any business are the people who "create wealth." If any college graduate can just "create wealth," why don't they?

You sound like one of the people who look at a manager of a business and say..."All he did today was talk on the phone, send and answer emails, review and approve some projects and talked to some potential customers, I can do ALL of that, I deserve his job."

The key is knowing what to say, what projects to approve, and to win some customers. If you could do that, you would already be doing it.

[polemikos]

"...Socialism...cannot be reconciled with the teachings
of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself
is utterly foreign to Christian truth."
QUADRAGESIMO ANNO, 117, Encyclical of Pope Pius XI
Reconstruction of the Social Order, May 15, 1931

"...no Catholic [can] subscribe even to moderate Socialism."
MATER ET MAGISTRA, 34, Pope John XXIII
On Christianity and Social Progress, May 15, 1961

"Socialists...debase the natural union of man and woman...
the [family] bond they...deliver up to lust. Lured...by the
greed of present goods...they assail the right of property.
While they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying
the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common
whatever has been acquired either by title, by labor, or by
thrift."
QUOD APOSTOLICI MUNERIS, 1, Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII
On Socialism, December 28, 1878

[John Locke]

"Leo XIII is perfectly clear about the just wage," said Storck. "It's based on the human needs of the worker, not on how much they contribute to the enterprise."

An excellent notion, because this solves the problem at a stroke.

The employer pays the worker in proportion to the worker's contribution to the needs of the enterprise, and the Pope pays whatever else the worker thinks he is entitled to.

Case closed.

[tiki]

I would also add to anyone if you've ever had to meet the payroll and go hungry yourself as a result then you know a little about business.

[TradicalRC]

The original quote of "More" comes from Samuel Gompers, a conservative union leader, if you can believe that.
Check it out here:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=2615