I was rather astonished to discover, upon reading you latest missive, that the rumors of your death were greatly exaggerated. I am impressed that you remain as spry as ever, even at the age of 187. Will the miracles of modern medicine never cease?
Just a few minor points before I go on my way back to my business endeavors.
1. Capitalists do not view labor as evil, nor do they view it as a commodity. It is work - human activity that adds value by creating products and services for people.
2. As you note, profit is good. It is the reward one gets for taking risk.
3. People who offer their services in a free market are not slaves or servants - they are traders. Work - and you are paid. You do not need to work for me or anyone in a free society. If you choose, you can learn how to create things that other people desire. If you choose, you may risk your capital by creating a business and hiring others to work for you in order to create value that did not exist before. If you make a profit - you have earned it.
4. The honest efforts of working people is always noble because it reflects the desire to earn things rather than demand them by reason of need. One person's need is not a claim on another's rights. There is a name for the activity that results from such a belief: it is called Theft.
5. Every advance in the human condition since the beginning of time is due to three things: the rule of law, the right of property, and the free exercise of the human mind. These have been guaranteed in practice only by constitutional republics, democratic institutions, and by competition.
6. People who take risks that others do not, and work harder than others do, and make better choices and plan more effectively than other people are entitled to the fruits of their labors. To involuntarily deprive them of such, (as is most often accomplished in this world by threat of force) is to enslave them. The purpose of such thievery matters not: the essential nature of one's action is not changed or ennobled by motive.
I certainly trust your living conditions have improved marginally since I last heard from you in the 1880's, and please send my regards to Herr Engels (assuming that the old man is still with us).
Regards,
Andy
You might add being willing to fight for their country against foreign threats to that human condition and expect reproprocity as citizens.
When we are at that, do not forget to send your regards to Popes Leo XIII and John Paul II
You said:
"People who offer their services in a free market are not slaves or servants - they are traders. Work - and you are paid. You do not need to work for me or anyone in a free society. If you choose, you can learn how to create things that other people desire."
So you are saying that people who "work for [you] or anyone in a free society" DO NOT CREATE? You are repeating the classic freemarketeering error reducing human labor to a mere commodity!
You said:
The honest efforts of working people is always noble because it reflects the desire to earn things rather than demand them by reason of need.
No, the desire to earn/get things is not noble. Another freemarketeers error. The noble is creating things and things are created by human labor, whether by the labor of worker or by the labor of employer in capacity of the manager/leader. Living off dividends, usury and speculation (like stock trading) is not noble(although sometimes justified).
You said:
Every advance in the human condition since the beginning of time is due to three things: the rule of law, the right of property, and the free exercise of the human mind. These have been guaranteed in practice only by constitutional republics, democratic institutions, and by competition.
This is hilarious!!! Human history is MUCH LONGER than freemarketeers imagine. And CERTAINLY "constitutional republics, democratic institutions" did not exist "from the beginning of time".
OK, let me provide a few quotes from Laborem exercens:
Through work man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family. And work means any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means any human activity that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very nature, by virtue of humanity itself.
Man is made to be in the visible universe an image and likeness of God himself, and he is placed in it in order to subdue the earth. From the beginning therefore he is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.
[...]
Church considers it her task always to call attention to the dignity and rights of those who work, to condemn situations in which that dignity and those rights are violated, and to help to guide the above-mentioned changes so as to ensure authentic progress by man and society.
[...]
The ancient world introduced its own typical differentiation of people into dasses according to the type of work done. Work which demanded from the worker the exercise of physical strength, the work of muscles and hands, was considered unworthy of free men, and was therefore given to slaves.
By broadening certain aspects that already belonged to the Old Testament, Christianity brought about a fundamental change of ideas in this field, taking the whole content of the Gospel message as its point of departure, especially the fact that the one who, while being God, became like us in all things11 devoted most of the years of his life on earth to manual work at the carpenter's bench. This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent "Gospel of work", showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one.
Such a concept practically does away with the very basis of the ancient differentiation of people into classes according to the kind of work done. This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of tbe value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work".
[...]
It was precisely one such wide-ranging anomaly that gave rise in the last century to what has been called "the worker question", sometimes described as "the proletariat question"
[...]
Following tlle lines laid dawn by the Encyclical Rerum Novarum and many later documents of the Church's Magisterium, it must be frankly recognized that the reaction against the system of injustice and harm that cried to heaven for vengeance13 and that weighed heavily upon workers in that period of rapid industrialization was justified from the point of view of social morality.
This state of affairs was favoured by the liberal[free market] socio-political system, which, in accordance with its "economistic" premises, strengthened and safeguarded economic initiative by the possessors of capital alone, but did not pay sufficient attention to the rights of the workers, on the grounds that human work is solely an instrument of production, and that capital is the basis, efficient factor and purpose of production.
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As I understand it, you have mistakingly framed the arguement as one of individual rights: capitalist's rights vs. labor rights... That oversimplification ignores the fact that We the People have legislated an economic disparity by granting capitalists the privilege of limited personal liability when they pool their resources through the act of incorporation.
We the People extend this privilege with the expectation that the resultant economies of scale for commercial investment and growth will benefit all. However, when corporate activities become detrimental to our populace, We the People have the right to impose corrective measures.
This can not be repeated often enough. When you assemble labor, capital, marketing, energy etc. and the end result is greater than the sum of these parts, you have profit. When you assemble these things and the result is less than the sum of these parts, you have loss.
PROFIT IS GOOD, LOSS IS BAD.
Your picture of Capitalists is flawed--you ascribe the virtues of the IDEAL capitalist to all of them.
Wrong guess, my man. The human condition guaran-frickin-tees that some "capitalists" will be nasty little creatures, and encounter great success due to this.
Similarly, some 'workers' will be thieves.
Were the world as clean as your post indicates, this thread would only have 4 ripostes.