The popes’ increasing reliance on associations led to their grasp of the importance of subsidiarity, and also the social need for freely willed solidarity in moral witness, concrete assistance, and mutual reliance on one another—in medical care (for example, Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross) and in every other human sphere. The power of voluntary associations for bringing good into every corner of the world is immense. And those who participate in voluntary care worldwide have no problem in sharing love with all the others they meet, for it is love that moves them all.
Solidarity is a new name for caritas in a globalizing world of rapid air transport, electronic communications, and worldwide media. A massive explosion of nongovernmental associations has occurred in our time. This is what Leo XIII dreamed of.
4. The Right to Private Property
Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when every one has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business.
(Aristotle, Politics 1263a25.)
Every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation. . . . And on this very account—that man alone among the animal creation is endowed with reason—it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only things that perish in the use, but those also which, though they have been reduced into use, continue for further use in after time.
(Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §6.)
When the ‘sacredness of property’ is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. . . . Even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, though only one among millions, the law permits to hold thousands of acres as his single share, is not entitled to think that all this is given to him to use and abuse, and deal with as if it concerned nobody but himself. . . . The rents or profits which he can obtain for it are at his sole disposal; but with regard to the land, in everything which he does with it, and everything which he abstains from doing, he is morally bound, and should, whenever the case admits, be legally compelled to make his interest and pleasure consistent with the public good.
(John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy.)
Although it seems to many of today’s progressives that the best way to create wealth and bring poor people out of poverty is socialism implemented through a network of government programs, human experience from ancient times until today has not borne this out. To the contrary, experience shows that personal responsibility for private property actually raises the common prosperity. It especially raises the well-being of the poor more reliably than collective ownership does. Experiments in socialism since the first winter at Plymouth in America have always come aground on the tendency of many to exert themselves no more than is necessary, especially when others exert themselves less. Socialism breeds free riders on the harder and smarter labor of others.
Testimonies to this human propensity go far back in recorded history (including the reports of Julius Caesar from Gaul and Germany), and in recent times have been refreshed by vast experience under socialist nations all around the world. Compare the prosperity of South Korea with the inertia of North Korea, West Germany with East Germany, socialist Cuba with capitalist Chile, precapitalist India and China with the rapid victories over poverty during the past twenty or so years. There are many other instances. Whatever socialist dreams may promise, human experience shows that collectivization retards economic progress. By vivid contrast, having all individuals in a nation take responsibility for their own property better raises the common good of all.
As we detail below in chapter eight, Leo XIII was particularly shrewd in his predictions in Rerum Novarum about what socialism would bring into the world, why it would cause evil, and why attempts to install it would be futile as well as destructive. Leo’s perception holds up very well when compared with what preeminent Western thinkers (in this case, even Albert Einstein) hoped for from socialism:
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.2
John Paul II reaffirms Leo XIII, after a hundred years of experience following Rerum Novarum:
Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own,” and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community.3
The wonderful irony is that the common good suffers most under common property—and that a regime of private property produces a higher level of the common good more quickly and reliably than a statist regime.
5. The Right to a Living Wage
Equity therefore commands that public authority show proper concern for the worker so that from what he contributes to the common good he may receive what will enable him, housed, clothed, and secure, to live his life without hardship. Whence, it follows that all those measures ought to be favored which seem in any way capable of benefiting the condition of workers.
(Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §51.)
We therefore consider it our duty to reaffirm that the remuneration of work is not something that can be left to the laws of the marketplace; nor should it be a decision left to the will of the more powerful. It must be determined in accordance with justice and equity; which means that workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner.
(John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, §71.)
The justice of a socioeconomic system and, in each case, its just functioning, deserve in the final analysis to be evaluated by the way in which man’s work is properly remunerated in the system.
(John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, §19.)
In the agrarian age, the vast majority of workers were fed by their land and lived in ancestral homes. One did not have to be concerned about “wages” for landowners, only for day laborers. In contemporary