WEBVTT NOTE The Crisis in Catholic Social Teaching on Economics 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.200 It is a really great honor for me to be here today and I want to thank Lou for inviting me and just shows, you know, what a couple of books can do. 2 00:00:10.200 --> 00:00:15.680 My wife, my wife wanted to come to this today. My wife is essentially a musician. 3 00:00:15.680 --> 00:00:19.920 She wanted to, can everybody hear me by the way? Is this thing on, you know? 4 00:00:19.920 --> 00:00:26.720 She wanted to be here today and she impulsively said, I'm going to this and we got the ticket and everything and she realized she had too much work to do. 5 00:00:26.720 --> 00:00:30.040 and she just had taken two weeks off to go to South Carolina to help out my 6 00:00:30.040 --> 00:00:31.360 daughter-in-law who just 7 00:00:31.360 --> 00:00:33.600 had a baby and the baby was very ill 8 00:00:33.600 --> 00:00:35.400 the baby's fine now thankfully 9 00:00:35.400 --> 00:00:38.960 so she realized she just spoke too soon but she definitely told me she wants to 10 00:00:38.960 --> 00:00:40.360 come next year 11 00:00:40.360 --> 00:00:44.600 but anyway i think because she backed out we're entitled to make a couple 12 00:00:44.600 --> 00:00:48.880 of jokes at her expense 13 00:00:48.880 --> 00:00:50.520 these are true stories though 14 00:00:50.520 --> 00:00:57.080 I sent away for the Bad Mises t-shirt with Carl Menger's picture on it 15 00:00:57.080 --> 00:01:01.120 and the first time I wore it she was walking by and she kind of just caught 16 00:01:01.120 --> 00:01:03.520 the picture in the name in the corner of her eye 17 00:01:03.520 --> 00:01:07.160 and didn't pay any attention to it but later on she says I can't imagine you 18 00:01:07.160 --> 00:01:13.360 wearing a t-shirt glorifying Joseph Mengele 19 00:01:13.360 --> 00:01:19.020 after thirty five years you just don't get to know a person very well do you? 20 00:01:19.020 --> 00:01:30.020 And the other story was, it was just the other night, the shirt is very soft and I'm a terrible sleeper. If everything isn't quite right, I just can't sleep. So the shirt's soft. I turn into a night shirt. I wear it to bed. 21 00:01:30.020 --> 00:01:40.020 So I get into bed and she looks at me and she says, you know, I can't really get used to a strange face getting into bed. 22 00:01:40.020 --> 00:01:50.020 So anyway, the original topic of the talk suggested by Lew was, why can't religious people understand the benefits of the market? 23 00:01:50.020 --> 00:02:01.020 And I thought that was a great idea, but since I'm a Catholic, cradle Catholic, I've studied under Catholics and I'm into Catholic things, theology as well as economics and politics, 24 00:02:01.020 --> 00:02:08.020 I thought maybe if I just focused on the Catholic Church for a while, that would be much more appropriate for me to do. 25 00:02:08.020 --> 00:02:15.020 A few years ago I gave a paper at the Austrian Scholars Conference entitled The Intellectual 26 00:02:38.020 --> 00:02:45.020 In that paper, I documented the hostility of many of the main Catholic writers in economics to the free market. 27 00:02:45.020 --> 00:02:48.020 I demonstrated their ignorance of basic economic theory. 28 00:02:48.020 --> 00:03:00.020 I showed that many of these writers were literary men, using extremely negative similes and metaphors to describe an economic system that they had already decided was evil. 29 00:03:00.020 --> 00:03:14.340 I showed that the Church authorities themselves were hostile to the free market for two basic reasons. 30 00:03:14.340 --> 00:03:21.340 Firstly, they equated classical liberalism with the French Revolution and the bloody attacks of that event on the Church. 31 00:03:21.340 --> 00:03:27.340 And secondly, the Church's political power was being severely eclipsed in the 1800s. 32 00:03:27.340 --> 00:03:42.340 And this was blamed by the Church authorities on liberalism in general, without distinguishing the various types of liberalism, nor looking at the economic theory separately from the anti-Christian attitudes of some liberal thinkers. 33 00:03:42.340 --> 00:03:54.340 Much to the chagrin of contemporary parators of these attitudes, who equate them with official Church teaching, the Catholic Church had been moving slowly toward an acceptance of the market. 34 00:03:54.340 --> 00:04:12.340 Even Pope Leo XIII, who was not really hostile to capitalism in general, made private property a natural right in the same way that John Locke did, in contradistinction to St. Thomas Aquinas, for whom private property was merely the most practical way to assure productivity. 35 00:04:12.340 --> 00:04:24.340 Pope Pius XI, who condemned Communism and Nazism, nevertheless set back the trend toward the approval of the market when he wrote the following. 36 00:04:24.340 --> 00:04:42.340 The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, venerable brethren, the bishops, and beloved children, the believers, see and deplore. 37 00:04:42.340 --> 00:05:00.340 Free competition has destroyed itself. Economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market. Unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain. All economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel. 38 00:05:00.340 --> 00:05:11.340 Which just brings me back to my childhood. I came from a very wealthy family. My dad was a big accountant. My mother taught in the New York City school system the highest paid teachers of the nations, and we didn't even have air conditioning. 39 00:05:11.340 --> 00:05:23.900 Today, I have a really low salary, Jesus Christ, a small Catholic college, and I have central air and central heat, and we've got like three cars, and so I don't... I can't deal with this. 40 00:05:23.900 --> 00:05:37.940 Now, of course, in a way, pious can't be blamed for thinking this. The world was in the midst of the Great Depression, and no one at the time knew that it was caused, as Murray Rothbard and others have shown, by the various central banks and governments' manipulation of the currencies. 41 00:05:37.940 --> 00:05:42.060 Nevertheless, this attitude has been picked up by many Catholics who do not understand 42 00:05:42.060 --> 00:05:46.840 the development of doctrine, nor the idea that these specific economic and political 43 00:05:46.840 --> 00:05:53.400 theories are really outside the realm of ecclesiastical authority, which should ascertain the accuracy 44 00:05:53.400 --> 00:05:59.340 of its facts prior to making moral pronouncements about them. 45 00:05:59.340 --> 00:06:03.760 Slowly but surely, as I showed in that paper, the Church began to distance itself from these 46 00:06:03.760 --> 00:06:04.760 These Attitudes 47 00:06:04.760 --> 00:06:12.680 Until a break was made by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical, Centesimus Annus. 48 00:06:12.680 --> 00:06:18.080 Now I have it on the highest authority that Pope John Paul II, prior to writing Centesimus 49 00:06:18.080 --> 00:06:22.240 Annus, spent a whole day with Friedrich Hayek. 50 00:06:22.240 --> 00:06:27.320 This discussion with Hayek, as well as having a number of advisors in the writing of the 51 00:06:27.320 --> 00:06:32.520 encyclicals such as Michael Novak and Rocco Battiglione, may account for the difference 52 00:06:32.520 --> 00:06:40.520 between this encyclical, not only from John Paul II's predecessors, but even from some 53 00:06:40.520 --> 00:06:44.200 of his own previous writings on the market. 54 00:06:44.200 --> 00:06:49.620 But in order to more thoroughly understand the tension in the thought of Catholics regarding 55 00:06:49.620 --> 00:06:55.040 the free market economics, it is necessary to examine more closely the nature and influence 56 00:06:55.040 --> 00:06:57.960 of the German historical school. 57 00:06:57.960 --> 00:07:03.240 Now we Austrians know that the German Historical School was the main theoretical obstacle to 58 00:07:03.240 --> 00:07:10.280 Carl Menger's attempt to advance a science of economics. And we can list the main tenets 59 00:07:10.280 --> 00:07:16.880 of this German Historical School as follows. First, it was that this is my own distillation 60 00:07:16.880 --> 00:07:22.160 of it, you may have others. It based itself on the epistemology of Jungian nominalism 61 00:07:22.160 --> 00:07:28.560 and Skepticism. Therefore, it rejected natural law. In other words, it rejected human beings' 62 00:07:28.560 --> 00:07:33.920 participation in the common nature. Therefore, it rejected the possibility of a science of 63 00:07:33.920 --> 00:07:40.680 economics in favor of a mere historical explanation of economics in each country. Basically, it 64 00:07:40.680 --> 00:07:48.000 was just purely historicism. It sees each state as the only real unit, rejects the idea 65 00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:53.520 of the Person, which you'll see later is very Hegelian. And therefore, it led to the idea 66 00:07:53.520 --> 00:07:59.160 of communitarianism and the organic state, and lastly, nostalgically yearn for the things 67 00:07:59.160 --> 00:08:05.320 of the medieval past to accompany the things in the last principle. So, for example, gills 68 00:08:05.320 --> 00:08:09.800 and the emphasis on agriculture and that kind of thing. And this is why they are called 69 00:08:09.800 --> 00:08:18.120 of Romantic Economists. 70 00:08:18.120 --> 00:08:23.140 Now many of those principles of the German Historical School contradict the time-honored 71 00:08:23.140 --> 00:08:25.720 Catholic approaches to life. 72 00:08:25.720 --> 00:08:30.600 The key here is that the Catholic thinkers most influential in earlier economic thought 73 00:08:30.600 --> 00:08:37.660 and church teachings were adherents of this same German Historical School, such that Catholic 74 00:08:37.660 --> 00:08:43.700 and hostility to the free market is neither based on theological grounds nor on a science 75 00:08:43.700 --> 00:08:53.860 of economics, but merely on an adaption of this German historical school's approach. 76 00:08:53.860 --> 00:08:57.660 Now the question we've asked, and I don't think others have really asked this, I haven't 77 00:08:57.660 --> 00:09:01.860 read everything that's ever been written, but we need to ask where the German historical 78 00:09:01.860 --> 00:09:06.760 school came from. We know that it was there, we know they thought like this, it was encouraged 79 00:09:06.760 --> 00:09:13.240 by the Kaiser and everything else, where did it come from? What is the source of all this 80 00:09:13.240 --> 00:09:19.240 misguided thinking that is not dead but it is still with us in many circles? Its origins 81 00:09:19.240 --> 00:09:24.160 can be traced back as far as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who is known to be both a reactionary 82 00:09:24.160 --> 00:09:32.160 and a romantic. Rousseau was a reactionary because he saw all of modern society as evil. 83 00:09:32.160 --> 00:09:36.600 First private property and then the division of labor coming from private property created 84 00:09:36.600 --> 00:09:42.640 Work and Therefore Inequality. And here's a fairly lengthy quote which distills what 85 00:09:42.640 --> 00:09:48.420 he thought. He says, property was introduced, work became necessary, and the vast forests 86 00:09:48.420 --> 00:09:53.060 were changed into growing fields that bid to be watered with the sweat of men, where 87 00:09:53.060 --> 00:10:00.060 one could soon see slavery and misery germinating, ripening along with the crops. Now this development 88 00:10:00.060 --> 00:10:06.620 Now this development destroyed the pristine primitive life that he referred to as the 89 00:10:06.620 --> 00:10:08.780 life of the noble savage. 90 00:10:08.780 --> 00:10:14.180 Continuing Rousseau, as long as men were satisfied with their rustic cabins, as long as they 91 00:10:14.180 --> 00:10:18.780 confined themselves to sewing together with thorns or fish bones, the pelts that they 92 00:10:18.780 --> 00:10:23.180 used as clothing to adorn themselves with plumes and shells, to painting their bodies 93 00:10:23.180 --> 00:10:27.640 with various colors, as long as they applied themselves to tasks that took no more than 94 00:10:27.640 --> 00:10:52.640 Now, this view was substantially different from the contemporary mainstream views. 95 00:10:52.640 --> 00:10:57.160 Despite the fact that Diderot's Encyclopedia contained an essay by Rousseau on political 96 00:10:57.160 --> 00:11:03.360 economy, where he expressed much of the same views quoted above, it contained many articles 97 00:11:03.360 --> 00:11:07.000 and plates extolling technological advances. 98 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:12.080 Many Catholic thinkers of the 19th through the 21st century see Rousseau as indirectly 99 00:11:12.080 --> 00:11:17.360 the father of the French Revolution, which these thinkers despise. 100 00:11:17.360 --> 00:11:22.560 They also lump together the capitalism, capitalism with the mentality that led to that revolution. 101 00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:37.560 But there is inherent contradiction here. If Rousseau was the father of the French Revolution, and the French Revolution gave impetus to the free market system, how can one reconcile Rousseau's anti-capitalism with the allegedly pro-capitalist French Revolution? 102 00:11:37.560 --> 00:11:46.400 The truth lies in the problem of romanticism, which from Rousseau onward would plague the 103 00:11:46.400 --> 00:11:47.400 continent. 104 00:11:47.400 --> 00:11:51.680 In the diagram, I start with German romanticism, but they got that from France, that came in 105 00:11:51.680 --> 00:11:54.800 from France big time. 106 00:11:54.800 --> 00:12:00.100 Essentially romanticism can be described as a cult of the past. 107 00:12:00.100 --> 00:12:05.040 In the case of continental Europe, a hearkening back to the Ancien Regime and its supposedly 108 00:12:05.040 --> 00:12:19.840 Romanticism is a reaction to the Enlightenment and to the French Revolution in general, without 109 00:12:19.840 --> 00:12:26.080 discriminating among any benefits which have flowed from this period of history. 110 00:12:26.080 --> 00:12:30.640 One can see why Romanticism would have a great effect on politics and economics, and cannot 111 00:12:30.640 --> 00:12:38.520 cannot be considered a purely literary outlook as some tend to do, nor was this all. Romantics, 112 00:12:38.520 --> 00:12:44.280 for example de Mester and Bonald, and to some extent Edmund Burke, rejected the idea that 113 00:12:44.280 --> 00:12:48.960 there was a universal reason which applied to everyone in favor of the uniqueness of 114 00:12:48.960 --> 00:12:55.000 each nation and culture. This was really a rejection of natural law and hence of a universal 115 00:12:55.000 --> 00:12:57.500 Science of Economics. 116 00:12:57.500 --> 00:13:02.340 There was also an apocalyptic tendency in some of the German romantic thinkers, which 117 00:13:02.340 --> 00:13:07.360 is especially noteworthy considering that Germany was the place where romanticism had 118 00:13:07.360 --> 00:13:09.840 taken root the most. 119 00:13:09.840 --> 00:13:14.560 The French Catholics deplored the state of Europe after the revolution, but contrasted 120 00:13:14.560 --> 00:13:19.040 that with, quote, what we all await. 121 00:13:19.040 --> 00:13:24.400 Demester rejoiced that the revolutionary fire, quote, had cleansed the place in preparation 122 00:13:24.400 --> 00:13:27.040 for the True Architect. 123 00:13:27.040 --> 00:13:33.160 This is interesting, too, because I saw the same things in my town of Front Royal, Virginia, 124 00:13:33.160 --> 00:13:41.240 which is very much a Catholic town because of the college that's there, regarding Y2K. 125 00:13:41.240 --> 00:13:44.560 Because there were a lot of people who thought this was the end of the technological world 126 00:13:44.560 --> 00:13:45.800 as we saw it. 127 00:13:45.800 --> 00:13:49.160 They were thrilled about the idea, and they stocked their basement with all sorts of food 128 00:13:49.160 --> 00:13:51.560 because we were going to go back to a barter economy. 129 00:13:51.560 --> 00:13:54.280 And everything was to be the way it should have been. 130 00:13:54.280 --> 00:14:05.280 The German Friedrich Schlegel picked up this idea of an apocalyptic return to medieval 131 00:14:05.280 --> 00:14:11.080 culture from Demestra and spread it from Berlin with the aid of his brother and Schliermacher 132 00:14:11.080 --> 00:14:15.400 Novalis, Teek, Halsen and Schelling. 133 00:14:15.400 --> 00:14:19.940 To the romantic expectations of the rebirth of medieval culture and economics must be 134 00:14:19.940 --> 00:14:27.340 We added the contribution of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel believed in free exchange, 135 00:14:27.340 --> 00:14:32.700 but he also said that free exchange took place in civil society, and civil society is subject 136 00:14:32.700 --> 00:14:38.740 to control by the state. Trade would be controlled by the state for its own ends, which are not 137 00:14:38.740 --> 00:14:44.860 necessarily the same ends as the citizen. Not only is this a rejection of much economic 138 00:14:44.860 --> 00:14:51.660 Law, but also it is the origin of the organic state, as well as economic nationalism. 139 00:14:51.660 --> 00:14:57.000 For Hegel, the perfection of the will of the world spirit is found in governmental edicts. 140 00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:02.300 If one takes out the reference to the world spirit, one arrives exactly at the view held 141 00:15:02.300 --> 00:15:09.300 by Heinrich Pech, who's right up there in the top middle of the diagram, and other Catholic 142 00:15:09.300 --> 00:15:10.980 economic thinkers. 143 00:15:10.980 --> 00:15:32.980 The reason for this control by the state, and also the view that all nations are unique, is seen in Hegel's conception of internal relations. 144 00:15:32.980 --> 00:15:38.980 The Hegelian doctrine of internal relations proposed that everything was an organic unity, 145 00:15:38.980 --> 00:15:45.260 and Community, such that one could not understand one aspect of, say, society on its own without 146 00:15:45.260 --> 00:15:49.660 understanding all of the other aspects of that society together. 147 00:15:49.660 --> 00:15:53.140 This meant that one could not develop a science of economics. 148 00:15:53.140 --> 00:15:57.380 One could only speak of economics as it operated in the milieu of German, French, or English 149 00:15:57.380 --> 00:15:59.100 culture. 150 00:15:59.100 --> 00:16:04.580 There were no laws of human action that applied to people as people, hence the Hegelian influence 151 00:16:04.580 --> 00:16:09.380 on the German Historical School predisposed it to see economics as the development of 152 00:16:09.380 --> 00:16:15.560 economic institutions in a purely factual or positivistic way, and not in any way connected 153 00:16:15.560 --> 00:16:22.240 with the universal laws of human action, or coming from a common human nature. 154 00:16:22.240 --> 00:16:26.580 Another Hegelian influence on the German Historical School was the idea of the essential importance 155 00:16:26.580 --> 00:16:32.040 of agriculture. In his philosophy of right, Hegel holds that agriculture is the backbone 156 00:16:32.040 --> 00:16:33.040 of Society. 157 00:16:33.040 --> 00:16:36.940 Well, you can kind of understand that in those days, you know, food was not as plentiful 158 00:16:36.940 --> 00:16:37.940 as it is today. 159 00:16:37.940 --> 00:16:40.120 And of course, people relied on agriculture. 160 00:16:40.120 --> 00:16:42.180 You can understand that. 161 00:16:42.180 --> 00:16:47.480 But it was detached from the economic realities of whether and to what extent the agricultural 162 00:16:47.480 --> 00:16:51.560 component of society is a benefit to that society. 163 00:16:51.560 --> 00:16:57.240 Hale considered agriculture as an estate and should in itself receive representation in 164 00:16:57.240 --> 00:16:59.460 the legislature. 165 00:16:59.460 --> 00:17:04.260 By Catholic distributists of the early 20th century and of today, Hegel sees an almost 166 00:17:04.260 --> 00:17:07.860 mystical component in agriculture. 167 00:17:07.860 --> 00:17:12.180 This is what he says, the substantial or agricultural class, is another name for the agricultural 168 00:17:12.180 --> 00:17:18.280 class, has its capital in the natural products of the soil which it cultivates, a soil which 169 00:17:18.280 --> 00:17:23.780 is capable of exclusive private ownership and which demands formation in an objective 170 00:17:23.780 --> 00:17:26.340 way and not mere haphazard exploitation. 171 00:17:26.340 --> 00:17:48.140 In the face of the connection of agricultural work and its fruit with separate and fixed 172 00:17:48.140 --> 00:17:53.940 times of the year and the dependence of harvests on the variability of natural processes, the 173 00:17:53.940 --> 00:17:58.100 The aim of need in this class turns into provision for the future. 174 00:17:58.100 --> 00:18:02.940 But owing to the conditions here, the agricultural mode of subsistence remains one which owes 175 00:18:02.940 --> 00:18:07.100 comparatively little to reflection and independence of will. 176 00:18:07.100 --> 00:18:11.820 And this mode of life is in general such that this class has the substantial disposition 177 00:18:11.820 --> 00:18:17.180 of an ethical life, which is immediate, resting on family relationship and trust. 178 00:18:17.180 --> 00:18:22.300 So in other words, you can have family relationship, trust and ethical life unless you're in agriculture. 179 00:18:22.300 --> 00:18:30.260 The real beginning and original foundation of states has been rightly ascribed to the 180 00:18:30.260 --> 00:18:34.900 introduction of agriculture along with marriage, because the principle of agriculture brings 181 00:18:34.900 --> 00:18:39.180 with it the formation of land and consequently exclusive private property. 182 00:18:39.180 --> 00:18:44.380 The nomadic life of savages who seek their livelihood from place to place brings back 183 00:18:44.380 --> 00:18:49.380 to the tranquility of private rights and the assured satisfaction of their needs. 184 00:18:49.380 --> 00:18:54.060 Along with these changes, sexual love is restricted to marriage, and this bond in turn grows into 185 00:18:54.060 --> 00:18:59.400 an enduring league, inherently universal, while needs expand into care of a family and 186 00:18:59.400 --> 00:19:02.260 personal possessions into family goods. 187 00:19:02.260 --> 00:19:07.840 Security, consolidation, lasting satisfaction of needs and so forth, things that are the 188 00:19:07.840 --> 00:19:13.100 most obvious recommendations of marriage and agriculture, are nothing but forms of universality, 189 00:19:13.100 --> 00:19:17.940 modes in which the rationality of the final end and aim asserts itself in these spheres. 190 00:19:17.940 --> 00:19:34.860 Interestingly enough, the focus on agriculture has become an almost full-time occupation 191 00:19:34.860 --> 00:19:39.500 of some Catholics through the rebirth of the idea of distributism, originally begun in 192 00:19:39.500 --> 00:19:45.220 England by Hilaire Belloc, whose dates were 1870-1953, and his adherents such as Father 193 00:19:45.220 --> 00:19:49.860 Professor Vincent McNabb, whose dates are 1868-1943. 194 00:19:49.860 --> 00:19:54.300 A new publisher, IHS Press, and I hate to give them publicity, has been started and 195 00:19:54.300 --> 00:20:00.180 pompously proclaims that Catholic social teaching has been dormant these many years, but has 196 00:20:00.180 --> 00:20:03.660 now been resurrection through their distributist publications. 197 00:20:03.660 --> 00:20:08.540 Quote, the editors are firmly convinced that the wisdom of Catholic social thought is today 198 00:20:08.540 --> 00:20:13.180 largely a buried treasure, untapped and almost wholly neglected. 199 00:20:13.180 --> 00:20:24.860 From this romanticism, the German historical school derived the idea of the corporate state. 200 00:20:24.860 --> 00:20:30.340 The emergence of corporatism was, with romanticism, a reaction to the development of liberalism 201 00:20:30.340 --> 00:20:36.420 in the classical sense, industrialism, and sought to reintroduce the alleged harmonies 202 00:20:36.420 --> 00:20:42.820 and organic moral order of the medieval period prior to industrial society. 203 00:20:42.820 --> 00:20:47.140 This would be accomplished by establishing quasi-public, state-licensed intermediate 204 00:20:47.140 --> 00:20:51.120 bodies in each industry, subject to government control. 205 00:20:51.120 --> 00:20:55.880 Each body would be composed of organizations of employers and employees. 206 00:20:55.880 --> 00:20:59.480 Industry-wide economic decisions would be made within each corporate body, subject to 207 00:20:59.480 --> 00:21:04.600 state approval, which would assure those decisions were in the national interest. 208 00:21:04.600 --> 00:21:11.480 Now this idea, brought up by people like Spahn and that kind of people, influenced Pesce. 209 00:21:11.480 --> 00:21:17.880 The CEO doesn't bring this up. Pesce-influenced Nell Brunning and Pius XI has that same plan 210 00:21:17.880 --> 00:21:22.200 in Quadrigia Samuano. That's his plan. At the time, it was called Mussolini Economics 211 00:21:22.200 --> 00:21:26.460 for good reasons. And the interesting thing is, after that encyclical, the official church 212 00:21:26.460 --> 00:21:30.740 dropped it like a hot potato. But a lot of these people in the church today are still 213 00:21:30.740 --> 00:21:36.720 continuing the idea that this is really going to work and it's a reasonable thing. 214 00:21:36.720 --> 00:21:41.360 Now the reason for this type of arrangement conformed to much that has already been discussed 215 00:21:41.360 --> 00:21:46.880 with the addition of the notion that these thinkers saw competition as evil and therefore 216 00:21:46.880 --> 00:21:49.600 it must be limited. 217 00:21:49.600 --> 00:21:53.320 Corporatism believes the market to be chaotic, how many times have you heard that, the chaos 218 00:21:53.320 --> 00:21:58.620 of the market, self-interest to be identical with selfishness, and workers automatically 219 00:21:58.620 --> 00:22:03.880 paid subsistence wages by greedy capitalists unless given official representation in the 220 00:22:03.880 --> 00:22:10.080 of Corporatist Bodies. Again, very faulty economic theory here. Hegelian notions of benevolence, 221 00:22:10.080 --> 00:22:15.220 in a sense, omniscience of the state are seen in corporatist theory. 222 00:22:15.220 --> 00:22:21.040 By the time we get to the thought of Heinrich Pech, whose dates are 1854 to 1926, and his 223 00:22:21.040 --> 00:22:28.820 Lehrbuch Der Nationale Economy, which is five volumes published between 1909 and 1926, touted 224 00:22:28.820 --> 00:22:34.380 Founded on one website by a non-economist who might happen to know as the world's greatest 225 00:22:34.380 --> 00:22:40.620 Catholic economist, Catholic economic thought has already imbibed a great deal of romanticism, 226 00:22:40.620 --> 00:22:46.140 Hegel and the thought of the German historical school and corporatism. 227 00:22:46.140 --> 00:22:51.060 Now there are some common roots here with Nazism. 228 00:22:51.060 --> 00:22:55.140 At this point let us return to the thought of the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, who's 229 00:22:55.140 --> 00:23:13.620 Lassalle and Marx were on the same team for a time, but broke over the method by which 230 00:23:13.620 --> 00:23:17.700 each saw that socialism had to come about. 231 00:23:17.700 --> 00:23:21.140 While both of these men were German, Marx was an internationalist. 232 00:23:21.140 --> 00:23:26.140 He believed in a spontaneous industrial worldwide revolution and saw government as essentially 233 00:23:26.140 --> 00:23:29.040 an employee of the moneyed interests. 234 00:23:29.040 --> 00:23:33.220 The state could never be trusted to aid in a revolution until after the overthrow of 235 00:23:33.220 --> 00:23:35.540 the capitalist by the proletariat. 236 00:23:35.540 --> 00:23:39.860 The state apparatus would then be used by the now empowered workers to wipe out the 237 00:23:39.860 --> 00:23:44.160 last vestiges of capitalism and bourgeois class consciousness. 238 00:23:44.160 --> 00:23:47.140 As this is accomplished, the state withers away. 239 00:23:47.140 --> 00:23:54.140 LaSalle, on the other hand, believed that government was the main method that should be used to install socialism in society. 240 00:23:54.140 --> 00:23:58.140 Mises characterized LaSalle's thought as follows, quote, 241 00:23:58.140 --> 00:24:06.140 He proclaimed the gospel of class war, the progressives as representatives of the bourgeoisie he held were the mortal forces of labor. 242 00:24:06.140 --> 00:24:10.140 You should not fight the state but the exploiting classes. 243 00:24:10.140 --> 00:24:18.140 The state is your friend. Of course, not the state governed by Herr von Bismarck, but the state controlled by me, LaSalle. 244 00:24:18.140 --> 00:24:26.140 Since, however, LaSalle and Bismarck opposed the progressives, they became allies and they even met secretly. 245 00:24:26.140 --> 00:24:30.140 Quote, again, Mises, they both aimed at supreme power in Germany. 246 00:24:30.140 --> 00:24:34.140 Neither Bismarck nor LaSalle was ready to renounce his claim to the first place. 247 00:24:34.140 --> 00:24:38.980 And evidently they plotted together to work this out and LaSalle was hoping that somehow 248 00:24:38.980 --> 00:24:41.140 Bismarck would vanish and he would get the job. 249 00:24:41.140 --> 00:24:43.860 Talk about romanticism. 250 00:24:43.860 --> 00:24:49.020 But the fact that LaSalle died at the young age of 42 in a duel in 1864 did not quell 251 00:24:49.020 --> 00:24:52.940 the movement toward the LaSallean plan. 252 00:24:52.940 --> 00:24:57.180 Bismarck knew that the proletariat made better monarchists and he would use them against 253 00:24:57.180 --> 00:24:59.260 the liberals and the parliament. 254 00:24:59.260 --> 00:25:04.940 The fact that Bismarck installed the state socialist system demonstrates this point. 255 00:25:04.940 --> 00:25:10.660 But LaSalle's influence goes way beyond this immediate historical period. 256 00:25:10.660 --> 00:25:12.900 And again, this is von Mises again. 257 00:25:12.900 --> 00:25:19.040 LaSalle's brief demagogical career is noteworthy because for the first time in Germany, the 258 00:25:19.040 --> 00:25:24.860 idea of socialism and eitatism or statism appeared on the political scene as opposed 259 00:25:24.860 --> 00:25:26.740 to liberalism and freedom. 260 00:25:26.740 --> 00:25:35.740 Lassalle was not himself a Nazi, but was the most eminent forerunner of Nazism and the first German who aimed at the Fuhrer position. 261 00:25:35.740 --> 00:25:46.740 He rejected all the values of the Enlightenment, a key point for our discussion, and of liberal philosophy, but not as the romantic eulogists of the Middle Ages and Royal Legitimism did. 262 00:25:46.740 --> 00:25:54.740 He negated them, but he promised at the same time to realize them in a fuller and broader sense, again back to Romanticism. 263 00:25:54.740 --> 00:26:11.740 Liberalism, he asserted, aims at spurious freedom, but I will bring you true freedom, and true freedom means the omnipotence of government. It is not the police who are the foes of liberty, but the bourgeoisie. The state is God. 264 00:26:11.740 --> 00:26:26.060 Now, this begs the question, who was more dangerous in the long run, Marx or LaSalle? 265 00:26:26.060 --> 00:26:34.540 There never was a spontaneous Marx-type revolution since he wrote the Manifesto in 1848. 266 00:26:34.540 --> 00:26:39.860 Lenin revised Marx's theory into a state socialist theory more similar to LaSalle's than to Marx. 267 00:26:39.860 --> 00:26:43.900 Stalin, Mao, and Castro became socialist dictators, self-appointed spokesmen for the 268 00:26:43.900 --> 00:26:49.120 working class, installing their version of socialism from the top down in the best LaSallian 269 00:26:49.120 --> 00:26:51.020 tradition. 270 00:26:51.020 --> 00:26:54.720 But the United States has not escaped the influence of LaSallian thought. 271 00:26:54.720 --> 00:26:59.620 Ever since the progressive era, it has been widely assumed that an all-knowing, all-virtuous 272 00:26:59.620 --> 00:27:03.360 government has had the interests of the ordinary worker at heart. 273 00:27:03.360 --> 00:27:07.120 How many professors did we have in college who thought that? 274 00:27:07.120 --> 00:27:08.980 I think we all have. 275 00:27:08.980 --> 00:27:13.040 The Progressive Movement was actually a conglomerate of movements which had the following principles 276 00:27:13.040 --> 00:27:17.900 in common, repudiation of the free market economy, concern for the underprivileged, 277 00:27:17.900 --> 00:27:22.060 popular control of government, employment of the process of government for the purpose 278 00:27:22.060 --> 00:27:25.920 of bringing industry under popular control. 279 00:27:25.920 --> 00:27:30.820 These motives are stated almost identically by the famous Jesuit theologian political 280 00:27:30.820 --> 00:27:33.920 theorist, Father John Courtney Murray S.J. 281 00:27:33.920 --> 00:27:39.200 And while these ideas will be discussed some other time, suffice it to say that they were 282 00:27:39.200 --> 00:27:44.720 not scientific economic notions, but stem from the assumptions of LaSalle and the German 283 00:27:44.720 --> 00:27:46.920 Historical School. 284 00:27:46.920 --> 00:27:51.120 Now two things I'd like to add in this spot. 285 00:27:51.120 --> 00:27:54.800 The first of all is the influence of Carl Schmitt. 286 00:27:54.800 --> 00:28:01.640 Carl Schmitt was a Catholic and a jurist, a political legal theorist at the time, and 287 00:28:01.640 --> 00:28:07.840 And he took what was called the Fuhrer Principle and developed it to a high pitch. 288 00:28:07.840 --> 00:28:12.560 The Fuhrer Principle essentially said, and by the way this was an attack on the chaos 289 00:28:12.560 --> 00:28:21.520 of parliamentarianism in the market, he essentially said that every country has to have a leader 290 00:28:21.520 --> 00:28:27.720 of Fuhrer who represents in himself the interests and the thoughts and the hopes and dreams 291 00:28:27.720 --> 00:28:33.160 of all of the people. And ultimately, even if you do have a parliament, he still makes 292 00:28:33.160 --> 00:28:37.800 the final decisions, and he doesn't really have to listen to anything else in the society. 293 00:28:37.800 --> 00:28:43.740 Well, this is exactly the same as Rousseau's legislator, the guy who declares what the 294 00:28:43.740 --> 00:28:49.420 general will is. This is exactly the same. So you go from the romanticism of Rousseau 295 00:28:49.420 --> 00:28:54.140 all through this other stuff until you get the romanticism of the Fuhrer principle of 296 00:28:54.140 --> 00:28:57.940 of Carl Schmitt, who was a devout Catholic, you see. 297 00:28:57.940 --> 00:29:00.900 The second thing is this. 298 00:29:00.900 --> 00:29:06.700 When Hitler wanted to get his emergency powers through after the Reichstag fire, he didn't 299 00:29:06.700 --> 00:29:07.700 have the votes. 300 00:29:07.700 --> 00:29:10.460 I guess you had to have a two-thirds vote to change the Constitution, to give him all 301 00:29:10.460 --> 00:29:11.460 his emergency powers. 302 00:29:11.460 --> 00:29:14.020 He needed 21 votes. 303 00:29:14.020 --> 00:29:16.000 Who did he get the votes from? 304 00:29:16.000 --> 00:29:19.940 The Catholic Center Party, because he promised not to persecute them. 305 00:29:19.940 --> 00:29:20.940 They said, okay, here. 306 00:29:20.940 --> 00:29:27.340 Now, hindsight, of course, is 2020. Maybe they didn't think that anybody could be as bad as he eventually wound up being. 307 00:29:27.340 --> 00:29:37.340 But there you go. So in other words, the Catholics coming from this whole tradition actually, you know, gave Nazism a big oomph. 308 00:29:37.340 --> 00:29:47.940 Now what I'd like to do in the final part of my talk is just to move a little bit to the philosophy of John Paul II when he was a philosophy professor. 309 00:29:47.940 --> 00:29:51.580 and uh... this appears, if you haven't read it, it's not an easy book to read 310 00:29:51.580 --> 00:29:54.860 but this appears in his book, The Acting Person 311 00:29:54.860 --> 00:29:59.140 and it's interesting, Mises writes Human Action, he writes The Acting Person 312 00:29:59.140 --> 00:30:02.220 uh... now this is not a treatise on economics, it's just a treatise on 313 00:30:02.220 --> 00:30:03.540 philosophy 314 00:30:03.540 --> 00:30:06.640 but it's very very interesting because you can see here 315 00:30:06.640 --> 00:30:09.420 that Carol Wojtyła and Ludwig von Mises 316 00:30:09.420 --> 00:30:12.700 were taking the philosophical currents of the time 317 00:30:12.700 --> 00:30:14.180 and basically 318 00:30:14.180 --> 00:30:19.380 you know withdrawing from them the same perspective on human nature 319 00:30:19.380 --> 00:30:22.980 which one of the nice things about the Austrian school is that it is very 320 00:30:22.980 --> 00:30:26.980 it is very philosophical that has within it the seeds of understanding real 321 00:30:26.980 --> 00:30:32.000 people and what they really are instead of some fabrication 322 00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:37.000 Waitiwa on one hand is an Aristotelian Thomist, on the other hand is a 323 00:30:37.000 --> 00:30:38.260 phenomenologist 324 00:30:38.260 --> 00:30:43.460 and because of this he's very good at combining metaphysics and ethics 325 00:30:43.460 --> 00:30:50.780 He says, people are understood through action, people are understood through action. 326 00:30:50.780 --> 00:30:55.740 There are four points, I guess, he makes in this book. 327 00:30:55.740 --> 00:31:04.940 He says, in human experience, we experience not only sense perceptions, but we experience 328 00:31:04.940 --> 00:31:09.860 things and people, and those are two parts of the world. 329 00:31:09.860 --> 00:31:25.060 The subject of action is the human person. 330 00:31:25.060 --> 00:31:32.180 And we can know ourselves as a subject of action by kind of maintaining an objective 331 00:31:32.180 --> 00:31:35.420 distance from ourselves. 332 00:31:35.420 --> 00:31:39.540 And this is very similar to what Smith had said in his theory of moral sentiments. 333 00:31:39.540 --> 00:31:48.540 Man is an objective judge in our own life, which looks at what we're doing and makes moral judgments. 334 00:31:48.540 --> 00:31:54.540 Man also has self-possession, self-governance, and self-determination. 335 00:31:54.540 --> 00:31:59.540 Possession... 336 00:31:59.540 --> 00:32:04.540 Well, I won't go through all the meanings of the terms, I just want to get to the key of it. 337 00:32:04.540 --> 00:32:11.420 Possession means that a person's actions flow from his authority over himself, flow from 338 00:32:11.420 --> 00:32:13.460 his authority over himself. 339 00:32:13.460 --> 00:32:21.260 And he says flights of fancy, imaginary utopias, or, you know, worshipping the past, haha, or 340 00:32:21.260 --> 00:32:26.720 things like that, is a flight from that self-possession. 341 00:32:26.720 --> 00:32:31.140 This is the same thing you find with drug addiction or alcohol addiction. 342 00:32:31.140 --> 00:32:37.620 It's kind of fascinating that he's really equating the romantics with drug addicts and alcoholics. 343 00:32:37.620 --> 00:32:43.780 Now, if a person is self-possessed, they are also self-governing. 344 00:32:43.780 --> 00:32:47.460 And this is man's distinctive property. 345 00:32:47.460 --> 00:32:53.380 The purpose of self-governance is to order one's actions to his existential ends. 346 00:32:53.380 --> 00:32:57.860 In other words, you order one's actions to the things that your nature is supposed to 347 00:32:57.860 --> 00:32:59.740 be doing or supposed to be enhancing. 348 00:32:59.740 --> 00:33:24.100 Man Acts are rulership over the dynamic energy of one's being. It has self-control, control 349 00:33:24.100 --> 00:33:39.100 Self-Governance and Divine Governance are related, since man is the only being whose existence is willed for its own sake. 350 00:33:39.100 --> 00:33:48.100 And true freedom exists in this self-governance. So self-governance now makes possible self-determination. 351 00:33:48.100 --> 00:33:55.100 You say, I will to do something, or I may, but I will not do it, I don't will to do it, etc. 352 00:33:55.100 --> 00:34:06.100 The person acts with self-awareness. He wills what exactly exists. You can't will what can't or won't exist. 353 00:34:06.100 --> 00:34:10.100 And the will is decisive in each of these cases. 354 00:34:10.100 --> 00:34:29.100 Now, there's a difference between act and action in his thought. An act is mere thinking. And I'm not sure, I don't speak Polish, I don't know Polish, so I don't know what word exactly uses for that, but that's the way it's translated. 355 00:34:29.100 --> 00:34:52.100 So that an act is mere thinking. But an action is actually doing something. So mere thinking really has no meaning. Like you say, talk is cheap? Well, thinking is cheap. So you can think about doing something, but that doesn't show anything about yourself. It's actually going out and executing the thought which shows something about yourself. 356 00:34:52.100 --> 00:34:57.100 When a person does an action, the world is permanently changed. 357 00:34:57.100 --> 00:35:03.100 Even if it's a small action that can't really be measured, the world is permanently changed. 358 00:35:03.100 --> 00:35:07.100 And in doing an action, you actualize your nature. 359 00:35:07.100 --> 00:35:12.100 You actualize your nature. It fleshes out what we really are. 360 00:35:12.100 --> 00:35:15.100 For example, you have, say, a five-year-old. 361 00:35:15.100 --> 00:35:21.220 Well, you might want the five-year-old to be a big industrial tycoon or a monk or pool 362 00:35:21.220 --> 00:35:25.940 hustler or whatever, but he's the one that has to make the decisions through life. 363 00:35:25.940 --> 00:35:29.220 And eventually, when you get to be my age, you can't really change that. 364 00:35:29.220 --> 00:35:35.220 I can't go back and say, you know, I want to be a professional football player by dying 365 00:35:35.220 --> 00:35:37.700 about two minutes on the field, so that would be the end of it. 366 00:35:37.700 --> 00:35:39.300 I can't do that anymore. 367 00:35:39.300 --> 00:35:43.720 But the path I've taken, I've made myself, if you will, I have the responsibility of 368 00:35:43.720 --> 00:35:45.720 Creating Myself by This. 369 00:35:45.720 --> 00:35:52.200 All right, I don't want to go on too much with this, but anyway, the whole point of 370 00:35:52.200 --> 00:35:59.120 this thing is that John Paul II, Carol Wojtyła, pushes the idea of responsibility, creativity 371 00:35:59.120 --> 00:36:05.360 of mankind, which is very similar to what the Austrians believe about men. 372 00:36:05.360 --> 00:36:08.600 If we didn't think this was true, we wouldn't support the free market. 373 00:36:08.600 --> 00:36:12.040 We'd say, no, people have to have somebody else to tell them what to do. 374 00:36:12.040 --> 00:36:14.040 The Theory of Money is kind of a higher level or whatever. 375 00:36:14.040 --> 00:36:22.040 Now this flies in the face of all this, because none of the people on this board, on this little diagram here, believed in any of this. 376 00:36:22.040 --> 00:36:25.040 They believed men couldn't be trusted to do the right thing. 377 00:36:25.040 --> 00:36:30.040 They didn't believe that men were co-creators with God, that they had that responsibility. 378 00:36:30.040 --> 00:36:34.040 And John Paul II says in one of his works, he says, 379 00:36:34.040 --> 00:36:51.040 None of the advances we have today, technological or anything else, is opposed to the biblical injunction to go and multiply and subdue the earth, that this is all part of what God has planned for human beings to do, to be the co-creators with Him. 380 00:36:51.040 --> 00:37:03.040 Thank you very much. 381 00:37:03.040 --> 00:37:07.040 Questions? Do we do questions? Yes, sir? 382 00:37:07.040 --> 00:37:12.040 Can you give us a little bit more, sort of a, give us a capsule summary of Pesce's thought? 383 00:37:12.040 --> 00:37:16.040 The IHS people seem to have latched on to him as a great economist. 384 00:37:16.040 --> 00:37:21.040 Right, yeah. Pesce is interesting. Pesce understands industry. 385 00:37:21.040 --> 00:37:26.040 He understands that there needs to be trade between people and things like that. 386 00:37:26.040 --> 00:37:30.040 But after a certain point, after you and I are trading, 387 00:37:30.040 --> 00:37:37.040 There has to be a government policy to decide what's good for you to have, what's good for you to produce, and what's not good to produce. 388 00:37:37.040 --> 00:37:44.040 So in other words, the government itself has these ends which are accomplished over and above the ends of the individuals. 389 00:37:44.040 --> 00:37:48.040 In other words, we see society in the market as sui generis, right? He doesn't. 390 00:37:48.040 --> 00:37:56.040 He sees the society in the market as generated from the top and just we're allowed to do a little training of ourselves to keep ourselves going and that kind of thing. 391 00:37:56.040 --> 00:38:01.040 So that is very much the essence of his thought. 392 00:38:01.040 --> 00:38:07.040 And if you didn't have the state guiding and telling everybody what to do, then there would be market chaos. 393 00:38:07.040 --> 00:38:13.040 It would be totally chaotic, people producing all sorts of things, and for some reason we would produce what people didn't want to buy. 394 00:38:13.040 --> 00:38:21.040 He had no concept of the sovereign consumers and that kind of thing at all. 395 00:38:21.040 --> 00:38:46.040 Let's see, he also believed, he also accepted the wage fund doctrine and the, getting old here, the iron law of wages, yeah, the iron law of wages, sure, from the classicals, but also from von Kettler, who pushed that like crazy. 396 00:38:46.040 --> 00:38:50.800 And von Kettler, von Kettler himself was the first one to bring up the social question. 397 00:38:50.800 --> 00:38:56.560 Von Kettler was a romantic, he was in the romantic club with Gores, who was a German 398 00:38:56.560 --> 00:39:03.080 romantic, and he was von Kettler, he was a higher level person in society, never really 399 00:39:03.080 --> 00:39:06.920 saw a factory, never worked in the factory, but when he became bishop of Mainz, he saw 400 00:39:06.920 --> 00:39:11.000 all these workers that he had never seen people, so, looked so down and out and everything 401 00:39:11.000 --> 00:39:15.200 like that, but of course not realizing that life on the farm where they had come was even 402 00:39:15.200 --> 00:39:19.700 So he's all these poor people. What's the solution? The solution is this 403 00:39:19.700 --> 00:39:24.780 evil capitalism thing, because capitalism is keeping people at this level whereby 404 00:39:24.780 --> 00:39:27.680 they're paid only enough so they can have energy to come to work and that's it 405 00:39:27.680 --> 00:39:32.240 because the capitalist is so stingy. So therefore they're evil. So coming from 406 00:39:32.240 --> 00:39:36.560 that Pesh Saha, the only way we're going to remedy this is from above. 407 00:39:36.560 --> 00:39:53.800 Well, I didn't put everybody in there, I just put some of them in there, yeah. 408 00:39:53.800 --> 00:39:58.660 Well I mean, you would put Schmoller coming out of the German Romantic School, right, 409 00:39:58.660 --> 00:40:01.560 and then just stick him in that box and then have another hour to pesh. 410 00:40:01.560 --> 00:40:02.560 Yeah. 411 00:40:02.560 --> 00:40:03.560 And there were a lot of them. 412 00:40:03.560 --> 00:40:04.560 What happens when I was doing all this research? 413 00:40:04.560 --> 00:40:09.560 Geez, there are a lot of these people, so I only put a couple in for just interest in. 414 00:40:09.560 --> 00:40:10.560 Yeah. 415 00:40:10.560 --> 00:40:16.560 I see that there are Jesuit schools in Manila and the European Union. 416 00:40:16.560 --> 00:40:22.560 My understanding is that the early Jesuits in the city of Palo Alto were pretty much 417 00:40:22.560 --> 00:40:26.560 up to the typical Austrian and Christian bodies. 418 00:40:26.560 --> 00:40:30.560 The modern Austrians are up to the modern Jesuits, 419 00:40:30.560 --> 00:40:38.700 We are talking about our liberation theory, which is to define if the non-Atheist is part of the market, but not the economy. 420 00:40:39.800 --> 00:40:47.800 How would you come after the contention of the general order by the moderns and explain what was in and what is in and what is in? 421 00:41:00.560 --> 00:41:11.560 Their stuff has only come out in some circles, you know, so of course Rothbard writes about it, and Schumpeter writes about it, and Alessandro Chalfin wrote the books on it and things like that. 422 00:41:11.560 --> 00:41:21.560 But they are really ignorant of it. And the other thing is the Jesuits are interested more in what these guys have to say because they see these guys as Catholic. 423 00:41:21.560 --> 00:41:26.560 Like so many of the people I run into, you know, in my circles, this is the Catholic teaching. 424 00:41:26.560 --> 00:41:36.560 And the other stuff is just bupkis, and they don't know anything about the others, so, nice New York Yiddish phrase, but you can tell where I'm from. 425 00:41:36.560 --> 00:41:40.560 And that's where that happens, and they just refuse to see through it. 426 00:41:40.560 --> 00:41:52.560 Even my own doctoral mentor, Father Canavan, who is more on our side than most of these other Jesuits, nevertheless he thinks I've gone over the deep end, you know, with this stuff, but that's because he doesn't understand it either. 427 00:41:52.560 --> 00:41:56.280 I think he can kind of be excused, he's 83 now, so I'm expecting too many new things. 428 00:41:56.280 --> 00:41:57.280 Yes, sir? 429 00:41:57.280 --> 00:42:04.280 You mentioned some of those questions about the things you think about when you're discussing your actions, 430 00:42:04.280 --> 00:42:10.280 but I'm wondering how that's shared with the intentions of the people who are speaking in your heart, 431 00:42:10.280 --> 00:42:12.280 but what's the environment in your heart? 432 00:42:12.280 --> 00:42:16.280 Because I've been speaking in your heart for a very long time. 433 00:42:16.280 --> 00:42:22.280 Yeah, well, first of all, I would say the acting person is a philosophical work, not a theological work, 434 00:42:22.280 --> 00:42:29.280 But I think, thinking, let's take the case from scripture, which specifically related to adultery, right? 435 00:42:29.280 --> 00:42:34.280 I say to you, if you even think about adultery with a woman you've committed to sin already, 436 00:42:34.280 --> 00:42:39.280 and of course that's prohibited by the commandments, that's covetousness. 437 00:42:39.280 --> 00:42:47.280 So Christ also said that the bad things of a man don't come in from the outside, they come from him, they come out from him. 438 00:42:47.280 --> 00:42:52.400 So, I think it's fairly true, but nevertheless the doing of the thing is worse than the thinking 439 00:42:52.400 --> 00:42:53.400 about it. 440 00:42:53.400 --> 00:42:55.320 I think that's what he would probably say. 441 00:42:55.320 --> 00:42:56.320 So you're right. 442 00:42:56.320 --> 00:43:00.200 Sin-wise, if you think about, like if I think about robbing the bank and I happen to trip 443 00:43:00.200 --> 00:43:04.040 and break my leg on the way there and my machine gun goes down the drain, you know, and I go, 444 00:43:04.040 --> 00:43:05.040 oh shucks, I didn't make it. 445 00:43:05.040 --> 00:43:06.960 I've still robbed the bank, essentially. 446 00:43:06.960 --> 00:43:14.440 But the actual doing of the rob, rob the bank really, really fits in your persona now. 447 00:43:14.440 --> 00:43:18.120 I remember just recently, you know, my wife and I have been talking about some of these 448 00:43:18.120 --> 00:43:23.840 criminals you hear about and read about, et cetera, and how really evil and vicious they 449 00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:28.360 are and they have no sympathy for their victims. 450 00:43:28.360 --> 00:43:33.000 I remember talking to one of my theology professors about it and what she said is what happened 451 00:43:33.000 --> 00:43:37.220 was they started to make choices in their younger life which started them on a path 452 00:43:37.220 --> 00:43:41.120 and then their hearts got hardened and then that's kind of what they do for a living. 453 00:43:41.120 --> 00:43:42.120 Like I'm a professor. 454 00:43:42.120 --> 00:43:43.800 I can't really do much else, you know? 455 00:43:43.800 --> 00:43:47.400 And I see that because we have a tendency to say, oh, they must be crazy. 456 00:43:47.400 --> 00:43:48.740 No, they're not crazy. 457 00:43:48.740 --> 00:43:53.320 They started doing this and they got comfortable with it, and the tree bent in the wrong direction. 458 00:43:53.320 --> 00:43:54.320 Uh-huh. 459 00:43:54.320 --> 00:43:56.320 Let's just let me know not to go over. 460 00:43:56.320 --> 00:43:57.320 Yes, sir? 461 00:43:57.320 --> 00:44:13.320 I just picked up a point made by a gentleman from the Jesuit School. First of all, by the way, you should be aware that there are three things that you can do. One is knowing that women can do this. The second one is what a Christian would say if he was a portraitist, and the third is what a Jesuit is thinking. 462 00:44:13.320 --> 00:44:43.320 So now we can add why it is that they think that they've said that, but to take up a serious point, because I've just published a paper on scholastic economics and I was tracing the events from the 17th century and it seems to me that over that 600, 500 year period, the secure development, they're struggling with what they take the injunctions, particularly in regards to misery and other things, with the 463 00:44:43.320 --> 00:44:47.140 the development of the economic situation and gradually coming to terms with it. 464 00:44:47.140 --> 00:44:53.680 But there is a clear move from the more restricted to the less restricted from the empty markets, 465 00:44:53.680 --> 00:44:55.180 empty business or more… 466 00:44:55.180 --> 00:44:55.940 Sure. 467 00:44:55.940 --> 00:45:02.180 There is a clear development, sort of like this, after the 17th century and during the 17th century, 468 00:45:02.180 --> 00:45:07.840 we have two catallactisms difference, one is the reformation, the second is the enlightenment. 469 00:45:07.840 --> 00:45:11.940 As a result of that you have a severe historical situation, right? 470 00:45:11.940 --> 00:45:12.540 Yeah. 471 00:45:12.540 --> 00:45:31.540 After that, you then have the point that you were making, which is that when you come to the emergence of romanticism, it's essentially anti-universal. It's localization and low localization and constant, it's the whole site, it's the spirit of the nation and all of these things. It's the rejection of universalism and rejection of science. 472 00:45:31.540 --> 00:45:48.540 And it's in that environment that the now dislocated world has to try and find a route, and I would argue to make a point here after, if you think about it, that it's only now, after almost 200 years, that we're finally in a position as capitalists to get back on track, right? 473 00:46:01.540 --> 00:46:07.980 Thomas Woods has debated, has said that he should be excommunicated. 474 00:46:07.980 --> 00:46:11.920 Because he and I are like peas in a pod, we'd agree on everything, but this guy just holds 475 00:46:11.920 --> 00:46:15.140 on to this as this was coming right out of heaven, you know. 476 00:46:15.140 --> 00:46:17.980 But yes, you're right, and it is moving in that direction. 477 00:46:17.980 --> 00:46:22.260 There are so many decent Catholics out, the Catholics that are involved in the Austrian 478 00:46:22.260 --> 00:46:26.500 economics movement, and that this fellow who said he should be excommunicated can't understand, 479 00:46:26.500 --> 00:46:27.500 he can't understand it. 480 00:46:27.500 --> 00:46:29.780 He quotes Austrians completely out of context. 481 00:46:29.780 --> 00:46:30.780 You know he hasn't read them. 482 00:46:30.780 --> 00:46:33.860 If you'll take a sentence, well, you know it's like you could do with St. Thomas. 483 00:46:33.860 --> 00:46:37.420 It's St. Thomas asked in the Summa, the question, does God exist? 484 00:46:37.420 --> 00:46:39.180 And you know the way the scholastics work. 485 00:46:39.180 --> 00:46:40.500 First you have objections. 486 00:46:40.500 --> 00:46:41.500 Then you have the other side. 487 00:46:41.500 --> 00:46:42.500 Then he explains. 488 00:46:42.500 --> 00:46:45.940 Well, if you take the objections to be the thought of the person writing, you get confused. 489 00:46:45.940 --> 00:46:48.660 So St. Thomas says, it seems that God does not exist. 490 00:46:48.660 --> 00:46:49.660 Ha-ha! 491 00:46:49.660 --> 00:46:50.660 St. Thomas was an atheist. 492 00:46:50.660 --> 00:46:51.660 And that's what he does. 493 00:46:51.660 --> 00:46:54.900 He takes one thing out of context and says, well, even the Austrians think this. 494 00:46:54.900 --> 00:46:58.980 It was not true if you read the whole book. 495 00:46:58.980 --> 00:46:59.980 Anybody else? 496 00:46:59.980 --> 00:47:14.480 I think it's had it's had a great influence on economics and Catholic 497 00:47:14.480 --> 00:47:20.620 economics and in the church it's had influence for example the the church has 498 00:47:20.620 --> 00:47:25.140 come out recently with a compendium of Catholic social teaching and they if you 499 00:47:25.140 --> 00:47:28.640 read through that I got that and I said oh gee here we go well you know they had 500 00:47:28.640 --> 00:47:33.520 Softpedal, a lot of this other stuff. It's selections from previous encyclicals, and 501 00:47:33.520 --> 00:47:38.100 they left out some of the more horrendous stuff. So if you look, you see the modern stuff is 502 00:47:38.100 --> 00:47:43.360 very market-friendly, and they put the things in the past that were more market-friendly 503 00:47:43.360 --> 00:47:48.260 and ignored the hostile type of thing. So that's working out there. Then there's this 504 00:47:48.260 --> 00:47:55.080 encyclopedia of Catholic social teaching, and if you go to the article on capitalism, 505 00:47:55.080 --> 00:48:00.080 It's written by a Benedictine priest. I don't know what his background is, so I don't know him. 506 00:48:00.080 --> 00:48:05.080 But everything he says is really market-friendly until he gets to the United States. 507 00:48:05.080 --> 00:48:11.080 And then he picks up Monsignor New Deal. What was his name? Monsignor John Ryan. 508 00:48:11.080 --> 00:48:17.080 He picks up on him, and all of a sudden it turns socialist, as if John Ryan was like the Pope. 509 00:48:17.080 --> 00:48:22.080 So they really don't know what they're doing. But the fact that the first part of that article, 510 00:48:22.080 --> 00:48:44.080 Would you like to comment on the growth of John Paul II's ideas between solicitudo socialis and reform 10 years before? 511 00:48:52.080 --> 00:48:56.200 things in there, of course. It's fairly long, so my wife would say I stop clock is right 512 00:48:56.200 --> 00:49:03.840 twice a day, but it was very market hostile in there. And he basically was parroting this 513 00:49:03.840 --> 00:49:10.240 or stuff that had gone before, which is weird because of his philosophical background he 514 00:49:10.240 --> 00:49:14.880 knew better, but it may be that he felt as a relatively new pope at the time that he 515 00:49:14.880 --> 00:49:21.840 had to continue in that hostile tradition. But again, I think the watershed period was 516 00:49:21.840 --> 00:49:26.000 when he met with Hayek, and I think Hayek straightened him out, and so that's why 517 00:49:26.000 --> 00:49:30.600 Sentesis is essentially different than that previous encyclical. Unfortunately, people 518 00:49:30.600 --> 00:49:35.680 still quote that other one. But it's very interesting that even popes can develop, and 519 00:49:35.680 --> 00:49:40.120 these things, remember, are not related to the theological directly. They're not pronouncements 520 00:49:40.120 --> 00:49:45.040 on the meaning of scriptural passages or saying, well, does the Trinity have five or six persons 521 00:49:45.040 --> 00:49:49.440 in, or anything like that. It has nothing to do with that. These are the church's reflections 522 00:49:49.440 --> 00:49:52.080 on Moral Aspects of Social Life. 523 00:49:52.080 --> 00:49:56.000 And it's interesting, because in Chanté's Amazonas, he says the church has no models 524 00:49:56.000 --> 00:49:57.240 to offer. 525 00:49:57.240 --> 00:50:00.640 Good, because in the past they were offering models. 526 00:50:00.640 --> 00:50:03.320 And finally, they now have dropped that, and I hope that continues. 527 00:50:03.320 --> 00:50:09.760 Now, however, I do have to say, the new pope, Benedict XVI, has written a very fine encyclical 528 00:50:09.760 --> 00:50:13.440 called Deus Caritas Est, God is Love. 529 00:50:13.440 --> 00:50:17.680 But in there, he has a little bit of social theory part, and he praises von Kettler. 530 00:50:17.680 --> 00:50:47.580 Michael Novak made a wonderful contribution to his economics. 531 00:50:47.580 --> 00:51:17.580 because he is another one who has thoroughly explicated why understanding and accepting a free market is totally consistent with Catholicism and the fact, as we would all agree in this room, in fact, the Ten Commandments is on the von Mises Institute emblem, that you have to have a moral society in order to have a functioning market. You have to be able to trust people. If you can't trust them, you know, and if the government is corrupt, well, that's kind of like redundancy, but if there isn't some stable rule of law and if you can't trust 532 00:51:47.580 --> 00:51:51.020 If we lose that, which is another subject, if we lose that, then it's going to be more 533 00:51:51.020 --> 00:51:53.660 difficult to run a market. 534 00:51:53.660 --> 00:51:54.660 Thank you so much. 535 00:51:54.660 --> 00:51:55.160 Thank you very much.