Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  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 times, however, most workers are not the owners of land sufficient to feed their families. They do depend on wages. More and more often, households have more than one income-earner. In the United States it turns out that families with higher income tend to be supported by three or four income-earners (often their teenage and twenty-something children earn wages), whereas the poorest households tend to have no workers—mostly because they are widows of advanced age or because they are unmarried females with young children and no husband present. For a very high percentage of the American poor, no one in the household is earning wages, or someone is working only part time for part of the year. Paying a living wage does not, then, solve the problem of poverty. At the lower end, most persons are not receiving any wage.

  Addressing these circumstances, economists tend to fall into at least two camps. One side argues that the way to help is to raise the minimum wage, so that those who work at or near the minimum wage receive at least a marginally better income. The other side points out that the minimum wage is poorly targeted as an antipoverty measure, since many of its beneficiaries are middle-class students or secondary earners from affluent households. They also argue that raising the minimum wage results in the disappearance of more and more low-wage jobs. Beyond a certain price for wages, marginal businesses survive better with fewer employees. Besides, a regime of higher minimum wages is an incentive for developing labor-saving machines. At toll stops on the highways, at cash registers, on the floors of department stores, one sees today fewer and fewer human workers, more and more labor-saving devices. In addition, less and less is it true that a married man’s income alone supports a household. Many millions of households are headed by single women. The greatest number of poor households tend to be exactly such households. Married-couple families are far less often poor. In more than half of those households, both husband and wife work.

  In these new contexts, the definition of a living wage becomes far more complex than in earlier times. Moreover, the policies of governments have huge effects on business activity. For example, one may compare the condition of the working poor during the Carter administration (1976–80) with their condition under the Reagan administration during the next eight years. The policies of the Carter administration placed high tax rates on business and personal income, increased regulation on business activities, and failed to control both inflation and unemployment (the simultaneous occurrence of inflation and unemployment had before then been thought to be impossible). Its final record showed that, through inflation, about 30 percent of those on fixed incomes fell into poverty during the Carter years, and the numbers of the poor went up dramatically. An uncommonly low proportion of all Americans of working age could find work. Median incomes were declining. Mortgage rates for borrowing to buy a home went up to as high as 15 percent, even spiking to 20 percent; inflation soared along at 10 percent or more per year; and unemployment rose as high as 11 percent in some states. Even President Carter referred to this as a “malaise.” Candidate Reagan referred to the combined figures for inflation, unemployment, and borrowing costs as the “misery index.”

  President Reagan reversed policies on almost every one of these fields. Employment soared so high that by the end of his term a larger proportion of Americans was gainfully employed than ever before in our history. The workforce expanded to accommodate millions of women, as more women found jobs than ever before. Labor shortages developed, and immigration expanded to relieve them. The numbers of the poor decreased, the median income of all the lower percentiles rose sharply. The employment rate
of blacks and Hispanics and their average incomes rose to the highest levels in history. After Reagan, one cannot say that government policies have no effect on unemployment, income, labor participation, inflation, mortgage rates, an atmosphere of new job creation, enterprise, or even the launching of whole new industries, such as computers and electronics in manufacturing, cell phones, fiber optics, fax machines, genetic therapies, and countless more.

  More people were receiving wages, and wages were higher (adjusting for inflation) than ever before. This record led many people to think differently about economics. It also forced a rethinking of the components of the living wage. John Paul II reflected some of these changes in his treatment of the living wage in Centesimus Annus, where he commented on the goals that need to be met in order to spare workers from being treated as commodities: “These objectives include a sufficient wage for the support of the family, social insurance for old age and unemployment, and adequate protection for the conditions of employment.”4

  For myself, I would reformulate an approach to the issue of the living wage in this way. First, a good and decent society ought to aim at improving the standard of living of the poor in each decade, so that one can see measurable and admirable economic progress for the poor in each. Second, pastors, theologians, and others who think through Catholic social teaching ought to study the factors that lead to median incomes that rise in each decade, and that show higher income levels for the lowest 10 percent (or even the lowest 20 percent) of income earners. Some government policies impede this growth. Others make it more likely.

  It does seem, based on the record, that political policies that encourage business activities, new job formation, new inventions and discoveries, as well as personal habits of enterprise and economic creativity, help the poor mightily. These are what enable more and more of the poor to work in the first place. Further, political regimes that measure the well-being of the poor solely by government money spent on them overlook two things: first, the fact that they accrue immense public debts to be paid off not by those who feel compassion today, but by their children and grandchildren. (Some compassion! Some self-sacrifice!) Second, they overlook the fact that they condemn the poor to habits of dependency, lack of self-fulfillment, and low economic achievement. The costs to the sense of personal dignity in the lives of the poor are immense. Besides, by this path poverty is never overcome, only perpetuated.

  [CHAPTER 7]

  The Six Ss

  BESIDES THE FIVE PRINCIPLES BEGINNING WITH C, AND THE five beginning with R, there are also six principles beginning with S. What unites these six principles is a generations-long effort to give sharper attention to the human person in the context of community. Thus, the first two Ss give new prominence to the subject of inner human actions and the inner distinctiveness even of communities themselves. Even communities have their own inner character, their own subjectivity which sets them apart from other communities. These two principles take advantage of the method provided by phenomenology’s turn to the subject.

  The next two Ss attend to recent differentiations in the universal human experiences of community. One deals with the relation of local communities to much larger communities (such as the state). This relation is specified as “subsidiarity.” The other side deals with the new experience—through modern means of communication—of the universal bond of sympathy and respect for mutual rights. This relation among the entire human community is called “solidarity.”

  Finally, since the goods of the earth were created by God for the good of all human beings without exception, because we are all children of the same God, emphasis has properly fallen in our time on the imperative of “social inclusion” of all human beings in one economic network of interchange. Thus is realized the “social destination” of the goods of the earth. Paradoxically, experience shows that this social destination is more quickly and thoroughly realized through methods of private ownership, personal initiative, and open and inclusive trade than by political command and management from above.

  Analogously, the principle of social justice highlights the virtues learned and exercised by responsible persons—working through their creative associations—to build up the common good of local communities, as well as national and international communities.

  In brief, the six Ss specify the new differentiations in modern societies that have brought these six new aspects of the relations among human persons and their communities into high definition.

  1. The Subjectivity of the Human Person

  In today’s world, among other rights, the right of economic initiative is often suppressed. Yet it is a right which is important not only for the individual but also for the common good. Experience shows us that the denial of this right, or its limitation in the name of an alleged “equality” of everyone in society, diminishes, or in practice absolutely destroys the spirit of initiative, that is to say the creative subjectivity of the citizen.

  (John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, §15.)

  In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII listed all the ways in which socialism was evil, futile, and bound to fail. John Paul II lived through all those failures.

  Central to Pope John Paul II’s thought is the question: What is a person? A person is an agent able to reflect on options and to choose among them, and to commit his entire self to another. In these potentialities he is made in the image of God. Even though he was not bound to do so, God made each person free, and provident over his or her own destiny. Therein lies the exceptional dignity of the human being among other creatures of God.

  The human person is a self-starter, a creator of her own destiny, gifted with the right to personal initiative, someone who infuses every aspect of his actions and his work with his own personality. Denial of that truth is the fundamental error in socialism, the young Bishop Wojtyła bravely announced. Socialism saw only the material side of human life, he observed, and barely distinguished persons from things. It treated workers as objects of government decisions, not as subjects who produced human and personal things—who infused even steel girders with their own intelligence, hopes, craft, skill, and creativity. Socialism did not really respect “labor.” It did not see laborers as persons. Socialism regarded human beings as factors of production, as cogs in a machine: quantifiable, interchangeable, and replaceable. For socialism, only numbers mattered: numbers of steel beams produced, often piling up in the mill yards only to rust, unfit for anybody to buy. How this waste of their work hurt the pride of workers. Yet socialist functionaries cared little for whether steel beams actually served the needs of others. Their job was to produce, not to serve needs. What mattered is that they had a production quota and it was met. They seemed incapable of seeing that this attitude toward the products of labor destroyed something in the worker’s soul, deadened his whole outlook on life.

  Even deeper, behind the socialist treatment of laborers as material factors in production lay a deliberate and ruthless atheism. Socialism could not see that every single human is a conscious, deliberating, choosing subject, who is entitled to take initiative in creating his own self-image and life path, as his own free conscience empowered him to do. It could not see the Creator in the creature.1

  2. The Subjectivity of Society

  According to Rerum novarum and the whole social doctrine of the Church, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good. This is what I have called the “subjectivity” of society.

  (John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §13.)

  It is not only each person who is a subject and originator of actions, but also each people. For, as we know, no man is an island. Each of us has been plunged into a culture and a language, a set of founding sagas and poems, a particular historical dream to realize, and a matrix of loves and rivalries. Under
the jackboots of marching totalitarians, whole peoples in our time have been overrun, and their communal subjectivity suppressed.

  Poles, in particular, so long occupied by foreign powers from the east and the west, and the north and the south, have long had a special sense of peoplehood. The name the Polish people give to this social subjectivity is Polonia, which is not so much a territory as a national soul, a way of being inspirited as a whole people, an inner sense of integrity and authenticity. Poles who are Christians tend to identify their people with the crucified Christ, having been overrun and put through so much suffering. As a people they are also quietly and determinedly defiant. They insist on being who they are, and not allowing anyone to rip away their soul.

  In the twentieth century, Poland’s Jews suffered doubly: first for being Polish (for which the Nazis had contempt), and second for being Jews, all of whom the Nazis wanted to eradicate from the earth. And in Poland they almost did.

  No one who has experienced twentieth-century Poland can deny the reality of the subjectivity of societies. Not necessarily states, but civil societies: all those intermediary institutions that bind a people as one, with one history, one national character, and one set of communal aspirations.