Love, Christians have always known, believes in both good fences as well as shared pastures. We do this by, as St. Thomas defined love, “willing the good of the other”. Peoples who do not think alike and who would not likely live well together can still share much to the benefit of all, the entire… Read More Good Fences, Shared Bounty
“The poor man is one who wants more, not one who is content with what he has“— Epictetus, Stoic philosopher. I didn’t say the following, Chesterton did: “Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not… Read More Chesterton: “Rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy”
“Catholic social doctrine is neither liberal nor conservative.” As Pope John Paul II put it, the Church’s social teaching “belongs to the field. . .of theology and particularly of moral theology”— Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, no. 41. “Most of us are raised and formed in a milieu in which we receive what we call either liberal… Read More Thomas Storck on An Economics of Justice and Charity
Patrick Bet-David explains how Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and China’s 2001 entry into the WTO triggered the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs. From cheap labor costs driving outsourcing to the devastation of states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, this video explores the economic fallout on Middle America, the rise of the Rust… Read More Trump’s Logic on Tariffs. Opinion.
Companies “leaning into AI to filter out,” even qualified job candidates. Newsweek 1/28/24.. “While over a third of job seekers said they’re applying to more jobs now and hearing back less, there’s also a substantial number of job seekers who have continued to search for employment for more than a year. Roughly one in five… Read More Americans Are Struggling to Find New Jobs as Market Changes.
Better to to appear Quixotic to fools than Egalitarian in the American / French and modern Western sense. St. Thomas Aquinas writes regarding the ideal: “One of the principal things to be considered,” Thomas wrote, “with regard to the good establishment of princes [rulers] is that all should have some part in the government; for in… Read More St. Thomas Aquinas on the Ideal Form of Government
New York Times 7/7/24: Even as vote counting was still underway across France on Sunday night, one thing was clear: The left-wing coalition called the New Popular Front did much better than expected and helped deny the far right a victory. Projections show the coalition coming out in front and gaining dozens of seats —… Read More Communists, Socialists, Greens, far-left Parties surge in France
By John C. Cort | New Oxford Review. January-February 1987. I’ve been thinking a lot about Karl Marx lately. Nearly two billion members of the human race liver under Marxist regimes, while leaders of the major opposition to oppressive regimes in Africa and Latin America usually look to Marx — and sometimes to a queer composite… Read More Neither Karl Marx Nor Adam Smith
Economics as If Families Mattered. by Joseph Pearce. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very centre of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern societies. In the current… Read More Small Is Still Beautiful
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British Canadian computer scientist and cognitive philospher most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.[13] In 2017, he co-founded… Read More The Godfather of AI Has Regrets
As a Christian I’ll eagerly go as far “Left” as seeking to meet the needs of a person’s physical hunger, injury or homelessness; but never so far “Left” as approving absolute “equality” (so-called “equity” today!) in wages; or approving promiscuous immigration, or the supposedly “equitable” availability of abortion, automobiles, personal video games, pornography, sex changes,… Read More Going Left
Note: The State today is massively involved in every aspect of American capitalist society, even to the point of total surveillance of citizens and outrageous mandatory thought-direction. Does this fact make the old paradigms (Capitalism / Socialism) obsolete? Few seem to think so. So as Francis Schaefer once asked, how should we then live? These… Read More Catholic Economics Round Table
For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind? [The] bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole—one attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class. In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster),… Read More The Bullshit-Job Boom
Jordan Peterson and Magette Wade discuss Common Law and free markets Magette Wade is the founder and CEO of SkinIsSkin.com, dedicated to reducing racial discrimination while creating jobs and prosperity in her home country of Senegal. Throughout her career, she has created successful high-end retail brands inspired by diverse African traditions. She is a Forbes “20… Read More Africa Is Not Poor Because of Colonialism.
“[Karl Marx] showed precisely how to overthrow the existing order, but he did not say how matters should proceed thereafter. He simply presumed that with the expropriation of the ruling class, with the fall of political power and the socialization of means of production, the new Jerusalem would be realized. Then, indeed, all contradictions would… Read More Benedict XVI on Marx’s “Fundamental Error”
The New Oxford Review. In our October [1987] symposium, Thomas Molnar, an authority on all things French, threw out the intriguing morsel that the New Oxford Review seems to be following in the footsteps of Esprit, the French Catholic review founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier (who lived from 1905 to 1950). Although we would… Read More Are We “Personalists”?
… every worker-bee stuffed into housing pods … Permanent capital is buying up single family housing stock.
Neither Socialism nor Laissez Faire Capitalism Pope Pius XI in 1931 warned of International Finance, the grave dangers of ‘economic domination’ accumulated in the hands of the few He warned in Quadragesimo Anno of the dangers of international finance controlling credit, crushing competition and families. And this message flows directly and seamlessly from the teachings of Christ… Read More Despotic Economic Dictatorship — Pope Pius XI
How the Federal Reserve Enriched Wall Street & Broke the U.S. Economy… — Merger Corporate Capitalism. How a Reagan Administration Trick is Destroying America (A Matt Stoller Video) — And Peter Schiff on the Fed, 2015. What caused the Great Depression? What does history teach about the risks of war? Did BLM unwittingly abet Federal… Read More The Lords of Easy Money
Social Justice, War, and Housing: Have children! Have many children! Have as many as you can. This is God’s way. Be fruitful, not voluntarily barren (save for specially graced vocations which bear other kinds of fruits for the Body of Christ). Yes, certainly, but today the dilemma for many is how many children can one… Read More Family, Eternity — and Catholic Social Justice
Catholic Critique 