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Peter Kopa, 20.3.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdfru9NHGvE
An old prejudice
Specifically, according to the World Bank, people who had to live in Asia on an income of less than $1.90, has declined since 1990 from 1.85 billion to 776 million people, thanks mainly to the fact that China and India have introduced the market economy. Throughout this time, development aid was of no importance because it has demonstrated even counterproductive, creating even greater social differences by facilitating corruption. The important thing is to create the conditions for the functioning of the free economy, which is the best way of generating jobs and opportunities for all, also for the poor. This requires a rule of law that secure property. The private sector, the division of powers in the State, fair laws and an education system within everyone’s reach.
Moreover, the Christian conception of man as the only rational being demands that the activity it carries out to ensure a dignified and responsible life is based on the Natural Law that governs all things, without anything or anyone forcing him not to manifest his ingenuity and creativity in order to always achieve greater productivity in their work. The systems of the planned economy, as has been the case in Russia until 1989, have proved to be a total failure because they consider the man only as a productive subject that has to be brought under a yoke, as if it were a horse or an ox attached to its cart. This is one of the many consequences of Marxist materialism.
Pope John Paul II has been a witness, for most of his life, how the barbarity of communism was embodied in economic activity in Poland. Thus, in 1991 he published the encyclical ‘Centesimus annus’, in which consummates a Copernican turn in Christian economic doctrine, recognizing openly the moral legitimacy of the Market Economy. Since then there is no longer any talk of a possible third way between socialism and communism.
The Temptation of Socialism
However, there are still outbreaks of socialist thinking by a number of reasons: Firstly, you don’t fully know and understand the man, and therefore, neither the potential of their freedom in the economic field, and also, because the technification and rationalization of the economy is a difficult matter. It’s an increasingly impenetrable world, for most people, where realities such as competition, market, stock exchange operations, options, premiums etc. end up giving the impression that the Economy is a pandora’s box, in the face of which the suspicion arises that a minority takes advantage of the ignorance or lack of means of the majority. And in the end the monster made of prejudice and feelings of rejection appears.
Christians can even claim to justify it by the parable that a camel would sooner go through the eye of a needle than a rich could enter the kingdom of heaven. Or that you cannot serve at the same time God and the money. This simplistic position overlooks the fact that the Gospels speak of attachment, interior subjugation under the economics that in themselves can’t be bad, since in many others sites Jesus Christ declares its intrinsic goodness. Secondly, socialism promises security based on redistributing assets, forgetting that they have to be generated first. When you say that it’s better to give than to receive, you’re always supposed to have something in advance to give.
And this so many times the case in the State when it is run out of money because it has already been spent before. But at the same time the free economy has been stifled by rules that have demonized the economic benefit of the businessman, not wanting to see in him the his right for a fair remuneration for those who put their money together to set up the company, taking huge risks that are never passed on to the employee, except in the event of liquidation of the company itself.
The competition
Free competition is an essential budget in the economy open capitalism, which has always been strongly motivated by the technological innovation, and therefore increased productivity, which historically manifests itself as a virtuous circle, as a vortex that has launched human society to levels of well-being that never before could have been dreamed only 150 years ago. One of these great dreamers was Jules Verne, and then the imagination introduced the science fiction, until the point that much of what was fantasy has become reality. Already in the 13th century, St Albert the Great wrote that ‘competition is a basic element of the market economy, because it rewards the smartest and the hardest working and because its achievements are for the good of society. He adds that the fair price of economic goods are the one estimated by the market at the time of purchase or sale. Many examples illustrate this principle: few discovered the electricity its technological applications, which today favors billions of people, as is the case with the mobile phone.
The right to property
This is another essential element in the non-socialist economy, because if the the most capable were not protected their rights to get the fruit of their efforts, there would be neither encouragement nor reasons to create economic goods. And this is not just about the inventor or the but also, to the merchant who buys a product or right and then sell it at a higher price in another market circumstance (in another place, under other conditions, at another time, along with other things that are revalued as they are combined etc.). In this process, moreover, the trader assumes the risk that you will not make the minimum profit margin required to pay your expenses (bank interest, cost of transport, rent of premises etc.). The commandment of the Decalogue not to steal presupposes the legitimacy property rights morality. Long before Adam Smith, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as the scholastics of the Salamanca, have blessed both the right of ownership and the benefit economic activity. However, so many times this very gain has been subject to suspicion of injustice, especially when it is considered that wages paid to workers should be older ones. This criticism tends to forget that employees have assumed their work, that the company does not pass on its risks (the risk of the sale of production, the risk of indebtedness, the cost of development of their products to ensure their demand, the risk of business capital which is responsible for debts, taxes of 49% in the OECD etc.). In this sense, the history of economic activity is full of Bankruptcies and bankruptcies that have left the owners of the business in poverty. Faced with demands for more pay, people tend not to see the background of every company, even those worth hundreds of billions of dollars, like Apple, Google and Facebook, listed on the stock exchange. While it is true that at these levels, the company has very special, yet these are ventures that have begun with the ingenuity of a Steve Job or a Zuckerberg, who have started by rolling up their sleeves shirt in a garage, and then thousands and millions have believed in them by giving money to become what they are today.
