TO OWE OR NOT TO OWN

This is another excerpt from the Contradiction section of my book Nunc Dimittis.
Separation Of Powers.
Any American Constitutionalist would be well equipped and eagerly prepared to discuss the familiar issue of the Separation of Powers. Under the Constitution of the United States, three powers are recognized and dutifully separated: the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary. In the process of such preoccupation with the familiar “Powers,” a larger point has been lost, that of the need to separate two principal powers, namely, the economic and the political powers, which, when combined, amount to an unprecedented level of oppression that no classic separation of powers can mitigate or even address with minimal adequacy.
The current gigantic financial crisis in America (this entry was written in October 2008) exposes the danger of this ‘unseparated’ political-economic power that has taken over this country to the extent of controlling all government policies including foreign policy, whose excesses are less conspicuously, but no less directly responsible for the collapse of this nation’s financial institutions, than its demonstrably unsound financial policies, lack of regulation, and all. In fact, the current problem and its successful resolution is not related so much to the question of regulation and deregulation, as to the underlying financial-capitalistic philosophy that promotes and magnifies the absolute political-economic power, running modern America. Therefore, only a change of the philosophy may produce a workable solution for the problems facing America today. The word socialism must cease to be a dirty word in the American lexicon, and must become the definitive philosophical and social force in the country; and the political-economic power merger, which benefits not even the productive capitalist enterprises, but the parasitic speculative and selfishly manipulative financial sector, which has produced that burstable bubble, which has just been burst, must be clearly and decisively separated, for the benefit of the whole nation and its eventual respectable place in the world.

Business And Darwinism.
Why are some people rich and others poor? I am not discussing inherited wealth at the moment, but only the rags to riches cases of the self-made tycoons. What do these people have that others do not, allowing them to make it in capitalist societies?
Judging from various specific stories, education has nothing to do with it. Many of them have been school dropouts, flaunting their educationally deficient backgrounds against the forefronts of spectacular business success. Apparently the traditional liberal formula that all men are born equally endowed, while the actual differences between them are determined by the differences in education, does not work here. Business has nothing to do with education, as we learn by induction.
Which brings us in search of an explanation to the doorway of naked Darwinism, with its highly pertinent theory of struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. All men, animals, or plants, although inheriting certain characteristics from their parents possess individual features of their own, which either exceed the norm, or are deficient in certain parameters. Thus, there are superior specimens and inferior specimens, of which the former type is fit to survive, while the latter type is marked for extinction, except for (in the case of us human beings) certain existing social equalizers, allowing the inferior specimens to subsist (but by no means to be equal to the higher types).
This is a pretty cruel description of natural selection, but it is honest enough, and true enough to the actual picture. The only question remaining to be answered is: which exactly characteristics determine the status of superiority? For instance, we know that people whom we call geniuses in some specific areas of human endeavor, can well be deficient in other vital areas of basic adaptability in either physical or social sense to such an extent that without a protective social support system these individuals might not survive at all, in the Darwinian struggle for existence.
Thus, it depends on particular societies not just to take protective care of their geniuses, but also to define the criteria of value allowing them to characterize persons as “geniuses” deserving of their protection and cultivation. The latter word is of utmost importance, as each society puts forward a set of priorities among the qualities worthy of cultivation, and those which find themselves low on the list are eventually doomed for extinction.
Having said all this, it is one of my most passionate objections to the culture of capitalism that it cultivates most a certain type of person much more preoccupied with personal financial success at all costs (anything goes!) than with things of enduring non-commercial value. As a result we see effective social degradation, disdain for morality, culture, education, aesthetics, and generally, for the past, all of which are not seen as factors contributing to success, and therefore, a despicable waste of precious time, which always ought to be invested in profitable business pursuits.
But alas, elevating business success to the top of the list of priorities diminishes and denigrates everything that human civilization has achieved in five thousand years of its history, reducing mankind to prehistoric conditions, described by Darwin as the life of animals and plants, seeing adaptation to changing situations as the only redeeming value in the struggle for existence. Thus capitalism becomes a reactionary force in human development, threatening to wipe out everything of everlasting value, which we have inherited from our past.
In this context, Darwinism is not an enemy but the last true friend of human civilization, opening our eyes to the reality of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, in the course of which our age is more and more reduced to the primitive state of Darwinian animals and plants, as much devoid of the concept of morality, as the present-day capitalist executive, overwhelmingly preoccupied with business competition.

To Owe Or Not To Own.
The classic American Dream is turning into a nightmare, as so exposed by the current financial, specifically mortgage crisis. The perennial wish of the normal American family man to own a home of his own has been exposed as a bogus, incompatible with the two pillars of free society: success and freedom. The foreclosure tragedy, hitting the American homeowner to the point of depriving him of all his hard-earned assets (…and I am not even talking about his investment in Mr. Bernie Madoff!), has erased the meaning of success from the lives of millions who just yesterday had considered themselves successful. At the same time, it has made painfully clear that in the final analysis it has been far safer to rent than to “own,” in fact, that renting means freedom, and ownership means slavery.
Paradoxically, to own means to owe. This is what the very foundation of capitalism, its gilded but now jilted credit system, has come to signify. If there ever was a hard-hitting self-incrimination of the capitalist way of life, here it is.
But, I guess, despite the crisis there will still be an army of dedicated capitalists who would not just disagree with my words, but who would condemn them as socialist-communist propaganda, and keep standing by the idol they have been worshiping all their lives. The super-rich who owe their super-riches to capitalism know that even having lost a few billion here and there, they would never have enjoyed their still remaining super-riches, except for the magic of capitalism, which had allowed them to make all this money in the first place. And then, the many millions of brainwashed Americans, for whom the empty word “capitalism” has become the substitute for patriotism, national pride, national honor, the terms whose true meaning has long been lost for them in the twisted labyrinth of modern American history.

Communism And Practicality.
It has been so common that it has come to be expected from the most ardent defenders of capitalism, and by logical necessity the fiercest detractors of socialism, to confuse the latter with communism, thereby refusing to acknowledge that socialism and communism are two different things, even though they have a number of things in common. It is therefore important to make the clarification that this entry addresses the practicality (or rather the impracticality) of communism, and by no means of socialism, which has proven its viability in a large number of historical contexts beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Consistently throughout this section it has been my basic argument that insofar as Christianity is concerned, communism would have been much preferable to capitalism, had it been feasible in real terms. But then had it been naturally feasible, without the supernatural intervention of the Second Coming, we would have had a different Bible, and a different Revelation, wouldn’t we?
Now, here is an apt quote from John Stuart Mill, that goes to the heart of my argument about the practicality of Utopian projects, communism being their natural first choice:
Whenever it ceases to be true that mankind as a rule prefers themselves to others and those nearest to them to those more remote, from that moment communism is not only practicable, but the only defensible form of society; and will when that time arrives be assuredly carried into effect. (From Representative Government, written in 1861!)
It does not matter, of course, if this passage is interpreted hyperbolically or as perfectly straight talk. What it implies is in both cases the same.

Contradictory Yet Compatible?
Yes, Capitalism and Christianity are contradictory in terms, but are they also incompatible? Welcome to my variation on the optimist and the pessimist, dressed up here as the question of compatibility versus incompatibility.
The pessimist says, “incompatible.” In support of his position, he quotes the Bible extensively, and each of these quotations is a burning condemnation of everything that capitalism stands for, namely, the promotion of money into its principle raison d’être.
The optimist says, “compatible.” Provided that no moral judgment is made on the nature of the beast, that is, the capitalist enterprise, such compatibility in practical terms is not only possible, but highly desirable, but only under the condition that capitalism is conscientiously redefined and tailor-fitted, to be consistent with the necessary criteria of such compatibility.
There are two judges to settle the dispute. The first judge easily grants both sides their legitimate points, and proudly pronounces his verdict on the issue of compatibility of Capitalism and Christianity: “Conditionally compatible!”
The other judge is more cautious and takes much longer time for his deliberation, the result of which are the following three important “dissertations”: God and Caesar, Capitalism as an Ideology and A Self-Defeating Repudiation Of Neutrality. (These three entries follow next.)

God And Caesar.
Let us first take it for granted that sincere religious faith is good, even though this philosophical thesis can be strongly opposed on theological grounds, by insisting that only the true faith is good, while untrue faiths are from the devil. On this point, however, we are with Kierkegaard, who says that he has more in common with a pagan worshiping a stick with sincerity, than with the whole multitude of religious hypocrites of his own Christian denomination.
Having thus overruled the inherent controversy and concluded that all (morally sound) religion is good, we can logically proceed to the point that Christianity is good (not in the belief of a Christian faithful only, but generally-philosophically, making it good in the eyes of all other religions and denominations). Now, can it be that something ethically good would allow itself to coexist with something amoral or immoral?
Our answer is that immorality is certainly out of this equation. Good cannot peacefully coexist with evil in any imaginable circumstances. But its coexistence with amoral phenomena is not only possible, but utterly inevitable. Such is the coexistence of God with Caesar throughout the millennia of human history.
The point that we are making is that it is not necessary for two symbiotic substances to be ethically judged as good, in order for them to be able to live side by side together. Any symbiosis of good and evil ought to be recalibrated Jenseits, with at least one of the substances judged as amoral, that is ethically neutral…
This is very much in the same vein with our point elsewhere about the truth being a poison, while hope is its sweet antidote. In theological circles, hope is always implicitly judged as good, even though it is habitually in sharp contrast and contradiction with the truth, the latter being patently acknowledged as good, in those same circles. Compare this with Baltazar Gracian’s “Hope is a great liar” (in his Art Of Worldly Wisdom, 1647), which is essentially Nietzsche’s point, expressed much later. His Fiat veritas, pereat vita! puts the whole argument about the goodness of truth in perspective… But we are getting carried away here into an entirely different argument, which will be rightfully pursued in its proper place.
Coming back to our specific issue, we have attempted to draw an analogy here between Christianity and Capitalism on the one hand, and God and Caesar on the other. If God and Caesar are compatible (otherwise Jesus would have spoken against Caesar!), then Christianity and Capitalism must be compatible too… Does this analogy hold water?

Capitalism As An Ideology.
When Jesus says, in Luke 20:25, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s, He implies that the two realms have a clear demarcation line between them, and that line is not to be crossed. The line, however, is being crossed all the time whenever our Caesar wishes to promote an ideology which is inconsistent with religion.
An ideology is defined as a set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system. There is no problem when it is derived from the state’s religion or is wholly consistent with it. The communist ideology is consistent with Christianity, and also with other great religions, as they all promote very similar social objectives. As we have seen, capitalism as an ideology goes against the very foundation of religious philosophy and is completely inimical to it. It is, therefore, our first order of business right now to ascertain whether capitalism is, in fact, an ideology, or it can be separated from it, and thus become as compatible with religion, as Caesar can be compatible with God.
There are certain parameters, under which capitalism can be considered non-ideological. One’s engagement in private enterprise or even the practice of usury do not constitute an ideology, as long as the state does not promote them as an expression of the national idea, a practice rooted in the particular social philosophy that the state claims to represent. But as we see in real life, and particularly within modern American society, the capitalist phenomenon is not satisfied with practice alone; it also strives to reaffirm itself in doctrinal terms, thus necessarily expanding into the ideological dimension. Capitalism is freedom, they say, as opposed to enslavement. Capitalism is the only propitious climate for man’s ingenuity, and therefore for man’s genius. Capitalism is the fairest social system, they say, as it defies class inequality, by allowing the poorest of the poor to become the richest of the rich, through upward mobility. This is by no means Caesar’s world. This is Caesar’s attempt to intrude and superimpose himself on the things which be God’s.
It is this kind of ideology that I have called a substitute for religion. It actually makes its own religion, and as such, it is incompatible with Christianity or with any other great religion.
In this regard, and especially in the context of Washington’s current infatuation with the neo-conservative ideology for the “New American Century,” which is exactly an effort of selling Globalism (American-style capitalism) to the world, I am delighted to quote the American economist and sociologist William Graham Sumner, who uses the word doctrine in the same sense as the word ideology may be used, both amounting to the same thing (see the definition of ideology cited above):
If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most fearful tyrants to which men are ever subject, because doctrines get inside of a man’s own reason, and betray him against himself… Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines. (War, 1903)
I will need to reinforce this insightful and important connection between capitalism as an ideology, which is the source, and the neo-conservative ideology of the American twenty-first century, as its natural outcome, in a future special project, which will be a worthwhile undertaking, as the neo-conservative ideology has by no means retreated with the inglorious end of the George W. Bush era: it had been the driving force behind President Clinton’s Clintonism, and is undoubtedly adapting itself to the new post-Bush era where President Obama has done nothing so far to repudiate its formidable source.

A Self-Defeating Repudiation Of Neutrality.
Why has capitalism mutated into an ideology and therefore into an alternative religion, inconsistent with the principles of Christianity, in the first place? Perhaps, out of the necessity to prove to the Marxian world that it was not evil?…
But now, the fact that capitalism has indeed become bogged down in an uncompromising capitalist ideology raises the intriguing question of whether Capitalism and Christianity can still coexist in a real-life symbiotic relationship, even though they are patently morally incompatible?
It should be noted that the improbable utopia of Capitalism and Christianity surviving together forever is no longer consistent with my thinking on the future configuration of world economic systems. There is no room here for a philosophical argument either, concerning the logical feasibility of any coexistence of an ethically positive phenomenon, such as Christianity, with something totally immoral, when ethically judged, such as Capitalism. The conclusion on my part that such a coexistence is possible and probably even unavoidable as long as the latter phenomenon is exempt from an ethical valuation, and thus considered amoral, is no longer sustainable, considering the forcefulness with which the ideology of capitalism insists on its superiority over all alternative ideologies and, consequently, religions. It is however my conclusion that eventually capitalist ideology will suffer a moral defeat, and capitalism will be liberated from it, becoming an essentially amoral system, capable, as such, to coexist with religion. But in the process of such uneasy coexistence, the amoral phenomenon of capitalism will be positively transformed, but not into a suddenly “moral” economic system, but rather into yet another amoral economic system, much closer to the socialistic model, which should then be more ethically-friendly to its religious counterpart, and thus Marx’s famous historical sequence of socio-economic formations (and also Hegel’s conception of spiral historical progress) should both acquire a nice facelift, reconciling the idealism of historical morality with the reality of the historical Jenseits!
As to the future of socialism, no apologies are needed here, but I do not believe that it will ever exist in pure form either (which is as statism). A mixed basket is also most likely in this case and through their respective mixed baskets socialism and capitalism may eventually converge, although this blessed event is perhaps still many years away.

Socialism As A European Substitute For Religion.
As long as we are on the subject of capitalism and religion, it may now be explained perhaps why people in the capitalist America are so much “clinging to religion” (alluding to Candidate Obama’s famous statement during the 2008 Presidential Campaign) while people in socialist Western Europe are rather indifferent to it. The adoption of capitalist ideology in America creates a subconscious guilt complex toward the somewhat abandoned religious morality, sending the split souls into churches, to compensate for the disconnect. At the same time, in Europe, where their socialist practices are much closer to Europe’s religious roots, there is no urge for a spiritual compensation, and religious practice has, consequently, been relegated to the rear burner of the social stove-top.
To capsulate this important thought for maximum clarity, European socialism, introduced in Europe back in the nineteenth century and quickly taking root there, has proved itself a viable enough ethical substitute, and succeeded in somewhat trivializing Christian religion there (at least until certain recent events have raised a few questions about it), whereas American capitalism, despite all its efforts, cannot become a substitute for religious morality, and keeps American Christianity alive, as an antidote of sorts to capitalist immorality.
This analysis does not apply to Russian spiritually rooted socialism, where the Russian Orthodox Church is an indispensable complement of the State, and social morality is not derived from the socialist practices, but directly from religion itself.

The Tiger, The Cow, And The Horse.
Winston Churchill is famous for the following comparison of capitalism and socialism:
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” I find it indeed very sharp, but rather thin, as it flirts with a loose interpretation of capitalism versus socialism, in a cartoonish cold-war propaganda witticism, never reaching into the finer points of their actual distinction. On the other hand, his lesser-known gem on the same subject reveals much more subtlety, and, rather than being flatly declarative, is open to different interpretations. Here it is:
“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.”
My lingering impression here is not that Churchill commends capitalism as a healthy workhorse, but that he calls attention to the sad fact that there are too few people in this world who are capable of using capitalism as a workhorse pulling a sturdy wagon, whereas the important others are split between those who see it as a predator (the anti-capitalists), and those who see it as a milking cow (the successful aggressive capitalists). There are of course also those who sing praises to capitalism without realizing that they are by no means the horse’s drivers, but rather, the predator’s prey, the milkman’s cow…

The Last Nail.
Needless to say, I could go on and on quoting what the modern world’s greatest thinkers have disparagingly said about the nature and the practices of capitalism. Some more quotes are bound to appear in my working entries later in this section. But the purpose of the “master quotes” above has almost been achieved in citing a number of particularly important and authoritative quotations. This entry is designed to drive the last nail into the coffin of the glossy image that capitalist ideology has been striving to spin for itself and the quote in it comes not from a detractor of capitalism, but from one of its principal upholders, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan. Here is what he had to say about capitalism back in 1963 in his essay The Assault on Integrity: “Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues, and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.” What could pass off as a straight-faced apologia of capitalism in 1963 has become a bitter caricature of itself half a century later, after the avalanche of revelations of grand-scale criminality, and the unintended sarcasm of Mr. Greenspan’s words, indeed, drives the last nail into the coffin of the kind of capitalism which has taken over the American economic system, partly on Mr. Greenspan’s watch.

Capital And Capitalism.
As the reader may have noticed by now, I am not particularly happy with assigning negative connotations to the term capitalism, because this indiscriminate repudiation allows bad capitalism to defend itself against its critics by using good and neutral capitalist practices in its defense. Thus certain perfectly natural activities, such as the market and private enterprise, have been allowed to be used interchangeably with a host of very negative and repulsive practices, such as stock manipulation and loan shark usury, which is not at all helpful in exposing the infectious diseases of capitalism and trying to mitigate them.
In this regard, it is useful to look at the word, from which capitalism originates, that is, capital. Predictably, this is what we learn about capital from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital: Capital is dead labor that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. This unpleasant description is very different from David Ricardo’s cool definition formulated half a century before Marx’s: "Capital is that part of the wealth of a country which is employed in production, and consists of food, clothing, tools, raw materials, machinery, etc., necessary to give effect to labor." From Ricardo’s definition, it is obvious that it can be equally applied to any economic system whatsoever, including socialism, and even communism!
Considered dispassionately, capital is nothing more than one of the three factors of production, which also include land and labor. (I am skeptical about identifying management as the fourth factor. In my estimation management is a form of labor. Interestingly, in his very first 1885 Message to Congress, President Grover Cleveland, one of the better US Presidents, whose face graces the $1,000 bill, goes even further, saying that “Labor is the capital of our workingmen.”!!!)
It is therefore my good advice to all detractors of capital and capitalism to stay away from an indiscriminate assault on these two harmless commonsense words, focusing instead on the specific misdeeds, promoted by the defenders of bad capitalism, as if those excesses were the essence of capital and capitalism.

Globalism As Imperialism.
Globalism, to me, is another word for modern American imperialism, and it is definitely an extension of the American dark-side capitalism to other nations. When a very rich man goes out to make deals with his poor neighbors, a relationship of inequality is implicit in such efforts, unless the man is a saint and a communist.
Globalization is an attempt at world domination. No wonder that at the height of the Globalist offensive the poorer countries of Eastern Europe were seen in Washington as easy prey, and called New Europe, whereas the relationship with the wealthy Western Europe (Old Europe), who had been correctly presumed to put up a resistance to any projection of American hegemony, dramatically deteriorated. What American Globalists had not anticipated, however, was the nationalist backlash from the outraged rest of the world, which has by now effectively resulted in the death of Globalism as such.
Nations, collectively, do not suffer from the shortage of common sense, and the world was quick to identify Globalism as the latest face of American Imperialism. I am however refusing to recognize “imperialism” as a tag permanently attached to the American nation as such. The nation is obviously split, or perhaps suffers from a temporary Globalist (neoconservative) takeover, which may eventually retreat, as more reasonable forces, taking advantage of Globalists’ global defeat, may take America back to reason. In the meantime, it will be worthwhile to remind my American readers what President Grover Cleveland (ranked as high as #12 in some recent national polls) said about imperialism in his earlier quoted 1885 Message to Congress:
"Maintaining, as I do, the tenets of a line of precedents from Washington’s day, which proscribe entangling alliances with foreign states, I do not favor a policy of acquisition of new and distant territory or the incorporation of remote interests with our own." (Underlined by me.)
And I am very much pleased to end this entry by quoting a passage from the Democratic National Platform of 1900, which says this:
"We assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home."
I would not call this prophetic, as this is plain common sense.

Interest And Usury.
Just like with capitalism, where there are ardent voices on both sides of the ethical argument, the question of interest and usury has drawn the battle lines between the same combatants. It is easy but quite unproductive for the opponents of interest to quote Deuteronomy 23:19, as they will be parried by the defenders of usury with their own quote of Deuteronomy 23:20. There is a tendency however to distinguish interest charging at reasonable rates from excessive rates, which are now commonly identified as usury.
I have no interest in rounding up the usual suspects of this argument, as their horse has already been beaten to death. My personal view is that loan-making is indeed a service, which has to be rewarded somehow, but that this service ought to be limited to two situations. One is that the loan be made by an appropriate public organization, all profit going into the public coffers. The other is that the interested party (public or private), which has the funds to cover such a loan, enter a profit-sharing partnership with the party which asks for the loan for a commercial purpose. Any interest lending to the needy and the destitute, who need the money just to make the ends meet, is certainly immoral.
I believe that putting the savings and loan practice into private hands inevitably leads to abuse as corruption is firmly embedded in human nature, and the lucrative practice of excessive interest lending holds too strong a temptation to resist for those who are interested in pursuing this sort of occupation in the first place.

Ethics Of Private Property.
Is private property moral or immoral? The reader already knows my opinion that, taken in isolation from all other factors, private property is ethically neutral. Rousseau is certainly among the loudest voices asserting its immorality:
"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought to himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditch and crying to his fellows: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all and the earth itself belongs to nobody.'” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dissertation On the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind.)
Even more ridiculous, except for purely demagogical agitation and propaganda reasons, is Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s famous declaration of war on private property in The Communist Manifesto of 1848:
"You reproach us with planning to do away with your property. Precisely, that is just what we propose." (This is the kind of bold demagoguery which must be particularly effective with those cartoon-character communists who, as the joke goes, “have nothing, and want to share it with the rest of the world.”)
I have had enough of the shameless promoters of the other extreme, which is proprietary morality, and I am not going to quote any of them here. But a more moderate view, which is either matter-of-fact or conditional in its assessment, deserves to be mentioned. For example, here is an interesting quote by John Locke, which sounds like a sentence taken out of Hobbes’s Leviathan: “The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.” Not surprisingly, Bakunin adds his substantial contribution to this thought, in his Dieu et l’État: “Private property is at once the consequence and the basis of the state.”
And now, here is what the Roman Catholic Church has to say about it, the Pope ipse dixit ex cathedra:
“Every man has by nature (!!!) the right to possess property of his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the lower animals.” (Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891.) Pope Pius X, in his 1903 Apostolic Letter introduces still further clarity into this subject: “Of the goods of the earth man has not merely the use, like the brutes, but he also has the right of permanent proprietorship; and not merely of those things which are consumed by use, but also of those not consumed by use.”
Mind you, this is not the Zeitgeist of our materialistic modern age, or something. The Popes are well in tune in this with the greatest Catholic mind of the supposedly ascetic (at least, in theory) Dark Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas, who asserts moral neutrality of wealth in the following passage from his Summa Contra Gentiles: "External riches are necessary for the good of virtue: since by them we support the body, and help others. Things directed to an end must take their goodness from that end. Hence it happens that possession of riches is good for some who use it for virtue, while to others it is an evil…" There is no sense in arguing with the Catholic Church on this question of property and ownership!
And now, the final word on this subject, which no one will dispute, but few have opted to act upon: While there is certainly no immorality in the private possession of non-consumable property, it is utterly immoral on the part of any society to allow the perpetuation of chronic poverty in its midst. It is the abject poverty of the poor, which makes the private property of the well-to-do conspicuously immoral.