On July 14, 2014, Jonah Goldberg of theAmerican Enterprise Institute delivers a video presentation on the topic of “What Is ‘Social Justice?'” wherein he attacks the concept.
My colleague at the Center for Economic and Social Justice and its president, Norman Kurland responds:
Jonah Goldberg offers his limited right-wing critique of “Social Justice” to admittedly equally shallow left-wing definitions of the term. However, as a non-Catholic, I think Mr. Goldberg ignores a more scholarly definition of the term by Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical on “The Restructuring of the Social Order.” Pius XI offered a theory of “Social Justice” that supports Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical correcting the errors and conflict-prone nature of socialism. More specifically, Pius XI’s theory of social morality offers a complement to personal morality, guiding each of us on how to organize “people power” peacefully for redesigning unjust systems, institutions and laws at all social levels. All Popes since 1903, especially now through Pope Francis, have supported the social teachings of Leo XIII and Pius XI. All social encyclicals since 1931 have also supported the “redistribution of economic opportunity” for the poor and a “just wage” for most citizens, as well as a more just and inclusionary free market system, all in the spirit of charity, not in support of State-coerced redistribution of wealth or property or anarchy in the form of endless class warfare.
In contrast, inherent in Socialism and all forms of collectivism is the ever-expanding economic power of the State and the ever-increasing powerlessness of persons and families. Monopoly capitalism is also an unjust global economic system, where, according to Forbes, the richest 68 people in the world own more than the bottom 3.5 billion people. This enables a tiny, morally indifferent elite to buy politicians in most countries, perpetuating global class warfare, political corruption, poverty, joblessness, needless threats to the environment, increased terrorism, and war.
The late Fr. William Ferree in his 1942 Ph.D. dissertation The Act of Social Justice at the Catholic University of America offered strong support for Pius XI’s profound contributions to the field of Sociology. Fr. Ferree, a co-founder of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) in 1984, served for many decades before his death in 1985 as the globally respected intellectual leader of the Marianist order and head of several universities, including Dayton University. Fr. Ferree’s 1948 pamphlet “Introduction to Social Justice” is available at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/Free/introtosocialjustice.pdf.
CESJ as an interfaith, all-volunteer non-profit organization has always supported the common sense definitions of “Social Justice” as taught by Pius XI and Fr. Ferree, especially when combined with the definitions of “Economic Justice” and “Economic Democracy” developed in the two books co-authored in 1958 and 1961 by the lawyer, binary economic theorist, and leveraged Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) inventor Louis O. Kelso and the Aristotelian-Thomist scholar Mortimer J. Adler. See Kelso’s 1957 Just Third Way critique of Marx’s logic and principles at http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/karl-marx-the-almost-capitalist/ Also see the May 2015 article and thoughtful commentaries by CESJ’s Director of Research Michael D. Greaney, “Pope Francis and the Just Third Way”, at http://www.hprweb.com/2015/06/pope-francis-and-the-just-third-way/
A personal note: Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s were engaged in acts of social justice when they organized non-violently to end the segregation system in the Deep South. As a civil rights lawyer for the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights, I was directly involved from 1962-64 with leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and NAACP in Mississippi. Despite powerful opposition from Deep South politicians, this Social Justice-based movement attracted students from all over the country in 1964 to join the “Mississippi Freedom Summer.” A few movement people lost their lives. But America woke up and President Johnson encouraged the Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Unfortunately, many civil rights leaders did not have an economic vision for achieving a Just Third Way vision of economic democracy to complement access to the political ballot beyond that of government-created “jobs and welfare” programs of the Depression of the 1930s. Neither did I when I shifted my role in the Federal Government in 1964 to the so-called “War on Poverty.” Frustrated by the top-down attitudes at the highest level of this taxpayer-supported initiative, I quit in March 1965 to become the planning director of the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty (chaired by Walter Reuther, the legendary leader of the United Auto Workers). Before joining CCAP someone introduced me to Kelso’s Just Third Way ideas. Within 10 minutes I became convinced of the soundness of his vision, and committed my work in CCAP to introducing liberals, including Reuther, and the grassroots community to Kelso and his market-based, expanded capital ownership approach to economic democracy. In 1968 I joined Kelso and headed his Institute for the Study of Economic Systems and later became his Washington Counsel for gaining passage of the initial leveraged ESOP laws which today cover about 11 million American workers. From the left Hubert Humphrey supported our ideas when he chaired the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Among conservatives, Ronald Reagan supported Kelso’s ideas since 1974, calling for an “Industrial Homestead Act”; when he was president he appointed me as Deputy Chair of the Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice, based on my putting together a bipartisan group on Capital Hill to gain passage of the authorizing legislation. The task force’s report was unanimously approved by a broadly representative group, including two members of Mr, Goldberg’s American Enterprise group, a staff economist from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, key staff members of the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, economists Paul McCracken and Steve Hanke. Now I work with serious and open-minded activists and professionals to change national and global economic systems to encourage environmentally sound and non-inflationary growth through changes that would provide more equal capital ownership opportunities, governance rights and capital incomes for every child, woman and man without government redistribution of property from current owners.
It’s time for people across the political spectrum to wake up, organize across the political spectrum, and build Justice into the monetary, financial, tax, inheritance systems throughout the world.
Political democracy and universal access to the ballot do not work without a sound and just expanded ownership version of economic democracy. And economic democracy must be based on sound principles of Social Justice.
