Joshua Holland writes on AlterNet.org on May 10, 2012:
“America’s political-economy is caught in a vicious cycle, with concentrated wealth at the top leading to outsized political power.”
“For a generation, America’s political-economy has been gripped in a vicious cycle. Those at the top of the economic pile have taken an ever-growing share of the nation’s income, and then leveraged that haul into ever-greater political power, which they have in turn used to rewrite the rules of “the market” in their favor. Wash, rinse and repeat.”
“The more pernicious effect of economic inequality comes indirectly through its impact on political inequality,” says MIT Economist Daron Acemoglu, Co-Author of Why Nations Fail. In an interview with Think Progress, Acemoglu explained what he called, “a general pattern throughout history”:
“When economic inequality increases, the people who have become economically more powerful will often attempt to use that power in order to gain even more political power. And once they are able to monopolize political power, they will start using that for changing the rules in their favor.”
The heart of this op-ed addresses the concepts of social justice and economic justice. The writings published by the Center For Economic And Social Justice (CESJ) and my mentor binary economist Louis O. Kelso and his co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto, Mortimer J. Adler () addressed this subject comprehensively.
Defining Social Justice
Social justice encompasses economic justice. Social justice is the virtue which guides us in creating those organized human interactions we call institutions. In turn, social institutions, when justly organized, provide us with access to what is good for the person, both individually and in our associations with others. Social justice also imposes on each of us a personal responsibility to work with others to design and continually perfect our institutions as tools for personal and social development.
Defining Economic Justice
Economic justice, which touches the individual person as well as the social order, encompasses the moral principles which guide us in designing our economic institutions. These institutions determine how each person earns a living, enters into contracts, exchanges goods and services with others and otherwise produces an independent material foundation for his or her economic sustenance. The ultimate purpose of economic justice is to free each person to engage creatively in the unlimited work beyond economics, that of the mind and the spirit.
The Three Principles Of Economic Justice
Like every system, economic justice involves input, output, and feedback for restoring harmony or balance between input and output. Within the system of economic justice as defined by Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler, there are three essential and interdependent principles: The Principle of Participation, The Principle of Distribution, and The Principle of Harmony. Like the legs of a three-legged stool, if any of these principles is weakened or missing, the system of economic justice will collapse.
The Three Principles Of the Kelso-Adler Theory Of Economic Justice
The Principle Of Participation
The principle of participation describes how one makes “input” to the economic process in order to make a living. It requires equal opportunity in gaining access to private property in productive assets as well as equality of opportunity to engage in productive work. The principle of participation does not guarantee equal results, but requires that every person be guaranteed by society’s institutions the equal human right to make a productive contribution to the economy, both through one’s labor (as a worker) and through one’s productive capital (as an owner). Thus, this principle rejects monopolies, special privileges, and other exclusionary social barriers to economic self-reliance.
The Principle Of Distribution
The principle of distribution defines the “output” or “out-take” rights of an economic system matched to each person’s labor and capital inputs. Through the distributional features of private property within a free and open marketplace, distributive justice becomes automatically linked to participative justice, and incomes become linked to productive contributions. The principle of distributive justice involves the sanctity of property and contracts. It turns to the free and open marketplace, not government, as the most objective and democratic means for determining the just price, the just wage, and the just profit.
Many confuse the distributive principles of justice with those of charity. Charity involves the concept “to each according to his needs,” whereas “distributive justice” is based on the idea “to each according to his contribution.” Confusing these principles leads to endless conflict and scarcity, forcing government to intervene excessively to maintain social order.
Distributive justice follows participative justice and breaks down when all persons are not given equal opportunity to acquire and enjoy the fruits of income-producing property.
The Principle Of Harmony
The principle of harmony encompasses the “feedback” or balancing principles required to detect distortions of either the input or output principles and to make whatever corrections are needed to restore a just and balanced economic order for all. This principle is violated by unjust barriers to participation, by monopolies or by some using their property to harm or exploit others.
“Economic harmonies” is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary as “Laws of social adjustment under which the self-interest of one man or group of men, if given free play, will produce results offering the maximum advantage to other men and the community as a whole.” This principle offers guidelines for controlling monopolies, building checks-and-balances within social institutions, and re-synchronizing distribution (outtake) with participation (input). The first two principles of economic justice flow from the eternal human search for justice in general, which automatically requires a balance between input and outtake, i.e., “to each according to what he is due.” The principle of harmony, on the other hand, reflects the human quest for other absolute values, including Truth, Love and Beauty.
It should be noted that Kelso and Adler referred to the third principle as “the principle of limitation” as a restraint on human tendencies toward greed and monopoly that lead to exclusion and exploitation of others. Given the potential synergies inherent in economic justice in today’s high technology world, CESJ feels that the concept of “harmony” is more appropriate and more-encompassing than the term “limitation” in describing the third component of economic justice. Furthermore, “harmony” is more consistent with the truism that a society that seeks peace must first work for justice.
I began my personal pursuit of economic and social justice advocacy in the latter part of the 1960s during my graduate studies and doctorate studies (in Sweden). I founded Agenda 2000 Incorporated with Louis Kelso, Professor John W. Dyckman, Kenneth Friedman and Norman Kurland, who later founded the Center For Economic And Social Justice in Washington, D.C. Another who has served as a mentor in my development and has addressed the issue of social justice is the late Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. who wrote a pamphlet in 1948 entitled “Introduction To Social Justice” (see http://www.cesj.org/cesjsitemap.html under Just Third Way for pdf download).
What makes Father Ferree’s pamphlet so critical is that it offers common-sense guidelines on how to solve seemingly overwhelming social and cultural problems, problems which no individual realistically can overcome on his or her own.
