The following are articles written in the 1950s by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen D.D., Ph.D. and originally posted by Guy C. Stevenson on Facebook.
Revolutionary Change
April, 1959
Two revolutionary changes have taken place recently in England and the other in Russia. Both had to do with private property.
It has always been the position of sane men that when property under a socialist regime belongs to the state or the dictator, there is never the same care for it that there is under a regime of personal responsibility. A man is willing to sit down on someone else’s tools, but he is not willing to sit down on his own. The one way to get men interested in property is to give them some incentive and one of the best incentives is some share in production or the fruits of their labor.
In Britain, a parliamentary committee investigating 13 years of socialism in Great Britain recently brought the following facts to light.
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Costs in all state-owned enterprises are higher than under private ownership because the state managers are not under the same pressure as private owners to show profits and to cut down unnecessary expenses.
A Story is told of one man who had gone into private business from government and found a deficit in his business. He said: “I was not worried about it, until I realized that I was no longer working for the government.”
Nor were labor relations any better when state managed, as was proved by tensions in the coal mines and the transport industries. One billion six million tons of coal were lost in the mining industry because of strikes. Not only did the mines show a deficit of $80 million in 11 years of state management, but the transportation systems in the same period lost $424 million. One British airline lost $75 million.
The investigation also revealed that there were 3,000 more employees in the airline than were actually needed, the jobs having been given out as political plums. On the contrary, the private industries that were left free from government socialism showed lower costs and higher returns without any financial aid.
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Russia has had the same experience of the failure of socialism. First of all, Nikita Khrushchev has admitted that the commune system with which communism started has failed. This was a very pointed reference to China which has two million mess halls where workers eat together, four million nurseries where all children are kept together, and all this after the tearing down of millions of homes to provide common dormitories for workers. Russia challenges China when it claims that it has already achieved communism. Russia denies this, stating that there must be socialism first and that is as far as Russia had advanced, whereas China is behind Russia.
But more important still, Mr. Khrushchev now says that people will not work in Russia without some incentive; this he adds is particularly true when workers do not have sufficient goods to meet their needs. He justifies the use of incentives to work by saying that they are necessary under socialism; but when communism arrives — and no one knows when it will, the incentives to production will be done away with. But for the moment there must be some rewards given to those who produce more– the mere love of state property is not enough. No Communist would ever have asserted this 20 years ago.
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Both the above admissions of failure point up the abiding truth that private property is the economic guarantee of freedom. A man is free on the inside because he has a soul which he can call his own; he is free on the outside because he can call something his own. Economic justice means that neither class, labor nor capital, should be deprived of some share in the ownership, profits or management of industry. It used to be that capital claimed all; now labor claims more and more but without assuming responsibility for increased production which helps create their wages and their livelihood.
Socialism is a system in which capital and labor share in responsibility to the anonymous state. Nineteenth Century capitalism was a system in which capital denied any responsibility for the worker; the 20th Century must be one in which labor sees itself, not working for such and such an industry, but with them.
We’ve been here before.
ONE hears so much today about the conflict of Capitalism and Socialism or Capitalism and Communism, that many people believe they are two contradictory systems. The truth is Capitalism and Socialism, from an economic point of view alone, are related as retail and wholesale. Socialism and Communism have carried to the extreme many of the basic principles already latent in Capitalism, which is here not understood as private property, but as a concentration of wealth in the hands of the few without any social control.
Those who think that capitalism and socialism are enemies should long ponder, how the capitalistic system of England (European Union) has without any revolution, become socialistic. Capitalism in the United States has ‘not yet’ become socialism, but the growing power of the State indicates that the transition is taking place slowly. It may be inquired when the transition of one to another takes place without revolution.
OWN vs. OCCUPY
The answer is when capitalism has reached its maximum point of efficiency, when it generates so many conflicts between capital and labor, when it begets social injustices: and when labor demands more and more a share of its gains without assuming increasing responsibilities toward the source of its gains. The State then steps in to correct the abuses. Thus does ownership rest in the hands of a few capitalists evolve into ownership of the means of production in the hands of a few (State) bureaucrats.
There is nothing mysterious about the process any more than there is a mystery as to how a democracy which identifies freedom with license eventually becomes a totalitarian state. The chaos resulting from unbridled liberty can be controlled only by force, and thus the pendulum swings from unbounded license to unbounded tyranny.
Capitalism and Socialism are related in another way, namely, their attitude toward religion. Capitalism is indifferent to religion: it wants no church, no Bible, no moral law telling a man what he ought to do with his wealth. Socialism wholesales this idea by saying religion may have nothing to say, and if it has nothing to say, then it should not be permitted to exist (HHS). Thus the amoral attitude of capitalism becomes the anti-moral attitude of socialism.
Ownership Of The Means Of Production
There is very little hope for the average man or family in either system, and it offers them little consolation to know that capitalism becomes socialism. Both capitalism and socialism are opposite sins against property. Capitalism emphasizes private rights to property without any social responsibility to the common good: socialism emphasizes the social use of property, to forgetfulness of personal rights. The true solution is one in which the rights to property are personal (connected to the PERSON), but the responsibilities are social. The one real defense for Liberty in the economic order is property. *
The more anonymous property becomes the more the individual suffers and the less freedom he enjoys. Property reaches its complete state of impersonality and anonymity in socialism. Some day labor may become smart and instead of organizing to get more and more money out of industry, it may organize to get itself more and more ownership so that it may have some capital to defend.
by Fulton J. Sheen D.D., Ph.D.
Posted by: “OWN or be OWNED”
Economic Matrix – Christian Social Order – Capital Homesteading Now –
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“NEW SLAVERY” _________________________________________________________
Freedom Without Property Is Incomplete
By Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the “Welfare State.”
The slave states of Western world are an outgrowth of monopolistic capitalism—an economic system which is opposed to the wide distribution of private property in many hands. Instead, monopolistic capitalism concentrates productive wealth among a few men, allowing the rest to become a vast proletariat.
Some representatives of monopolistic capitalism, sensing this evil in their system, have tried to silence criticism by pointing to the diffused ownership in the great corporations. They advertise, “No one owns more than 4 percent of the stock of this great company.” Or they print lists of stockholders, showing that these include farmers, schoolteachers, baseball players, taxi drivers, and even babies. But there is a catch to this argument, and it is this: although it is true that individuals of small means own shares in the company, it is not true that they run the company. Their responsibility for its policies is nil.
Possession properly has two faces, two aspects: we all have a right to private property, but this is accompanied by our responsibility for its righteous use. These two things (which should be inseparable) are frequently divided today. Everyone admits that the farmer who owns a horse is obligated to feed and care for it, but in the case of stocks and bonds, we often forget that the same principle should prevail.
Monopolistic capitalism is to blame for this; it sunders the right to own property from responsibility that owning property involves. Those who own only a few stocks have no practical control of any industry. They vote by postcard proxy, but they have rarely even seen “their” company. The two elements which ought to be inextricably joined in any true conception of private property — ownership and responsibility — are separated. Those who own do not manage; those who manage; those who manage and work do not control or own.
The workmen in a factory may have a shadowy, unknown absentee “employer” – the thousands of individual owners of stock – whom “management” represents and tries to please by extra dividends. The workman’s livelihood is at the disposition of strangers who make a single demand of their representatives: higher profits.
Faced with such insecurity, labor unions seek a solution in demands for higher wages, shorter hours, pensions, and such things. But this approach takes monopolistic capitalism for granted, and accepts the unnatural division between property and responsibility as permanent. A much more radical solution is apt to come, and this may take either of two forms.
One way of remedying the situation would be through a profound alternative of our political and economic life, with the aim of distributing the means of production more widely by giving every workman a share in profits, management, and ownership, all three. The other alternative which is not a constructive solution is confiscation: this may take the violent form of communism, or the less noticeable form of bureaucratic encroachment through taxation, as favored by the welfare state. [And/or outright confiscation likened to General Motors, AIG, and Banks, etc. etc. etc.] Confiscation in any form is an unhealthy solution for a real disease. It amounts to telling men that because they are economically crippled, they must abandon all efforts to get well and allow the state to provide them with free wheelchairs.
The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be “secured” – but with no accompanying responsibility – is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security.
A democracy flirts with the danger of becoming a slave in direct ratio to the numbers of its citizens who work, but do not own / or who own, but do not work; or who distribute, as politicians do, but do not produce. The danger of the “slave state” disappears in ratio to the numbers of people who own property and admit its attendant responsibilities under God. They can call their souls their own because they own and administer something other than their souls. Thus they are free.
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Originally published in On Being Human: Reflections, On Life and Living, Fulton J. Sheen, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982
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The Significance Of Property
“The Great Jailer who became rich through “confiscation” does not envy your national wealth; he envies your personal wealth. Personal wealth is the economic guarantee of your freedom. He knows that your right to call property your own is yours because you already have a soul which you can call your own.” — Fulton J. Sheen, 1959
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Share In Ownership Is Asked For Every Citizen.
Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen Holds Property a Guarantee of Freedom
Property is “the economic guarantee of freedom, as the soul is its spiritual guarantee,” Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University said last night in an address over WEAF network of the National Broadcast Company.
The way out of our current difficulties is for labor to share in the ownership of the industry in which it is employed, Monsignor Sheen declared. He said that this meant “the restoration of property, not as the right to do with it whatever you please, but as ownership bound up with control as the last and solid bulwark of free men in a free country.”
“When labor is willing to assume this responsibility and when capital is willing to share it.” he asserted, “then shall we have a rebirth; the freedom with which America began; then the symbol of freedom in the United States will not be a free lunch-counter, but a Statue of Liberty; then the inspiration of freedom will be He who, hanging on a cross, kept His body so much His own that He could give it to us as our life, and who kept His soul so much His own that He could commend it to His Heavenly Father.”
January 1939 ; The New York Times..
We as a people, ought to investigate the merits of “Expanded Capital Ownership, through the Capital Homestead Act”. Or perhaps wait another three quarters of a century.
Posted by “Own or be Owned”
