© 2019 Trent Horn and Catherine R.

Pakaluk

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Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Return of Socialism
2. What Is Socialism?
3. Socialism’s Fatal Flaws
4. What About Democratic Socialism?
5. The False “First Socialists”
6. The Real “First Socialists”
7. Leo XIII on Private Property
8. Leo XIII and Human Nature
9. Socialism Gets a State
10. Pius XI and Socialism’s Victims
11. Socialism Goes Global
12. Modern Popes vs. Modern Socialism
13. Capitalism and Human Nature
14. The Church on Capitalism
15. The Church on Just Wages
16. Capitalism and Human Labor
17. The Nordic Myth
18. The Venezuelan Reality
19. Debunking Catholic Socialism
20. Catholicism and Moral Capitalism
Appendix: What About Distributism?
About the Authors
 INTRODUCTION

In the middle of the third century, the Roman emperor Valerian launched a
fierce persecution against the Church that resulted in the martyrdom of
Pope Saint Sixtus II along with seven deacons. St. Ambrose tells us that
when the Roman authorities demanded that one of the deacons, named
Lawrence, hand over “the treasures of the Church,” he agreed. According to
Ambrose, “On the following day he brought the poor together. When asked
where the treasures were which he had promised, he pointed to the poor,
saying, “These are the treasures of the Church.”
Christ commanded his followers to care for the poor and warned them that
ignoring the poor was the same as ignoring him (Matt 25:40). As the
Church grew within the Roman Empire, Christians became famous for their
generosity, which included not just almsgiving but the construction of the
first hospitals that served the poor. The Roman emperor Julian the Apostate
lamented how Christians “support not only their own poor but ours as well;
all men see that our people lack aid from us.” For the most marginalized
people in Roman society, like widows and abandoned newborns, it was only
the generosity of Christians that stood between them and a premature death.
Christian generosity continued to be the difference between life and death
for many people even after Christians became the rulers of medieval
kingdoms, in which there simply wasn’t enough wealth for the state to lift
the masses out of poverty. But this began to change with the rise of modern
capitalism, as is evident in Adam Smith’s famous 1776 essay, “An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” Christians now had
the ability to create wealth, and with that power came moral questions
about how to address the perennial problem of poverty.
In the century after Smith’s essay was published, revolutionaries in
America and Europe tore down the authority of the monarchy and replaced
it with democratic republics. Ultimate authority, the revolutionaries said,
should lie with the people instead of the king. Other revolutionaries took
this democratic ideal even further and said wealth and property should not
lie with a few people (be they monarchs or capitalists) but should be owned
by all. In 1871, some of these revolutionaries even took over the city of
Paris for two months, establishing a “socialist commune” until the French
army retook the city, killing thousands of communards in the process.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the revolutionary spirit showed no
sign of slowing and even many Christians were becoming sympathetic to
the socialist cause. Christians now had access to more wealth and political
power than they had ever possessed in the history of the world, but it wasn’t
clear how those things should be used to help the poor. All of this was on
the mind of Pope Leo XIII as he wrote the introduction to the most famous
papal encyclical to address the issue of socialism: Rerum Novarum (Latin:
“New Things”). He says this “spirit of revolutionary change” is not
surprising and notes:
The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast
expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science;
in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous
fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; the
increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working
classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy.
The pope goes on to describe how everyone is talking about these “new
things” and so the Church, which teaches us on matters of faith and morals,
“thought it expedient now to speak on the condition of the working
classes.”
The socialist revolutions of the nineteenth century spurred the creation of
the Church’s social doctrine: the application of its teaching to issues that
arise as society changes over time. When it comes to the application of
timeless truths to changing circumstances the pope admitted:
The discussion is not easy, nor is it void of danger. It is no easy matter to
define the relative rights and mutual duties of the rich and of the poor, of
capital and of labor. And the danger lies in this, that crafty agitators are
intent on making use of these differences of opinion to pervert men’s
judgments and to stir up the people to revolt.
Although much has changed in the century since Pope Leo XIII penned
these words, many things are still the same. There may not today be calls
for violent revolution in America or Europe, but there are grassroots
movements seeking to establish socialism through democratic activism.
Some of those movements even claim that a Christian is obligated to
support socialist economies or else he does not truly follow Christ’s
command to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
In this book we will apply the Church’s social doctrine to the debate on
socialism and show that not only are Catholics not obligated to be socialists,
they—we—cannot be socialists. It is not a permissible or prudent way to
address the problem of poverty.
In part one, we will examine the modern resurgence of socialism and
explain why so many people, including faithful Catholics, are attracted to
this ideology. Then we will “pull back the curtain” and show why socialism
is an inherently contradictory and unsustainable approach to economics.
In part two we will refute the claim that Christianity gave birth to
socialism and show how it was actually conceived in nineteenth-century
Europe. We’ll also explore Pope Leo XIII’s arguments against socialism,
especially his claim that it violates the natural right to private property and
poses a grave danger to the family.
In part three we continue our historical survey and reveal, in all its
horrors, the destruction socialism wrought in the twentieth century.
In part four we turn our attention to capitalism and, while not providing an
exhaustive summary and defense, refute arguments that try to justify
socialism by saying capitalism is worse or unacceptable as an economic
system.
Finally, in part five, we return to the present to examine modern, Catholic
defenses of socialism and present a trajectory toward a “moral capitalism.”
For the best approach to economics will not only produce the most wealth
and alleviate the most poverty, but will create conditions for the human
spirit to flourish, grow in virtue, and be perfected by God’s grace.
 Part One

Socialism
Deconstructed
 1

The Return of Socialism

In 2019, 43 percent of Americans consider socialism to be a “good thing”

and millennials are some of its strongest supporters.1 Magazines such as
Teen Vogue even run articles like “Everything You Should Know About
Karl Marx” and “What ‘Capitalism’ Is and How It Affects People,” which
says that millennials “expect a grand societal shift toward socialism” to
counteract a “dystopian Mad Max nightmare” in which “rich plutocrats own
everything.” Another poll found that half of young people say they would
prefer life in a socialist country to a capitalist one.2
But this flirtation with socialism is nothing new; in order to understand it,
in fact, we need to go back to the Great Depression. When you see how
socialism thrived in that decade, you’ll understand why it’s making such a
comeback today.
SHARE THE WEALTH
By the mid-1930s, following the stock market crash in 1929, the average
family’s income had fallen 40 percent. But maybe they were the lucky ones
compared to the 25 percent of Americans who were unemployed.3 For
many people, volatile markets and greedy bankers were the villains
responsible for taking people’s jobs and even their homes. In John
Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, banks are described as
“monsters” that men make but can’t control, and capitalists are depicted as
heartless pursuers of profit. For example, in one scene Steinbeck describes
farmers dousing oranges in kerosene as starving people look on, because
this was necessary to keep the price of oranges from getting too low.
Steinbeck doesn’t tell his readers that it was the federal government that
ordered the farmers to do this. However, he does describe the resentment
many average people felt toward an economy that seemed to benefit the
rich at the expense of the poor: “Men who have created new fruits in the
world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten . . . in the
eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the
grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the
vintage.”4
Before 1929, the Communist Party USA was a marginal movement, but
during the thirties its explosive growth in membership led later historians to
call that decade “the heyday of American Communism.”5 However, most
critics of capitalism adopted a more moderate socialism focused on
redistributing wealth instead of launching a worker’s revolution. For
example, Democratic senator Huey Long blamed the country’s economic
crisis on the small number of people who he said owned most of the
nation’s wealth. In his notorious “Share Our Wealth Speech,” Long
declared:
[T]he rich people of this country—and by rich people I mean the super-
rich—will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little
problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our
woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the
wealth to be shared by all of the people.6
Long proposed that no one be allowed to possess more than $50 million.
He claimed that confiscatory taxation on wealth above that amount could
provide every family with enough money to own a home, automobile, and
radio, meaning that “there will be no such thing as a family living in
poverty and distress.”
Despite such lofty promises, socialism didn’t catch on in America, partly
because it was associated with distinctly anti-American values. While
reflecting on his unsuccessful 1936 bid for the California governorship,
socialist Upton Sinclair said, “The American people will take socialism, but
they won’t take the label. . . . Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000
votes, and running on the slogan to ‘End Poverty in California’ I got
879,000.”7
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
In the 2010s, struggling American families were still reeling from the Great
Recession, after which the average family’s income fell by 4 percent and
nine million jobs were lost—doubling the unemployment rate to a high of
9.3 percent.8 What angered people the most, however, were policies that
seemed to allow the wealthy to hoard the country’s wealth at the expense of
the poor. In 2011, protesters took over lower Manhattan as part of the
“Occupy Wall Street” movement, carrying signs saying, “We are the 99
percent.”
That slogan came from economist Joseph Stiglitz’s article “Of the 1
percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent,” in which Stiglitz claimed that 1
percent of the population controlled 40 percent of the nation’s wealth and
that, although their incomes had risen over the past twenty-five years, the
incomes of the lower classes were stagnant or had even fallen. He
ominously concluded:
The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best
doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t
seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with
how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that
the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.9
Part of young people’s affection for socialism is grounded in a distrust of
capitalism that grew out of the Great Recession. Many millennials blamed
the economic crisis on unregulated free markets, and polls show that
between 2010 and 2018 their support for capitalism dropped from 68
percent to 45 percent.10 This skepticism made them the least likely
generation in history to invest their savings for retirement. Some of them
even believe retirement saving is pointless because, as one thirty-two-year-
old political consultant put it, “I don’t think the world can sustain capitalism
for another decade. It’s socialism or bust.”11
Some of the most vocal advocates for socialism, though, are Christian
theologians and committed Catholics. The Tradinista! Movement identifies
itself as “a small party of young Christian socialists committed to traditional
orthodoxy, to a politics of virtue and the common good, and to the
destruction of capitalism, and its replacement by a truly social political
economy.”12 In 2019, Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart
published an editorial in the New York Times with the provocative title,
“Can We Please Relax About Socialism?”13 Not to be outdone, the Jesuit
magazine America published a feature-length article later that year entitled,
“The Catholic Case for Communism.”14
 There’s no small irony in this new enthusiasm for socialism among young
Christians, when you consider that socialism served as the “founding
heresy” that spurred the development of Catholic social teaching.
Between the 1840s and the 1940s, the papacy released eight major
encyclicals that dealt with the subject, all in critical ways. In 1849, Pope
Pius IX referred to “the wicked theories of this socialism and Communism”
and how they plotted to “overthrow the entire order of human affairs”
through the haze of “perverted teachings” (Nostis et Nobiscum 6). At the
end of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII called socialism a “deadly
plague” (Quod Apostolici Muneris 1) that reaps a “harvest of misery”
(Graves de Communi Re 21). Thirty years later, Pope Pius XI said,
“Communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian
civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever” (Divini
Redemptoris 58).
“REAL” SOCIALISTS
Many socialists, when confronted with the moral and economic failures of
countries like the Soviet Union, are quick to respond, “Oh no, I don’t want
that kind of socialism” or, “That wasn’t real socialism, that was
Communism.” They don’t want a totalitarian government that controls
everyone; they just want a benevolent government that helps everyone. In
polling, this leads to a mixed bag of preferences.
For example, two-thirds of millennials support free college tuition,
government-provided universal health care, and a government guarantee of
food, shelter, and a living wage. But the majority of them also oppose state
ownership of private businesses and tax increases on anyone but the
wealthy.15 Another survey shows that whereas only 56 percent of people
have a positive image of “capitalism,” 86 percent have a positive image of
“entrepreneurs.”16 One Atlantic writer ably summarizes this paradoxical
attitude toward economics: “They’d like Washington to fix everything, just
so long as it doesn’t run anything.”17 Hart evinces a similar attitude when he
claims of the United States:
Only here is the word “socialism” freighted with so much perceived
menace. I take this to be a symptom of our unique national genius for
stupidity. In every other free society with a functioning market economy,
socialism is an ordinary, rather general term for sane and compassionate
 governance of the public purse for the purpose of promoting general
welfare and a more widespread share in national prosperity.18
So who’s right? Is socialism a deadly plague that reaps a harvest of
misery? Or is it a sane and compassionate economic policy that everyone,
especially Christians, should support?
There are a lot of things that are wrong in Hart’s op-ed, but he does make
one good point. He writes, “In this country we employ terms like
‘socialism’ with wanton indifference to historical details and conceptual
distinctions.” Indeed, critics who cry wolf and describe every form of
governmental economic intervention as “socialism” numb people to the
unique evils that occur in a truly socialist system.
That’s why in order to determine if Catholics can be socialists we have to
first understand “real socialism.”

It’s important to remember . . .

• Socialism often becomes popular during times of economic turmoil.

• Most people have an incoherent understanding of socialism and often conflate it with government
entitlement programs.

• The Catholic Church has consistently and strongly denounced socialism as an evil that Christians
can never support.
1 Mohamed Younis, “Four in 10 Americans Embrace Some Form of Socialism,” Gallup, May 20, 2019,
https://news.gallup.com/poll/257639/four-americans-embrace-form-socialism.aspx.
2 “Victims of Communism 2018 Annual Report,” https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/2018-annual-report.
3 Glen H. Elder, Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (New York: Routledge, 2018), 44–45. Some
median income losses reached as high as 64 percent, though anything above 40 percent usually required the sale of assets like
homes to make up the difference.
4 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 2002), 348–349.
5 See Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York, Basic Books, 1984).
6 Huey Long, “Every Man a King” in American Political Speeches, ed. Richard Beeman (New York: Penguin, 2012), 66.
7 Letter to Norman Thomas (September 25, 1951). See David Mikkelson, “Norman Thomas on Socialism” snopes.com
(September 26, 2009), https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/norman-thomas-on-socialism/.
8 Rakesh Kochhar, “A Recovery No Better than the Recession Median Household Income, 2007 to 2011,” Pew Research Center
(2012), https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2012/09/median-household-incomes-2007–2011.pdf.
9 Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent” Vanity Fair (May 2011),
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105.
10 For a criticism Frank Newport, “Democrats More Positive About Socialism Than Capitalism,” Gallup (August 13, 2018),
https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socialism-capitalism.aspx.
11 Keith A. Spencer, “Some millennials aren’t saving for retirement because they don’t think capitalism will exist by then,”
salon.com (March 18, 2018), https://www.salon.com/2018/03/18/some-millennials-arent-saving-for-retirement-because-they-
do-not-think-capitalism-will-exist-by-then/.
12 “Tradinista Manifesto,” https://tradinista.tumblr.com/manifesto.
13 David Bentley Hart, “Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?” The New York Times (April 27, 2019),
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/opinion/sunday/socialism.html.
14 Dean Dettloff, “The Catholic Case for Communism,” America (July 23, 2019),
 https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/07/23/catholic-case-communism.
15 Derek Thompson, “Millennials’ Political Views Don’t Make Any Sense,” The Atlantic (July 15, 2014),
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/millennials-economics-voting-clueless-kids-these-days/374427/.
16 Frank Newport, “Democrats More Positive About Socialism Than Capitalism,” Gallup (August 13, 2018),
https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socialism-capitalism.aspx.
17 Derek Thompson, “Millennials’ Political Views Don’t Make Any Sense,” The Atlantic (July 15, 2014),
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/millennials-economics-voting-clueless-kids-these-days/374427/.
18 David Bentley Hart, “Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?” The New York Times (April 27, 2019),
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/opinion/sunday/socialism.html.
 2

What Is Socialism?

When most people think of the “Pilgrims,” they think of people in big hats
eating luxurious Thanksgiving feasts. But in the spring of 1621, the
Plymouth colonists were in danger of starving to death and, despite what
you were told in elementary school, it wasn’t harsh weather or ignorance
about farming that led to these dire circumstances. Instead, it was the
pilgrims’ policy of sharing communal plots of land that nearly led to their
ruin.
Even after local tribes helped the pilgrims survive their first harsh winter,
the colonists still suffered from food shortages. That was because people
weren’t allowed to grow their own food. Instead, food was grown
communally and then equally distributed to everyone—even to people who
didn’t help farm any of it. In choosing this method of farming, the colony’s
governor William Bradford said the pilgrims thought “the taking away of
property, and bringing in community into a commonwealth, would make
them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.”19
It took several painful years for the pilgrims to learn they were not so
wise.
THAT WHICH IS COMMON
According to Bradford’s journal, the strongest of the young men
complained about “spend[ing] their time and strength to work for other
men’s wives and children without any recompense.” Wives viewed forced
work for other husbands and families as “a kind of slavery.” Even the older
residents who couldn’t work (and thus actually had more to eat than they
otherwise would have) “thought it some indignity and disrespect unto
them.”
People were mad because no matter how hard they worked, their situation
in life wouldn’t improve. And they resented neighbors who barely worked
but still got the same rations as they did. These bitter colonists may have
thought, “I’m done with back-breaking work in the fields. Instead, I’ll just
do the bare minimum like everybody else.”
The communal farming system could tolerate a few lazy people as long as
everyone else worked hard. But once enough people only had incentive to
do the bare minimum, then it would only take bad luck or uncooperative
weather to ruin their meager food supplies. Fortunately, Bradford
recognized that because “all men have this corruption in them, God in his
wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”
He responded to the crisis by assigning each family its own parcel of land
and letting them keep the food they produced. Bradford recalled, “This had
very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more
corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Bradford had
discovered what the Greek philosopher Aristotle proved to be true 2,500
years ago: “That which is common to the greatest number has the least care
bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the
common interest.” He added that a person only thinks of the common good
“when he is himself concerned as an individual.”20
The sad truth is that every generation has individuals in it who fail to learn
this lesson about human nature. The pilgrim’s plight isn’t just interesting
history; it’s a cautionary tale that shows why no one (especially Catholics
who share the pilgrim’s worship of “God in his wisdom”) should be a
socialist.
THE MEANING OF SOCIALISM
One May 2019 poll revealed that a third of people associate socialism with
providing people with health care, housing, and jobs, and ending poverty,
while 20 percent don’t know what socialism is. Only one in five could name
the mechanisms by which socialism is supposed to achieve its grand
promises: government ownership of the economy and the abolishment of
private property.21
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the popular socialist magazine Jacobin, writes,
“Radically changing things would mean taking away the source of
capitalists’ power: the private ownership of property.”22 Sunkara faithfully
adheres to the teachings of the most famous socialist in history, Karl Marx,
who declared in The Communist Manifesto that “the theory of the
Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private
property.”23 This is why Pope Leo XIII said socialism is contrary to the
natural right to own property and that, “the main tenet of socialism, [the]
community of goods, must be utterly rejected” (Rerum Novarum 15).
This communal ownership of wealth and property also means that no one
could exchange privately owned goods in order to make a profit. Instead,
society would simply produce goods by the command of government-
owned industries, and those industries alone would sell them. Political
scientist Frances Fox Piven notes, “The academic debates about socialism’s
‘meaning’ are huge and arcane and rife with disagreements, but what all
definitions have in common is either the elimination of the market or its
strict containment.”24
Such regimes are called command economies or planned economies
because in order for such a system to work without a market (a means for
people to voluntarily buy and sell from one another) the economy would
have to be centrally planned. Administrators and bureaucrats—accountants,
economists, and statisticians—would have to direct factories, farms, and
businesses (or what are commonly grouped under the term “the means of
production”) to produce enough of the right kind of goods and services that
people desire, or at the very least, need.
In his book Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation,
activist Danny Katch envisions a future in which the community produces
so many goods and services that most people only have to work Tuesday
through Thursday. His fictional socialist wistfully explains, “Each year the
whole money thing feels increasingly pointless in a society in which
everyone has more than enough of what they need and plenty of what they
want. But money is still the main way for planning committees to keep
track of how goods and services are being distributed and used.”25
SOCIALISM OR COMMUNISM?
Later we will look at how central planning led to horrifying results in
socialist countries like the Soviet Union, but some people may say we
shouldn’t use Communism’s failures as an argument against socialism.
After all, they say, “Communism isn’t the same thing as socialism.”
But according to the textbook Essentials of Sociology “The terms
socialism and Communism are often used more or less interchangeably.”26
For many collectivists, socialism and Communism are not separate
systems of economic thought; they are successive stages in the same
scheme to create a world of collective ownership. Vladimir Lenin wrote in
The State and Revolution that, “in the first phase of communist society
(usually called socialism) ‘bourgeois law’ is not abolished in its entirety, but
only in part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained.”
Communism isn’t the embarrassing, authoritarian cousin that gives
socialism a bad name. Instead, Communism is the end point to which
socialism inevitably tends, at least for Marxists.
Marx defended a limited “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would rule
until a classless, Communist society came into existence. But, as we will
see later, socialism has inherent authoritarian tendencies. That’s why it’s no
surprise that any “dictatorship of the proletariat” would refuse (like almost
every other dictator in history) to give up its power once its goal of creating
a centrally planned economy had been achieved.
One reason Marxists give for why no socialist country has ever reached
the endgame of peaceful Communism is that socialism isn’t just for nations;
it’s for the entire world. Marx wanted to “abolish countries and nationality”
because “the working men have no country.”27 His collaborator Friedrich
Engels said that social classes “fall as inevitably as they once arose. The
state inevitably falls with them.” He believed the idea of a governing state
belonged in “the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the
bronze axe.”28
Modern socialists tend to follow Marx on this point, as is evident in the
World Socialist Party’s claim that “central to the meaning of socialism is
common ownership. This means the resources of the world being owned in
common by the entire global population.”29
But not all socialists historically have wanted to adapt this “international
Communism.” Some preferred a “national socialism” grounded in a
powerful authoritarian state. The most famous example of this approach
was the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, or as you probably
know them, the Nazis.
The Nazi party platform required the nationalization of industries and
charged the state with providing for people’s livelihoods. Its defenders
taught the importance of respecting the maxim, “The common good goes
before the individual’s good.”30 Even historians who dispute Hitler’s
socialist credentials admit that Nazi Germany used planning methods
similar to those of socialists. According to one such historian, Ian Kershaw,
this meant that “the state, not the market, would determine the shape of
[Germany’s] economic development.”31
SOCIALISM OR CAPITALISM?
Another misconception about socialism is that there are only two kinds of
economic systems: complete government control of the economy and
complete lack of government control (so-called laissez-faire capitalism).
But it’s incorrect even to think about economic systems as existing on a
control or regulatory spectrum. What divides socialism from capitalism is
not whether the government controls the economy or how much it does, or
how big it is, but its role in creating and sustaining the economy
Under socialism, governments create and sustain the production of goods
and services by running businesses and employing individuals. In contrast,
under capitalism, governments create and sustain the conditions under
which individuals and firms produce goods and services. In a modern
market economy, these conditions include a robust system of property rights
that allow for the sale and transfer of property as well as regulations that set
the “rules of the game” for all types of market transactions.
Many of the “freest” economies, then, actually operate under many
government regulations; in fact, they couldn’t exist without governments to
enforce contracts that regulate all their economic exchanges.
If economies exist on a spectrum, then it isn’t a spectrum of control or
regulation. Instead, it’s a spectrum of how many functions the central
government takes to be its own, and how many are left to subsidiaries—
private individuals and firms, communities, and local governments. In this
book we are concerned with economies that lie toward the socialist end of
that spectrum, or ones where the greater number of functions are tasked to
the central government.
In this book, then, we use the terms socialism and Communism to refer to
the same kind of centrally planned economic system that rejects the
ownership of private property. We will show that Catholics cannot support
these economic systems because they violate our natural rights and lead to
human misery. Even apart from the authoritarian abuses that often
accompany these systems, socialism contains undeniable flaws that make it
unfit for any modern nation to accept.
It’s important to remember . . .
• Socialism is opposed to the private ownership of property and believes that the community as a
whole should “own” the means of producing goods and services.

• Socialism and Communism represent different stages in the ultimate goal of eliminating economic
and social classes; both systems advocate for centrally planned economies that leave no room for a
free market.

• The choice in the modern world is not between socialism and completely unregulated capitalism but
between keeping the means of production primarily in the hands of private businesses or primarily
in the hands of government.
19 William Bradford, “Of Plymouth Plantation,” The English Literatures of America: 1500–1800, eds. Myra Jehlen and Michael
Warner (New York: Routledge, 1997), 187.
20 Politics, II.3.
21 Matthew Sheffield, “20 percent of Americans can’t define ‘socialism’ even as it’s become the focus of 2020,” The Hill (May
31, 2019), https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/446377-20-percent-of-americans-cant-define-socialism-even-as-its.
22 Bhaskar Sunkara, “End Private Property, Not Kenny Loggins,” Jacobin (February, 2016),
https://jacobinmag.com/2016/02/socialism-marxism-private-property-person-lennon-imagine-kenny-loggins.
23 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Chapter II,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm.
24 Jeff Stein, “9 questions about the Democratic Socialists of America you were too embarrassed to ask,” Vox (August 5, 2017),
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/5/15930786/dsa-socialists-convention-national.
25 Danny Katch, Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 76.
26 George Ritzer, Essentials of Sociology (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2016), 289.
27 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Chapter II,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm.
28 Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf.
29 https://www.worldsocialism.org/english/what-socialism.
30 Fritz Oerter, “Our Speakers in the Anti-Marxist Struggle,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, eds. Anson Rabinbach and Sander
L. Gilman (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 34.
31 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 270.
 3

Socialism’s Fatal Flaws

If there’s one thing socialists are great at doing, it’s coming up with
appealing visions of what a socialist future would look like. This kind of
literature was especially popular in the early nineteenth century, before the
gritty reality of socialism became a historical fact. One of the most popular
was Étienne Cabet’s 1842 novel Voyage to Icaria, about a traveler who
visits the fictional nation of Icaria and is impressed by its cleanliness and
lack of poverty.
The traveler credits this paradise to the community’s abandonment of
private property and its commitment to living a simple, communal lifestyle.
He utters what could be considered a mantra for socialists: “Nothing is
impossible for a government that wants the good of its citizens.”32 But
history has repeatedly shown, in lessons that become more painful every
time they must be taught, that a utopia (a word that literally means “no
place”) is impossible to create in this world.33
In fact, when we stop to think about how a socialist society would even
work—beyond the presumption of “free” housing and health care for all—
we see that true socialism, the kind endorsed by thinkers like Marx, aren’t
even hypothetical—they are impossible.
THE INCENTIVE PROBLEM
The ultimate goal of socialists, especially those influenced by Karl Marx, is
the elimination of social classes. According to them, inequalities are the
source of all conflict between human beings and so, once classes like rich
and poor are a thing of the past, then conflict between human beings will
cease as well. But this theory only works if “classes” aren’t just noticeable
differences between groups of human beings that will always exist.
For example, if no one were richer than anyone else because everyone
received the same wages, why would anyone be motivated to choose a dirty
or dangerous occupation? If you would get paid the same amount of money,
would you rather make sausage or snow cones? Would you rather clean car
windshields or the windows on a skyscraper?
Of course, most people will want the more pleasant job, which means that
the less-desirable jobs will have to pay more. Unequal wages thus adjust
compensation to create incentives for people to do the jobs that need to be
done. But when higher wages are given according to the job, some people
will naturally make more money and so Marx’s dreaded “classes” will still
persist.
If such incentives were abolished by giving everyone the same wages,
then the less-desirable jobs will go unfilled. Or, what is more likely to
happen in a command economy, some people will be forced to work at
these jobs even against their will. Yet even then, classes will still exist—in
the form of the pleasantness or safety of one’s work or just its basic
desirability—creating inequality and envy.
Some jobs, like oil drilling or cattle farming, require people to live in
harsh climates while other jobs, like lifeguarding, let people live near the
beach. Which lifestyle do you think most people would prefer? So you
would be stuck with a higher class of people lucky enough to draw work
assignments in Malibu and a lower class that gets stuck in Timbuktu.34
And you can be sure that those who have connections with governmental
planners will be able to secure the pleasant upper-class jobs while the lower
classes are compelled to do everyone else’s dirty work.
Maybe this inequality could be solved by having people share and rotate
jobs—like being a kindergarten teacher one week and a sewer repairman
the next? This would only result in a society of unskilled workers, since it
takes years of experience to master a trade. Yet this seems to be the solution
Marx has in mind when he dreams about how, once production results in a
superabundance of goods, it will be “possible for me to do one thing today
and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without
ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic.”35
Whatever conception of genteel living Marx had in mind, most of us don’t
want our doctor, lawyer, plumber, or electrician to be someone who was a
window-washer last week, or who decided to try this field out as a hobby.
Differences in wages play a huge role in getting the right people—those
who have the interest, talent, or taste, to invest the right resources (e.g.,
specialized schooling or apprenticeship) in order do the right work—the
thing that needs doing.
The incentive problem also beguiles moderate socialism, which doesn’t
rely on outright government control of businesses but simply confiscates
wealth or income above a certain amount. If a person has no hope of
retaining income above a certain amount, then he has no incentive to put in
the necessary work to produce the income he never receives (and then it’s
the pilgrims’ starvation problem all over again). But, the biggest incentive
problem for socialism lies in getting people to work in the first place.
As we shall see, socialists often complain about the injustice of having to
“sell your labor-power to capitalists” in order to survive. They think that if a
person’s livelihood depends on how much he works, then he is just a “wage
slave.” They say that a socialist economy will guarantee everyone’s basic
needs and so no one has to be subjected to “wage slavery.” But if that’s true,
why would anyone choose to work at all? Sure, some people may work here
and there when they feel bored, but why would most people work full-time
to produce the goods that other people need to live when they can get what
they need without working?
Some socialists try to evade this problem with the motto, “Those who
don’t work, don’t eat” and say they will deny freeloaders access to the
community’s resources (St. Paul gave this same advice in 2 Thessalonians
3:10 in order to deal with freeloaders in the early Church). But now the
injustice of “selling your labor-power to capitalists” has simply been
replaced with the privilege of “selling your labor-power to the state”—
which, unlike businesses in a free market, doesn’t have to compete for it.
Even if socialists reached their “post-state” communist utopia, there would
still be a class of workers in constant conflict with a class of moochers
trying to game the system.
THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM
If you have ever watched a flock of starlings, sometimes thousands of birds,
move in unison, then you know it’s a mesmerizing experience. How do they
all know to change direction together so quickly? It’s not like there is one
bird directing their movement like how a conductor directs an orchestra.
Instead, each individual bird receives a cue from the birds around him and
this sends an “information wave” through the whole flock letting them
know which way they should go.
The knowledge of how the flock should move is dispersed among many
birds. It isn’t in the hands of a single bird leader who directs everything, nor
could it be. And the same is true when it comes to the most important
economic knowledge: the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of
time and place” as 1974 economic Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek
called it.
“We need to remember,” he said, “how much we have to learn in any
occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part
of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an
asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and
special circumstances.”36
This knowledge, which by its nature can’t be summed up in a statistic,
doesn’t exist in a single place for a central planner to use in his calculations.
Instead, it’s dispersed among millions of people who wouldn’t be able to
communicate it even if there were a calculus sophisticated enough to make
use of it all.
Economic knowledge dispersed among people also captures realities that
are—like the starlings—constantly changing.
Think about all the decisions that have to be made to produce something
as simple as a loaf of bread. The farmers have to decide what kinds of grain
to plant along with what kind of machinery to buy in order to harvest the
crops. The bakers have to decide what kinds of ovens to use and which
kinds of bread to make. The shipping companies have to decide which
kinds of trucks or rail cars to use to ship the product. Wholesalers have to
know how much bread to purchase from factories and retailers have to
know how much they need to purchase from the wholesalers. And now add
the complexity of the plastic used to wrap the loaves, which begins as oil
drilled from the earth.
In a free market, there’s a simple way to coordinate tens of thousands of
people who produce millions of tons of bread every year: prices. A central
planner doesn’t have to tell the entire “flock” not to buy a rare item in order
to prevent a shortage. Instead, individual producers will naturally respond
to increased demand by raising the price of the good. This incentivizes both
the consumer to buy less of the product and the producer to make more of
it. Lowering prices, on the other hand, incentivizes producers to stop
producing things that aren’t profitable and incentivizes consumers to reduce
unwanted surpluses.
In contrast to the idea of prices communicating information, Marx thought
that the price of a good should reflect how much work went into it, and thus
the price compensates the worker for his labor. To be fair to Marx, many
people feel this way. It is intuitive to think that when we pay for a good or a
service we are satisfying a balance that is owed for value created in the past.
But this is only partly true, because prices aren’t static descriptions of past
behavior—even if payments rendered do compensate for value provided
(which includes the labor used to create the product). Instead, prices are
constantly-changing “signal devices” that send information to buyers in the
same way wing positions send information to the birds in a flock.
When there is a shortage of rye, for example, the price of rye bread goes
up to signal to consumers that there is a shortage. The farmer doesn’t have
to call the store and have the manager tell the customers, “We’re low on
rye, so if you all buy a lot of it then it will be gone!” Through a long chain
of financial transactions, the storeowner learns from other people with
localized knowledge and he then changes the price of the rye bread.
The price change signals to the consumer that rye is scarce and so more
money has to be spent on each loaf to keep rye production viable. It also
signals enterprising suppliers that they have an opportunity to make a profit
if they spend the capital that is needed to deliver this scarce, desirable
product to customers. When products stop being desirable, consumers don’t
have to call farmers to let them know that. Their lack of purchasing leads
the storeowner to drop the price, and the producer learns that he needs to
respond to this change in demand.
But without free markets and the prices that go with them, socialist
planners have to make their best guesses about what kind of goods should
be produced and what services are worth providing. Historically, this leads
to the overproduction of unwanted goods and the underproduction of
wanted goods. This underproduction can lead to shortages of vital products
like food and medicine, as we saw in the famines and “bread lines” of the
Soviet Union.
In 1982, the New York Times noted how the Soviet Union’s official state
newspaper Pravda claimed that Soviet collective farming was more
productive than American capitalist farms. It then said, “Unfortunately for
the people in the food lines, statistics [about the Soviet Union] suggest
otherwise.” Not even Soviet propaganda could hide the inferiority of
planned economies to free ones. As the Times pointed out, while the
U.S.S.R. suffered shortages, “The United States, with less than 5 percent of
the labor force working in agriculture, keeps supermarkets stocked from
one end of the country to the other and still exports nearly a third of its farm
output.”37
CAN IT EVER WORK?
There have been small social “communes” that operated effectively with
this mentality, but not large socialist states. Even many of these communes
experienced difficulties because socialist principles often contradict human
nature (see chapter eight).
For example, when communal villages in Israel called kibbutzim (singular,
kibbutz) were first implemented in 1909, children slept in communal houses
and only saw their parents for a few hours a day. Couples were even
discouraged from having tea kettles in their apartment for fear that it would
encourage private time away from the community. Kibbutzim grew in
popularity throughout much of the twentieth century, but since the 1970s
most have fallen away from the strict communitarian guidelines that tried to
impose more radical socialist principles on their members.38
But other small-scale socialist experiments were not as successful.
In mid-nineteenth-century America, followers of Etienne Cabet started
their own Icarian colonies to bring his utopian dream to life. One of these
colonies, in Iowa, housed a dozen families and became the longest-running
non-religious commune in American history. Property was owned
communally and decisions were made collectively. But the colonies never
grew because the children ended up leaving.39 Religious monasteries can
make communal life sustainable only, it seems, because they’re small and
made up of adults who freely join them (and are driven by convictions other
than socialism).
“Fine,” a critic may say, “Maybe we have to allow people to have private
property, and the ability to exchange goods on the market, but isn’t there a
kind of socialism that still looks out for the poor in the midst of the free
market?”
We will address that question in the next chapter; but you should know
that the Church has been aware of this kind of “moderate socialism” and
still rejects it. Pope Pius XI said, “Such just demands and desire have
nothing in them now which is inconsistent with Christian truth, and much
less are they special to socialism. Those who work solely toward such ends
have, therefore, no reason to become socialists” (Quadragesimo Anno 115).

It’s important to remember . . .

• Socialism is inherently flawed because it relies on human beings not acting as they naturally do: in
favor of their own self-interest.

• Socialism’s mandated equality in wealth cannot incentivize people to do the most difficult or
necessary jobs.

• Central planners can never access the knowledge that is necessary to determine the amount and
variety of goods and services to produce, which inevitably leads to shortages.
32 Etienne Cabet’s, Voyage to Icaria (1842), https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/cabet/icarus.htm.
33 Pope Paul VI acknowledged the peril of those who avoid realistic solutions in favor of unrealistic utopianism when he said,
“The appeal to a utopia is often a convenient excuse for those who wish to escape from concrete tasks in order to take refuge in
an imaginary world. To live in a hypothetical future is a facile alibi for rejecting immediate responsibilities.”
34 A similar point is made in Justin Haskins, Socialism Is Evil: The Moral Case Against Marx’s Radical Dream (Boston: The
Henry Dearborn Institute for Liberty, 2018), 36.
35 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.
36 F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” The American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 4. (September 1945), 522.
37 John F. Burns, “Soviet Food Shortages: Grumbling And Excuses,” The New York Times (January 15, 1982),
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/15/world/soviet-food-shortages-grumbling-and-excuses.html.
38 Melford E. Spiro, “Utopia and Its Discontents: The Kibbutz and Its Historical Vicissitudes,” American Anthropologist, Vol.
106, No. 3 (September 2004), 556–568.
39 As one historian puts it, “communities dwindled and dissolved due to lack of able-bodied, hard-working members. Each time
they experienced a setback, they started anew, until finally there were no more young members—and there was no more fresh
energy—to continue the community.” Jyotsna Sreenivasan, Utopias in American History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2008),
188.
 4

What About Democratic

Socialism?

A 1949 Gallup poll asked Americans, “What is your understanding of the

term socialism?” The majority answer, at 34 percent, was “state control of
business.” Today, only 17 percent of people identify socialism in this way.
The most popular answer in 2019, comprising 33 percent of respondents,
was an identification of socialism with “equality” and government
provision of benefits and social services.40
There have always been people who tried to achieve socialism’s goals
without relying on its radical methods. These socialists wanted to end
poverty, but they were skeptical about using a large, central government
established through a people’s revolt in order to do it. Tellingly, those who
did believe in that method, like Marx’s partner Friedrich Engels, were
immediately suspicious of their “democratic” opponents:
These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet
sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or
they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the
achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives
rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat.41
Democratic socialists in the nineteenth century formed labor parties in
European countries that pushed for worker reforms instead of worker
revolutions, and many of them still exist today. Democratic socialists are
also a rising force in American politics, and in order to see if their brand of
socialism is compatible with Catholicism we need to examine their early-
twentieth-century roots.
THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
“Fighting friends” is a good way to describe the relationship between
socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw and former-socialist-turned-
Catholic G.K. Chesterton.42 The duo’s dissimilarities even appeared in their
looks and diets: Chesterton was a hefty lover of pubs whereas Shaw was a
trim vegetarian and teetotaler.
In their 1929 debate on socialism, Chesterton said that Shaw didn’t really
believe that the “community” should own the means of production. Under
his model of a socialist state, “It is a few oligarchs or a few officials who do
in fact control all the means of production.” Chesterton went on:
It is easy enough to say property should be distributed, but who is, as it
were, the subject of the verb? Who or what is to distribute? Now it is
based on the idea that the central power which condescends to distribute
will be permanently just, wise, sane, and representative of the conscience
of the community which has created it. That is what we doubt.43
Dorothy Day, the founder of the twentieth-century Catholic Worker
Movement, was well-known in socialist circles but, like Chesterton, was
skeptical of government assistance in ending poverty. For example, she
stood against “all dictatorships, fascist and Bolshevist [communist]” and
also opposed government entitlement programs like Social Security.44 In
1944 she called that program “a great defeat for Christianity” and often
quoted St. Hilary of Poitiers who said, “The less we ask of Caesar, the less
we will have to render to Caesar.”45 She preferred promoting her houses of
hospitality, where Catholic Workers practiced being “poor with the poor.”
Modern democratic socialists usually don’t sound like Dorothy Day
because their beliefs come from her disciple Michael Harrington, who left
the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1950s. Harrington had described it as
“as far left as you could go within the Church,”46 and soon he left the
Church, too—to become an atheist, the author of a best-selling book on
poverty called The Other America, and the founder of the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA). He believed capitalism was in the process of
dying out and it was necessary to rescue the teachings of Karl Marx from
authoritarian Communists who had perverted them.
Instead of a centralized economy, like what existed in the Soviet Union,
Harrington argued for a “decentralized, face-to-face participation of the
direct producers and their communities.”47 The current platform of the
modern DSA says that since “we are unlikely to see an immediate end to
capitalism tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the
power of corporations and increase the power of working people.”48
And instead of replacing markets with “an all-powerful government
bureaucracy,” the DSA believes that “social ownership could take many
forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises
managed by workers and consumer representatives.” In an interview with
National Public Radio, one DSA chapter founder gave this analogy to
explain how a “worker cooperative” would achieve social ownership in a
way that is superior to corporate capitalism:
Let’s say you were negotiating at a bargaining table with workers in a
bakery, and the workers said, “Look, we want more than a quarter of the
bread; we want half of the bread, or we want two-thirds of the bread.” The
socialist would say, “Actually, we want the bakery. We want to control it
all, for all of our benefit.”49
SOCIAL WELFARE VS. SOCIALISM
Some defenders of democratic socialism don’t stress this anti-corporate
mentality and simply focus on government entitlement programs. Neal
Meyer, a contributor to Jacobin and a member of the New York City
Democratic Socialists of America, says democratic socialists simply “want
to build a world where everyone has a right to food, health care, a good
home, an enriching education, and a union job that pays well.”50
No one disputes that governments have a moral duty to make sure citizens
have the ability to access the basic goods of life like food, education, and
medicine. But how the access to those goods is provided is something that
people can debate, and some ways of providing it are contrary to Catholic
social doctrine.
When it comes to “democratic socialism,” for instance, a Catholic can
advocate for policies that cohere with Catholic social teaching—like a
preferential option for the poor or the right of laborers to form a union. But
Catholics cannot pursue policies that result in “de facto socialism” even if
it’s called something else. Pope St. John Paul II, for example, was aware of
proposals like Meyer’s that argue for the universal right to “a union job that
pays well.” He said in response that “the state could not directly ensure the
right to work for all its citizens unless it controlled every aspect of
economic life and restricted the free initiative of individuals.”
Government can provide benefits to people through social welfare
programs, like food stamps or education grants, and people are free to
gauge and debate the effectiveness and value of such programs. John Paul II
warned, though, that if the “welfare state” grew too large it would result in
“a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies,
which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by
concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an
enormous increase in spending” (Centesimus Annus 48).
In contrast to social welfare programs, the government could provide
these goods directly, through socialist programs like government-run
schools, hospitals, and grocery stores. Since socialism is often gradually
introduced to societies through public policy, though, Catholics should
approach with a healthy dose of skepticism government policies that seek to
nationalize entire industries.
Of course, the existence of some nationalized industries does not mean a
country has embraced full-fledged socialism. For example, having
government-run schools in the United States does not mean we are a
socialist country like the Soviet Union . . . though that wasn’t for a lack of
trying.
In 1922, Oregon tried to outlaw private and religious schools, and it was
only a 1925 Supreme Court decision that kept the state from winning a
monopoly on education. Pope Pius XI quoted this decision in Divnii Illius
Magistri when he wrote, “The child is not the mere creature of the state”
(37). Contrast this with Engels, who dreamed of a time when “the care and
education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all
children alike.”51
In the United States, government on many levels provides many health
care services. Yet a fully socialist health care system—an idea that more
political candidates are beginning to float and more voters entertain—would
be another example of central planning that should concern Catholics. Not
least of reasons why is the moral threat. If government has the only say over
what services a hospital offers, then Catholic hospitals (to whatever extent
they could remain identifiably so) could be mandated to provide
contraception and to perform sterilizations, abortions, and so-called “sex-
reassignment” surgeries, among other morally objectionable things.52 There
would also be concerns about the state’s rationing of health care, potentially
denying certain ordinary treatments to disabled patients and imposing
euthanasia in their place.53
If the only alternative were cooperation with state-mandated immoral
practices, the result could be the dissolution of the Catholic health care
system—similar to how many Catholic adoption services have shut down
rather than comply with legal mandates to facilitate adoptions to same-sex
couples, but with far wider-ranging effects.
Tempting though the idea may be to some, it’s hard to see how Catholics
can create, in Meyer’s words, “a democratic road to socialism.”54 The
Church’s condemnations against socialism would have remained the same
even if Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other socialist leaders had been elected
through a democratic process.
As we will see in the sections to come, socialism is evil in principle
because it deprives people of their natural rights and treats them as products
of the state to be sculpted and used instead of creations of God to be
dignified and respected. Furthermore, socialism is unworkable because it
doesn’t “see the world as it really is” and, as a result, leads to physical evils
like food shortages and the abject neglect of natural resources and
environments. The physical and moral evils of socialism will become clear
as we examine the history of both socialism and the Catholic Church’s
response to it.

It’s important to remember . . .

• Socialism is not the same thing as social welfare. Government can provide benefits to citizens
without banning free markets and centrally planning entire economies.

• Catholics cannot support the establishment of socialist policies even through democratic means.
40 Frank Newport, “The Meaning of ‘Socialism’ to Americans Today,” Gallup (October 4, 2018),
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/243362/meaning-socialism-americans-today.aspx.
41 Friedrich Engels, “The Principles of Communism” (1847), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-
com.htm.
42 Shaw said that Chesterton’s crimes were those “of imagination and humor, not of malice,” while Chesterton said of Shaw, “It is
necessary to disagree with him as much as I do in order to admire him as much as I do,”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40681668?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.
43 Chesterton, following a model proposed by fellow Catholic author Hilaire Belloc, argued that it was not wealth that should be
re-distributed among people but the means to produce wealth. This “distributism” would take power away from governments
and factories and return it to individual families who could produce their own livelihoods. That’s why Chesterton is reported to
have said, “The problem with capitalism is not that there are too many Capitalists, but that there are too few.” (Chesterton even
blamed capitalism for “killing the family” because it drew men away from the home to work in factories and kept them from
being self-sufficient.)
44 Dorothy Day, “Communists Communicate,” The Catholic Worker (January 1937), 5,
https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/527.html. Cited in Stephen Beale, “The Dorothy Day Few of Us Know,”
Crisis (March 19, 2013), https://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/the-dorothy-day-few-of-us-know.
45 “We believe that social security legislation, now billed as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for
Christianity. It is an acceptance of the idea of force and compulsion. It is an acceptance of Cain’s statement, on the part of the
employer. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Since the employer can never be trusted to give a family wage, nor take care of the
worker as he takes care of his machine when it is idle, the state must enter in and compel help on his part.” Dorothy Day, “On
Pilgrimage,” The Catholic Worker (January 1973) 2, 6, https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/150.pdf. “Actually
if the State, City, and the whole secular world with its ‘inspector generals’ and bureaucracies did not demand our conformity to
such insane standards of luxury, Holy Mother the Church would not have to be pleading for funds for schools, and books, and
buses, and health and welfare aids. (As St. Hilary wrote a thousand (or a few days) ago, ‘The less we ask of Caesar, the less we
will have to render to Caesar.)’” Dorothy Day, “More About Holy Poverty. Which Is Voluntary Poverty,” The Catholic Worker
(February 1945) 1-2, https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/527.html.
46 Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life Of Michael Harrington (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 70.
47 Michael Harrington, Socialism: Past and Future (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1989), 197.
48 “About us,” Democratic Socialists of America, https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/.
49 Danielle Kurtzleben, “Getting To Know The DSA,” National Public Radio (July 19, 2018),
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/19/630394669/getting-to-know-the-dsa.
50 Neal Meyer, “What is Democratic Socialism,” Jacobin (July 2018), https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/democratic-socialism-
bernie-sanders-social-democracy-alexandria-ocasio-cortez.
51 Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf.
52 Lillian Cicerchia laments that, when it comes to abortion, Catholic hospitals aren’t “compelled to offer the service” though she
hopes that through government-backed universal health care, “The waiting periods, the counseling, the religious exemptions,
the feticide laws, [would] all have to go.” Lillian Cicerchia, “What Medicare for All Means for Abortion Rights,” Jacobin
(January 18, 2019), https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/medicare-for-all-abortion-hyde-trap-laws-reproductive-justice.
53 Rationing of palliative care leading people to feel that assisted suicide is the only way to treat their pain has become a problem
in Canada’s nationalized health care program. See Peter Stockland, “Assisted dying was supposed to be an option. To some
patients, it looks like the only one,” Maclean’s (June 22, 2018), https://www.macleans.ca/society/assisted-dying-was-supposed-
to-be-an-option-to-some-patients-it-looks-like-the-only-one/.
54 Neal Meyer, “What is Democratic Socialism,” Jacobin (July 2018), https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/democratic-socialism-
bernie-sanders-social-democracy-alexandria-ocasio-cortez.
 Part Two
The Birth of
Socialism
 5

The False “First Socialists”

Some people say Catholics not only can be socialists, they should be
socialists because that was how the first Christians lived. David Bentley
Hart says the book of Acts describes how Christians “affirmed their new
faith by living in a single dwelling, selling their fixed holdings,
redistributing their wealth ‘as each needed,’ and owning all possessions
communally.”55 Jose Mena assures us that “no God-fearing Christian would
want to condemn the apostolic Communism described in Acts 2 and 4.”56
Others say socialism comes straight from Jesus himself, as can be seen in
Barbara Ehrenreich’s description of Jesus as a “wine-guzzling vagrant and
precocious socialist.”57 Erika Christakis argues in Time that “Jesus would
advocate a tax rate somewhere between 50 percent (in the vein of, ‘If you
have two coats, give one to the man who has none’) and 100 percent (if you
want to get into heaven, be poor). Mostly, he suggested giving all your
money up for the benefit of others.”58
But when we examine the biblical and historical evidence, a different
picture emerges: the first Christians lived in communities that practiced
voluntary charity rather than mandatory Communism.
WAS JESUS A SOCIALIST?
As Trent has argued in his previous book Counterfeit Christs, Jesus was not
a socialist because he did not seek to either abolish private property or
centralize wealth redistribution.59 Jesus commanded people to give money
to the poor (Luke 12:33), but he never specified whether that money should
be given directly to the poor, donated to charities, or be taxed and
redistributed though government programs.
St. Luke even describes how a person following Jesus said to him,
“Teacher, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.” Instead of
helping this man “redistribute wealth” Jesus answered him, “Man, who
made me a judge or divider over you?” Jesus then said to the crowd
following him, “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life
does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:13–15).
But if that’s true, why did Jesus criticize the rich and say in Matthew
19:24 that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than
for a rich man to enter heaven?
In the first century, ordinary people could grow or acquire only enough
food to meet their basic needs, and any surplus was shared with relatives or
kin who were not so well off. The rich in Jesus’ time were seen as hoarders
whose excess consumption directly contributed to everyone else’s poverty.
That’s why Jesus condemned the “rich fool” who stored up resources in his
barns instead of putting them to use to help others (Luke 12:16–21). As a
Mediterranean proverb declares, “Every rich man is a thief or the son of a
thief.”60
But this does not mean that Jesus wanted every rich person (much less
every person) to give away all he owned.
When Jesus agreed to dine with the diminutive tax collector Zacchaeus,
the man said, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if
I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold” (Luke 19:8).
Instead of saying, “Half isn’t good enough! Sell everything and follow me,”
Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:9).
Zacchaeus and other wealthy disciples of Jesus, like Joseph of Arimathea
(who could afford an expensive rock tomb for Jesus’ burial), show that it is
not impossible for the rich to inherit the kingdom of God—as long as they
do not serve money instead of God (Matt. 6:24) or let a “love of money”
become the root of their evils (1 Tim. 6:10).
WERE THE FIRST CHRISTIANS SOCIALISTS?
The second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles records how Peter’s first
sermon after the Jewish festival of Pentecost (which Jews call Shavuot)
resulted in 3,000 people being baptized and joining the fledgling Christian
church. The Jewish historian Josephus and St. Luke, the author of Acts,
confirm that many of the visitors to Jerusalem at this time were pilgrims
from all over the Roman Empire. But instead of returning home after the
festival, these new converts “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching
and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).
The early Church now had a “blessing of a problem” on its hands. These
visitors needed help finding a place to live and a way to sustain themselves.
Fortunately, the Christian community in Jerusalem responded generously so
that “all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they
sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had
need” (Acts 2:45). But does this arrangement entail “apostolic
Communism”?
First, there is doubt about whether first-century Christians completely
renounced private property. Acts 2:45 uses an imperfect verb to say of their
possessions, “They were selling and were dividing them to all” (in Greek,
hyparxeis epipraskon kai diemerizon auta) instead of saying in the simple
past tense, “They sold and distributed them to all.” This seems to describe a
continuing process of selling extra property and goods in order to support
the poor. But in order to do that, Christians would have had to retain some
property even after becoming believers.
Moreover, although the New Testament contains many commands to help
the poor, it does not contain any commands for believers to give up their
possessions to communal ownership. If that were the case, we would expect
the biblical authors to discuss the issue of tithing, or required giving. But as
New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg points out, although tithing was
commanded of God’s people in the Old Testament, “no New Testament text
ever mandates a tithe but rather commands generous and sacrificial giving
instead.”61
This can be seen in St. Paul’s petition to the Corinthians that they give to a
collection for poor believers in Judea. Paul never commanded them to do
this but instead he hoped it would be seen “not as an exaction but as a
willing gift. . . . Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not
reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor.
9:5,7).
But even if the first Christians renounced some or all of their private
property, that doesn’t mean every Christian is bound to do the same. There
is a difference between a description of what some Christians did and a
prescription of what all Christians ought to do.
For example, the New Testament describes Christians meeting in private
homes for worship (1 Cor. 16:19), but that doesn’t mean it is wrong for
Christians to worship in churches today. Likewise, the description of
Christians selling property and bringing the proceeds to the apostles’ feet
for communal distribution (Acts 4:34–35) doesn’t mean this behavior was a
moral requirement for all believers then—or is now.
In response, critics like Hart contend that the story of Ananias and
Sapphira shows that renouncing property and giving it to the apostles was
mandatory because the couple was struck down for withholding their
property from the collection. But a careful reading of the passage shows
that the couple’s sin was not their mere withholding of property. Peter says
the property was theirs before they sold it and they would have retained
their right to use it even after selling it (Acts 5:4). Rather, it was their lie to
the apostles who represented God’s authority that incurred the fatal
judgment against them.
WAS THE EARLY CHURCH SOCIALIST?
Ancient pagan critics like Lucian and Christian apologists like Justin
Martyr both attest to Christians living a common life together and sharing
what they had with one another.62 This isn’t surprising, given that by the
second century Jews who worshipped Jesus had been expelled from the
synagogues and the Romans often persecuted people who openly admitted
to being Christian. In the absence of civil or religious support, Christians
relied on one another to survive.
But there’s no reason why we must infer from this communal living was
or is essential to the Christian faith. The prescription for us may be more
general. As Pope Benedict XVI notes, “As the Church grew, this radical
form of material communion could not in fact be preserved. But its essential
core remained: within the community of believers there can never be room
for a poverty that denies anyone what is needed for a dignified life” (Deus
Caritas Est 20).
As Christians became more accepted in the Roman Empire, reports of
their generosity preceded them. The Roman emperor Julian the Apostate
even griped about how Christians “support not only their own poor but ours
as well; all men see that our people lack aid from us.”63 Once Roman
persecution ended, some Christians were able to climb the social ladder and
achieve wealth, which they were not required to renounce but could
prudently manage instead.
Hart claims that the early Christians always condemned the accumulation
of wealth; and some of them, like Ambrose, did—when it was not put to
good use in serving the poor. But Hart goes further when he claims that the
Church Fathers condemned the possession of wealth itself regardless of
how it’s used. He asserts “The great John Chrysostom frequently issued
pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail
Bakunin sound like timid conservatives.”64 But from Marx’s perspective,
Chrysostom probably sounded like an enemy of the socialist cause when he
wrote:
A rich man is one thing, a rapacious man is another: an affluent man is
one thing, a covetous man is another. Make clear distinctions, and do not
confuse things which are diverse. Are you a rich man? I forbid you not.
Are you a rapacious man? I denounce you. Have you property of your
own? Enjoy it. Do you take the property of others? I will not hold my
peace.65
In the centuries after the fall of Rome in A.D. 476, invading northern
tribes, plagues, and poor crop yields decimated the European population.
Apart from a few Christian monasteries that preserved ancient knowledge,
what remained were powerful local rulers whose wealth consisted of land
they owned and the peasants, called serfs, who were subject to them (a
system we call feudalism).
Today, serfdom is considered on par with slavery, but in the Middle Ages
it was considered a moral improvement because whereas slaves had the
same value as livestock, serfs were recognized as persons made in the
image of God.66 As persons they were baptized and had rights their feudal
lord had to respect, though they did not have meaningful freedom. They
were forced to farm for a lord (or one of his vassals), who in return
provided them with food, shelter, and protection. And, unlike slaves, serfs
could own property and keep some of what they produced.
This is important because the concept of serfdom will be referenced both
in the arguments of the true “first socialists” of the nineteenth century and
in the writings of their twentieth-century critics. The latter claimed that
socialism does not move humanity forward to a utopian ideal but that it
takes it backward on a ruinous “road to serfdom” that turns the state into the
new lord, making the rest of us its servants.
It’s important to remember . . .
• Jesus required his followers to help the poor, but he did not tell them to support government
confiscation and allocation of wealth.

• The early Church practiced charity but did not require believers to renounce private property or
support what we would now call socialism.
55 David Bentley Hart, “Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?” The New York Times (April 27, 2019),
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/opinion/sunday/socialism.html.
56 Jose Mena, “The Catholic turn to socialism is something to celebrate,” Catholic Herald (May 30, 2019),
https://catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2019/05/30/the-catholic-turn-to-socialism-is-something-to-celebrate/.
57 Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001), 68.
58 Erika Christakis, “Is Paul Ryan’s Budget ‘Un-Christian’?” Time Magazine, August 14, 2012,
http://ideas.time.com/2012/08/14/why-paul-ryans- budget-unchristian/.
59 According to economist Lawrence Reed, “The fact is, one can scour the scriptures with a fine-tooth comb and find nary a word
from Jesus that endorses the forcible redistribution of wealth by political authorities. None, period.” Lawrence Reed, Render
Unto Caesar: Was Jesus a Socialist? (Atlanta, GA: Foundation for Economic Education, 2015), Kindle edition.
60 “By and large, only the dishonorable rich, the dishonorable nonelites, and those beyond the pale of public opinion (such as city
elites, governors, regional kings) could accumulate wealth with impunity. This they did in a number of ways, notably by
trading, tax collecting, and money lending. . . . In the first century [these methods] would all be considered dishonorable and
immoral forms of usury.” Bruce Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (Louisville, KY:
Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 104–105.
61 Craig Blomberg, “Neither Capitalism nor Socialism: A Biblical Theology of Economics,” Journal of Markets & Morality, Vol.
15 No. 1 (Spring 2012), 211.
62 Justin Martyr wrote to the Roman Emperor “[W]e who valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possessions, now
bring what we have into a common stock, and communicate to every one in need . . .” (First Apology, 14). Lucian had a more
cynical view saying in The Passing of Peregrinus, “they despise all things indiscriminately and consider them common
property, receiving such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence. So if any charlatan and trickster, able to profit by
occasions, comes among them, he quickly acquires sudden wealth by imposing upon simple folk.”
63 Julian the Apostate, Letter to Arsacius.
64 David Bentley Hart, “Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’?” The New York Times (April 27, 2019),
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/opinion/sunday/socialism.html.
65 Homily II on Eutropius.
66 Serf comes from the Latin servus, which means “slave” and while serfdom is considered on par with slavery today, in the
medieval world serfdom was considered a moral improvement to Roman slavery. In the time of Jesus a slave was not a person
but rather, as one historian notes, “a slave was res, a thing, property, an object . . . wounding or killing a slave was usually
counted as damage to property.”
 6

The Real “First Socialists”

Around the corner from the Louvre in Paris is the small Café de la Régence,
a haven for chess players both literal and metaphorical. On an August
afternoon in 1844, two German twenty-somethings, Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, sat among these players for lunch.
Engels had just come from working at a mill in England where his parents
had sent him in hopes he would abandon his radical philosophies. Instead,
the poverty and filthy conditions he witnessed in the mill towns motivated
him to write The Condition of the Working Class in England. This
confirmed Marx’s belief that history was just one long story about the rich
oppressing the poor, but this time factory owners took the place of feudal
lords or Roman slave drivers.
There had been self-identified socialists before Marx, but they were
“utopian dreamers” who hoped the rich would adopt their elaborate plans
for a better world.67 Marx and Engels, in contrast, believed that a just
society was achieved not by persuading kings and queens but by equipping
the pawns to overthrow them. And so, in 1848, they published The
Communist Manifesto, which declared, “Let the ruling classes tremble at a
Communistic revolution. The proletarians (poor workers) have nothing to
lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”68
We can’t understand the first socialists, though, unless we understand the
capitalism they rejected. And we can’t understand capitalism unless we
examine it at its origins in fourteenth-century Italy.
TRADING FEUDALISM FOR CAPITALISM
If you were glancing over Leonardo Da Vinci’s desk as he painted The Last
Supper, you might have seen this reminder in one of his notebooks: “Learn
multiplication from the root from Maestro Luca.” If Da Vinci was history’s
most famous inventor, then his friend, the Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli,
was its most famous accountant. You have probably never heard of him, but
his mathematics textbook has been called “the most influential book on
capitalism” ever written.69
To see why, we need to return to the issue of trade.
You’ll recall that serfs could own some property; but it was always
meager and what their property produced was primarily traded with
relatives. Some could amass enough goods to sell at local fairs, but no one
got rich with this kind of trading. That began to change in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries when mercantile capitalists like Marco Polo began
transporting large numbers of goods from locations where they were cheap
over long distances in order to sell them in places where they were
expensive.
Other merchants wanted these profits without personally making a 7,000-
mile trek into China, so they formed companies that provided the money (or
capital) to fund these trading expeditions. The investors in these “joint-
stock” companies would receive returns from successful expeditions and
share the losses from unsuccessful ones, thereby minimizing risk and
encouraging more investors to join the company. As more investors joined,
companies were able to use some of their profit to grow their enterprise.
Markets had always existed in one form or another since antiquity, but
now wealth could be created instead of just being discovered, and that
meant it could be reinvested to create more wealth. Hence, capitalism (in
the nascent form of “merchant capitalism”) was born.
As these companies grew and global trade increased, there came to be a
shortage in precious metals like gold and silver that were used to mint
coins. In addition, transporting coins became a hazardous way of moving
wealth because caravans could be robbed and ships often sank. Banks
became a safer place to deposit wealth because a person could deposit coins
in one area and then withdraw the same amount in another area through a
banknote. But while a local, traveling merchant only had to keep track of
how many coins were in his purse, trading companies had to keep track of
hundreds or even thousands of transactions taking place across different
continents.
And that’s where Da Vinci’s friend Master Luca enters the picture.
Two years after Columbus discovered the New World and opened up even
more trading opportunities, Pacioli published a summary of mathematics
that included instructions for performing “double-entry book keeping.” This
method of accounting requires two entries for every transaction: one for the
debited account on the left side of the ledger and one for the credited
account on the right. Both columns should add up to the same amount,
which helps prevent errors and allows for more complex transactions.
Jewish merchants had used this tidy method for centuries, but the printing
press made Pacioli’s description of it accessible to a growing class of
entrepreneurs who were leading an economic revolution.
For the first time in human history, wealth was not something that
belonged solely to lords who merely inherited it from other’s labor. Now
men like Josiah Wedgwood could create wealth through their ingenuity and
effort. Wedgewood grew up in poverty as the youngest of thirteen children,
but by the middle of the eighteenth century he had started a pottery business
that eventually produced affordable ceramics for palaces and humble homes
alike. He advertised pottery as “Queen’s Ware” and pioneered the use of
retail methods like catalogues and money-back guarantees.70 Wedgewood
was also an abolitionist who fought the slave trade and saw businesses that
used efficient mass production as the moral alternative to slavery. The
expansion of private business also drove down the cost of goods so that the
average person could have access to goods that once belonged only to
royalty.
This was true not just of Wedgewood’s pottery but also of basic
necessities like bread, milk, meat, and medicine, the wider availability of
which vastly improved the quality of life—and the span of life—for all
workers. For example, it took tens of thousands of years for the global
population to reach 600 million by the year 1700. But in just a hundred
years the population grew to 900 million, and by the year 1900 it had hit
1.65 billion.71 In other words, thanks to economic advancements, hundreds
of millions of people reached adulthood and had families of their own who
would have otherwise died young of starvation or disease.
CAPITALISM’S MELANCHOLY MADNESS
As cities expanded to accommodate rapidly growing businesses, the
resulting influx of people led to crowded, unsanitary, and dangerous places.
In his 1854 novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens describes a fictional version
of Manchester, England called Coketown, whose red bricks had become
choked by smoke and ash from the numerous mills. He writes, “It had a
black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast
piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling
all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked
monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of
melancholy madness.”72
Engels echoed Dickens descriptions of the town’s “measureless filth and
stench” and described it as disease-ridden and indicative of how the poor
“must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.”73 Engels also
believed that workers had better wages and quality of life before the
Industrial Revolution when they worked on farms.74 Marx and Engels
predicted in The Communist Manifesto that English workers would no
longer tolerate this oppression and would rise up against their capitalist
overlords. But the revolution never came, partly because the English
government passed laws that restricted child labor, regulated workplaces,
and improved public sanitation.
A similar episode took place in the U.S. five decades later, when Upton
Sinclair published installments of his novel The Jungle in a socialist
newspaper in 1905. It depicted the grim conditions of Chicago meatpacking
plants through a fictional story about a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis
Rudkus. Sinclair’s descriptions of the plants are like a trip through Dante’s
inferno where workers endure unique, hellish conditions based on their
tasks rather than their sins. For example, some men get their fingernails
peeled off as they prepare meat while others fall into steam vats and have
their remains turned into lard.75
The American author Jack London called Sinclair’s book “the Uncle
Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery” and Sinclair hoped it would spark a socialist
revolution in the same way that that book helped ignite the Civil War.76 But
the book’s most notable accomplishment was spurring passage of the 1906
Pure Food and Drug Act, which created what is now known as the Food and
Drug Administration. Food was now safer, but socialism now seemed less
attainable: a fact Sinclair noted when he said of his book, “I aimed at the
public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”77
CAPITALISM’S GREATEST SIN
Although inhuman working conditions (which the Church also condemned
along with socialism) played a part in socialist arguments, they were not
socialism’s primary complaint. Instead, the greatest injustice of capitalism
was that workers depended on wages from capitalists and they were cheated
out of the wages they truly deserved.
Engels said that having to earn a wage at all put workers “in the most
revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being.” He even
claimed that slaves and serfs were better off than nineteenth-century lower-
class workers:
The slave is assured of a bare livelihood by the self-interest of his master,
the serf has at least a scrap of land on which to live; each has at worst a
guarantee for life itself. But the proletarian must depend upon himself
alone, and is yet prevented from so applying his abilities as to be able to
rely upon them.78
Marx further protested the fact that mass-production techniques multiplied
worker productivity but worker compensation did not increase at the same
rate. He concluded that capitalists were stealing this “surplus value” of a
worker’s labor and calling it profit. Marx argued instead for a “labor value”
of a worker’s labor that an employee could redeem from a “socially owned”
source of income based on how long or hard he worked.79 But in order to do
this, capitalists would have to be stripped of their means of production and
prevented from retaining profits that belonged to their employees.
At the same time Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto,
revolutions were breaking out across Europe, overthrowing constitutional
monarchies in places like France, Denmark, and Hungary and establishing a
free press and parliamentary governments in their place. A few decades
later, labor riots broke out in America and socialists captured the city of
Paris and ruled it for nearly two weeks.80 All this prompted Pope Leo XIII
to write an encyclical on these “new things,” in which he acknowledged
that “the discussion is not easy, nor is it void of danger” because there are
“crafty agitators” who “pervert men’s judgments and to stir up the people to
revolt.”
Even still, the pope defended his foray into politics and economics in
Rerum Novarum because “the responsibility of the apostolic office urges us
to treat the question of set purpose and in detail, in order that no
misapprehension may exist as to the principles which truth and justice
dictate for its settlement” (2).

It’s important to remember . . .

• The rise of capitalism led to an increase in wealth,
but at the cost of dangerous jobs and an increase in urban squalor.

• Early socialists seized on these social injustices to argue that capitalism itself needed to be
abandoned in order to protect the dignity of workers.
67 This can be seen in the writings of figures like Henri Saint-Simon and Robert Owens. For precursors see J.C. Davis Utopia and
the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (1983).
68 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm.
69 Tim Harford, “Is this the most influential work in the history of capitalism?” BBC (October 23, 2017),
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41582244.
70 Mark Dodgson & David Gann, Innovation: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9.
71 Peter R. Cox, Demography, 5th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 195.
72 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Graham Law (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2000), 60.
73 Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns,” (1845), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-
class/ch04.htm.
74 Modern research refutes this. See for example Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “English Workers’ Living Standards
during the Industrial Revolution: A New Look,” The Economic History Review New Series, Vol. 36, No. 1 (February 1983),
20–25.
75 “. . . and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the
level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough
of them left to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out
to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906), 117.
76 Earle Labor, Jack London: An American Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 230.
77 Carl Jensen, Stories that Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century (New York, Seven Stories Press, 2000), 56.
78 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 127.
79 “He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the
common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount
of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.” Karl Marx,
Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/.
80 These include the 1886 Haymarket riot and the radical anarchist Paris commune that ruled the city during the Spring of 1871.
 7

Leo XIII on Private Property

The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said ownership of land was

a lie because “the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to
nobody.”81 This means anyone who owns property must have stolen it from
someone else, a sentiment the anarchist Pierre Proudhon expressed in the
famous slogan La propriété, c’est le vol! or “Property is theft!”82
The Church does not share their rejection of private property, even if
Catholic doctrines like the universal destination of goods can be twisted to
sound like socialism. That’s why Pope Leo XIII begins his critique of
socialism in Rerum Novarum by saying, “It is surely undeniable that, when
a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of
his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own” (5).
THE RIGHT TO ACQUIRE PROPERTY AND WEALTH
The primary reason that people work in exchange for money (what’s called
remunerative labor) is so that they can use that money to obtain their own
property. Leo writes, “If one man hires out to another his strength or skill,
he does so for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the
satisfaction of his needs.” This does not mean the man only has a right to an
income that satisfies his basic needs, though, because Leo goes on to say
that this worker “expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not only
to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just as he
pleases” (5).
The right to acquire money through work would be no right at all if you
had to surrender all of what you earned to the state (and thus weren’t free to
spend it “as you please”). In addition, a person’s right to wages includes the
right to convert those wages into property that remains under his control.
That way, “If he lives sparingly, saves money, and, for greater security,
invests his savings in land, the land, in such case, is only his wages under
another form; and, consequently, a working man’s little estate thus
purchased should be as completely at his full disposal as are the wages he
receives for his labor.”
Leo concludes that socialists “deprive [a worker] of the liberty of
disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing
his resources and of bettering his condition in life” (5). Elsewhere, in his
letter on socialism, he says they
assail the right of property sanctioned by natural law; and by a scheme of
horrible wickedness, while they seem desirous of caring for the needs and
satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common
whatever has been acquired either by title of lawful inheritance, or by
labor of brain and hands, or by thrift in one’s mode of life (Quod
Apostolici Muneris 1).
Notice that Leo did not condemn socialism because it was necessarily
atheistic or authoritarian. Rather, he condemned socialism because of its
lack of respect toward the natural right to private property.
ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL
The claim that “property is theft” is nonsensical, because you can only
“steal” what someone else rightfully owns. Even Karl Marx said that
“‘theft’ as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of
property.”83 In fact, there is no contradiction between publicly available
goods and private ownership of those goods.
Leo responds to critics like Rousseau who say people have the right to use
the land but they don’t have the right to own it by saying “they are
defrauding man of what his own labor has produced.” That’s because “the
soil which is tilled and cultivated with toil and skill utterly changes its
condition; it was wild before, now it is fruitful; was barren, but now brings
forth in abundance.” And because man has used his God-given abilities to
transform the earth into a resource, “it cannot but be just that he should
possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any
one being justified in violating that right” (Rerum Novarum 9).
Leo’s argument for private property also rests on the ability to carry out
our moral duties. If you have the duty of filling my car with gasoline, it
follows you have the right to drive my car, because you can’t carry out the
former duty without the latter ability. Likewise, if we have a duty to carry
on lives that, unlike other animals, have stability and focus on pursuing the
good, then “it must be within [man’s] right to possess things not merely for
temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to
hold them in stable and permanent possession” (6).
This is “all the stronger” for families because “it is a most sacred law of
nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom
he has begotten.” If parents have a duty to provide for their dependents,
they must have a way to provide for these people. Leo goes on to say, “In
no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive
property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance.” This stands
in contrast to Marx’s call to abolish not just the law of inheritance but the
family itself (which we’ll examine in more detail in chapter ten).
Leo is adamant that it is not the state’s responsibility to provide for
individuals or their families, except in extreme situations of poverty.84
“There is no need to bring in the state” because “man precedes the state,
and possesses, prior to the formation of any state, the right of providing for
the substance of his body.” Likewise, the duty of parents to provide for their
children “can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the state,” and when
socialists seek to give the state the parents’ duty to provide for children,
they “act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home”
(14).
A century before the birth of Christ, the Roman statesman Cicero
defended the right to property by comparing it to the seats in a theater:
“Though the theater is a public place, yet it is correct to say that the
particular seat a man has taken belongs to him, so in the state or in the
universe, though these are common to all, no principle of justice militates
against the possession of private property.”85 Likewise, Pope Leo says, “The
fact that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole
human race can in no way be a bar to the owning of private property” (8).
In fact, one way the earth serves the whole human race is through
individual owners of property who convert what they own into goods (like
crops or steel) that serve everyone else’s needs. As economies advance, the
labor that creates these goods becomes more specialized and allows for
more resources to be produced and distributed throughout the world,
including to the poor.
In 2015, YouTuber Andy George tried to make a chicken sandwich from
scratch, literally. He acquired a chicken, grew his own wheat and vegetable
garden, built a press to turn sunflower seeds into vegetable oil, and even
traveled to the ocean to procure salt. It took six months and $1,500 to make
a chicken sandwich that didn’t taste very good.86 But you can go to a fast-
food restaurant and get a delicious chicken sandwich at .0003 percent of the
cost and in .00003 percent of the time—all thanks to the good of private
property, the division of specialized labor, and free markets where property
can be sold in order to benefit other people.
THE GOOD OF PRIVATE PROPERTY
In his 1776 work “Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith said a nation’s wealth
wasn’t found in the gold within a king’s vault. Instead, its wealth existed in
its citizens’ having a high standard of living because of their ability to
freely trade their goods and services. As these individuals acquire wealth
for themselves, they also indirectly create wealth for the community as a
whole through their unique trades. Or, as Smith puts it, “It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our
dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”87
That’s one reason why Leo says socialism isn’t just immoral; it’s
impossible. He warns that if socialism were adopted, “The door would be
thrown open to envy, to mutual invective, and to discord; the sources of
wealth themselves would run dry, for no one would have any interest in
exerting his talents or his industry” (Rerum Novarum 15).
Leo was well-aware of that most basic incentive problem we covered in
chapter three: getting people to work. He saw that without the opportunity
for real and personal gain through wage labor and the accumulation of
private property (i.e., thrift and savings), few men would work with enough
industriousness to ensure a level of prosperity conducive to peace.
But when people like bakers and brewers exert their talents, they can end
up acquiring more property than others. Socialists believe this inequality is
a problem to be remedied through the communal production of wealth that
is equally distributed to everyone. However, as we will show in the
subsequent chapters, Pope Leo XIII was correct when he said, “That ideal
equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the
leveling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation” (15).
It’s important to remember . . .
• God gave the earth to all of humanity (this is the universal destination of goods), but this does not
preclude individuals from rightfully owning parts of the world and using it for good purposes.

• The Church teaches that socialism is wrong because it denies man’s natural right both to acquire
wealth and property and to dispose of them as he pleases.

• Socialism is flawed because it fails to see that private property allows people to carry out their
moral duties to one another, such as by providing for one’s family or creating goods and services
for one’s fellow man.
81 Jean Jacques Rousseau, “On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind: The Second Part” (1754),
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/rousseau/inequality/ch02.htm.
82 P.J. Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la Propriété?, ou, recherches sur le principe du droit et du Gouvernement (Paris, 1840), 2.
83 Karl Marx, “Letter to J. B. Schweizer ‘On Proudhon’” (1865),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_01_24.htm.
84 “That the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a
great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and
without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of
the commonwealth” (Rerum Novarum 14).
85 De Finibus, Book III.
86 Marissa Fessenden, “Making a Sandwich from Scratch Took This Man Six Months,” Smithsonian Magazine (September 18,
2015), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/making-sandwich-scratch-took-man-six-months-180956674/.
87 Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2 (London, William Clowes and Sons,
1835), 55.
 8

Leo XIII and Human Nature

In 1924, nineteen-year-old Nathan Leopold and eighteen-year-old Richard

Loeb lured fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks into their car, where they
stabbed him repeatedly in the head with a chisel before dumping the body
in a ditch by some railroad tracks near Chicago. The duo were wealthy and
intelligent and seemed to have no motive for the killing. So their attorney,
the famous Clarence Darrow, convinced the judge to spare them the death
penalty by arguing that the crime wasn’t really their fault. “Somewhere in
the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man,” he
said, “something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated,
despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.”88
Darrow’s defense relied on a belief about human nature shared by many
socialists. Instead of being born with sinful tendencies we must overcome
through virtue and grace, socialists believe we are born good, and it is
societal processes or social structures that cause us to become evil. They
follow Rousseau, who said, “Man is naturally good” and, “Society depraves
and perverts men.”89
Rousseau also believed that society makes us unequal because human
talents and fortunes are distributed unequally. The socialist answer to this
“unnatural inequality” is mandated equality, which is why the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union declared in 1986, “Communism is a classless
social system with one form of public ownership of the means of
production and with full social equality of all members of society.”90 But in
Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII says this is backward because “it is
impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that
intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain” (Rerum
Novarum, 17).
UNEQUAL ISN’T UNFAIR
For socialists, “equality” isn’t just a matter of providing people with equal
opportunities (like equal standing under the law). Instead, true equality can
only be achieved through mandating equal outcomes. In 1913, the eminent
socialist Bernard Shaw wrote, “Socialism, translated into concrete terms,
means equal division of the national income among all the inhabitants of
the country.”91
Human beings are certainly equal with regard to their basic rights and
dignity, because God made us that way. But we can never be equal in things
like wealth, health, or accomplishments because, as Leo observes, “There
naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important
kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is
a necessary result of unequal condition.” And whereas Rousseau would
consider this situation a defect in need of a remedy, Leo says,
Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or
to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means
of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts;
and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar
domestic condition (17).
Leo believed, building on the classical and Christian traditions before him,
that the fact of natural differences among human beings promotes the
distinct good of needing one another for our earthly and spiritual needs.
Humans aren’t identical, like interchangeable cogs in a machine or worker
ants. They’re more like specialized organs that work together for the good
of a whole body—be it the family, the neighborhood, the nation, or the
Body of Christ. These differences constitute a “glue” that holds the body
together and allows us to receive genuine gifts of friendship from one
another (something that would be impossible if we were all equal and
already possessed those gifts).
This interdependence that springs from our inequality can be called
Christian realism. It is realistic because it recognizes the natural differences
among human beings. It is Christian in how it recognizes that some of them
are good for us. For example, we could not have genuine responsibility for
one another, or what is called solidarity, without some kind of inequality.
This sentiment can be found in the writings of the twelfth-century mystic
St. Catherine of Siena, who heard God tell her,
 I could easily have created men possessed of all that they should need
both for body and soul, but I wish that one should have need of the other,
and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and the gifts
that they have received from me. Whether man will or no, he cannot help
making an act of love.92
THE DIGNITY OF WORK
Another unnatural aspect of socialism is its hostility to work, especially
physical labor. Marx believed mental and physical labor should be divided
equally among people; his son-in-law Paul Lafargue went so far as to write
in The Right to Be Lazy that work itself should be forbidden. He declares,
“Jehovah, the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme
example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for all eternity”
(though Lafargue overlooked John 5:17, where Jesus said the Father is still
at work).93
The 2016 Tradinista! Manifesto likewise objected to the idea that “people
must sell their labor-power on the market in order to survive.”94 Their
solution to this injustice is found in the state’s “guaranteeing a livelihood
independent of the market.” This sentiment was even echoed in 2019 when
a summary of the “Green New Deal” claimed that the government should
provide “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work
[emphasis added].95
In other words, no one should have to work for a living. But is this natural
or healthy for human beings? According to Leo XIII:
As regards bodily labor, even had man never fallen from the state of
innocence, he would not have remained wholly idle; but that which would
then have been his free choice and his delight became afterward
compulsory, and the painful expiation for his disobedience. “Cursed be the
earth in thy work; in thy labor thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life”
(Rerum Novarum 17).
Simply put, bodily labor is not evil in itself. What is evil is the physical
toil and pain we experience as a necessary byproduct of having corruptible
bodies in a fallen world. This is why Leo says, “Nothing is more useful than
to look upon the world as it really is, and at the same time to seek
elsewhere, as we have said, for the solace to its troubles” (18). That
“elsewhere” is the life of grace that gives courage to bear all manner of
human hardship.
This does not mean that people must accept any suffering they endure in
their occupations and just wait for heaven’s reprieve. Later in Rerum
Novarum, Leo exhorts employers, “It is neither just nor human so to grind
men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their
bodies” (42). Socialists who promise “undisturbed repose, and constant
enjoyment” actually “delude the people and impose upon them, and their
lying promises will only one day bring forth evils worse than the present”
(18).
This warning would fit defenders of “Fully Automated Luxury
Communism,” such as Aaron Bastani, who promised unlimited leisure for
humans while robots do all our work.96 The DSA would no doubt agree,
since they say that “a long-term goal of socialism is to eliminate all but the
most enjoyable kinds of labor.”97 However, in “the world as it really is”
labor, including exhausting labor both physical and mental, is a necessary
and healthy part of life. Pope John Paul II said this reality affects not just
traditional “hard workers” like farmers but also
those who bear the burden of grave responsibility for decisions that will
have a vast impact on society. It is familiar to doctors and nurses, who
spend days and nights at their patients’ bedside. It is familiar to women,
who, sometimes without proper recognition on the part of society and
even of their own families, bear the daily burden and responsibility for
their homes and the upbringing of their children. It is familiar to all
workers and, since work is a universal calling, it is familiar to everyone
(Laborem Exercens 9).
He goes on to describe how “in spite of all this toil—perhaps, in a sense,
because of it—work is a good thing for man.” That’s because it allows him
to excel in the virtue of industriousness and by acquiring this good he
“achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes
‘more a human being.’”
MAKING PIGS FLY
Let us sum up. According to Leo XIII, socialism is unnatural because it
denies the fundamental truth that God made human beings to cultivate the
earth through labor. He wants us to retain the fruits of our labor through the
acquisition of property that we can use to benefit those who are dependent
upon us, including by leaving it to them as an estate. The idea that the state
should usurp this role from men and women and from the family is not only
a “great and pernicious error” but a serious attack on natural justice (Rerum
Novarum 14).
Moreover, socialism denies the truth that human beings, though equal in
dignity, are unequal in talents, passions, and abilities. This inequality is a
good thing because it’s what creates the “social web” that unites all of us
toward a common good. If we were all self-sufficient animals that hunt and
live in solitude, then no human community would ever need to form. But
man is a social animal by nature, and denying his natural desire to compete
and excel does nothing to further his well-being.
Socialism is unnatural because it expects humans to ignore their natural
desire to acquire property and instead to give themselves wholly over to the
state. They are then expected to work even if they don’t need to, and some
will be expected to perform more-difficult work in exchange for the same
compensation everyone else receives: access to communal rations. Those
workers are then expected to care for property like a home that may be
transferred at any time to a stranger at the discretion of central planners.
There has never been a socialist state in the same way there has never and
will never be a flying pig: they both completely contradict nature. And, just
as the only way you could make a pig fly would be to violently alter its
being through surgery, the only way to make human beings conform to the
socialist society is to violently intervene in their lives and compel them to
live that way. That this is the case will become abundantly clear as we
examine how socialism developed throughout the world after the
publication of Rerum Novarum.

It’s important to remember . . .

• Socialism fails to account for the reality of human nature. Human beings are equal in dignity but
unequal in talents and life choices.

• Socialism is wrong because it tries to equalize that which is essentially unequal (e.g., talents and
abilities) and prevents human beings from charitably relying on one another because of this natural
inequality.
• Work is not evil in itself, but has become burdensome because of original sin. However, human
beings can redeem work by offering their bodily labor for the good of others and themselves.
88 Clarence Darrow, The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow, eds. Edward J. Larson and Jack Marshall (New York:
Random House, 2007), 236.
89 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (USA: Basic Books, 1979), 237.
90 Stephen White, Communism and its Collapse (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3.
91 Peter Gahan, Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb on Poverty and Equality in the Modern World, 1905–1914 (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017), 106.
92 “Dialog of Catherine of Siena,” 4.2.5, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/catherine/dialog.iv.ii.vii.html.
93 Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy (1883), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ch01.htm.
94 “Tradinista Manifesto,” https://tradinista.tumblr.com/manifesto.
95 Mark Schmitt, “The case for helping the ‘unwilling to work,’” Vox (February 20, 2019),
https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2019/2/20/18233515/unwilling-to-work-jobs-employment-aoc-green-new-deal.
96 Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (New York, Verso, 2019).
97 “What is Democratic Socialism?” https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/. Other writers claim that
once technology advances enough we will be like characters in the Star Trek series who do not worry about acquiring scare
resources and focus on leisure and exploration. Of course, even people on the Enterprise had jobs and some of them seemed
quite demanding (not to mention hazardous for the red shirted crew members).
Part Three

The Rise
of Socialism
 9

Socialism Gets a State

Marx said, “There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of
the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be
shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary
terror.”98 Marx and Engels believed this worker’s revolution would take
place in a highly industrialized country like England where factory workers
would overthrow their capitalist overlords. But the revolution actually
arrived in an economically backward part of the world: Russia.
WAR AND REVOLUTION
In 1898, industrial workers made up less than 3 percent of the Russian
population, and socialists wondered how the peasant population could ever
be unified to overthrow their royal rulers.99 In 1901, Vladimir Ulyanov, a
member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party, published a
pamphlet entitled What Must Be Done? In it he argued that a political party
must lead the small working class to a socialist victory and “professional
revolutionaries” would have to maintain control over these workers even
after the revolution, lest they backslide into the old order.
Fearing for his personal safety, Ulyanov published the pamphlet under the
pen name Vladimir Lenin and he would have to wait until 1917 before his
revolutionary vision came to pass.
In that year, massive fatalities and food shortages related to Russia’s
involvement in World War I turned public opinion against the monarchy.
Groups of workers councils, called soviets, led revolts in major cities, and
Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne. Lenin returned from exile in
Germany to lead the majority (or Bolshevik) faction of the Russian socialist
party.
During this period, the Bolshevik “Red Army” enacted a policy of militant
Communism, taking up civil war against the opposing “White Army” of
anti-communist Russians. They banned private enterprise, nationalized
industry, and confiscated grain from farmers for central planning purposes.
This proved to be a disaster and contributed to a famine that killed five
million people. But the Bolsheviks prevailed, and in 1922 the country was
reconstituted as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or U.S.S.R.
THE TEN-POUND NAIL IN THE COFFIN
In 1875, Marx had proposed that in the highest phase of Communism,
“after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want” and
automation has produced more resources than are demanded, society can
live by the motto, “From each according to his ability, to each according to
his needs.”100 But until then, people must live under a lower phase of
Communism and would have to settle for the motto, “To each according to
his contribution.”
Under this view, workers would receive “labor vouchers” they could
exchange for goods and services. That way, as Lenin put it, “every worker,
therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.”101 Soviet
factories and businesses were then encouraged to produce as many goods as
possible so that they could be easily distributed to everyone.
But remember the knowledge problem we discussed in chapter three. No
central planner can ever know the millions of variables that go into deciding
when it’s worthwhile to produce a good or offer a service. For example,
most hardware stores carry dozens if not hundreds of different kinds of
nails. How does the store know how many and what kind of nails to stock?
How does the factory know what type and number of nails to produce?
The answer is that individual purchases of nails communicate information
about each product. This information is then reflected in prices that owners
set in order to maintain profits based on available supplies and consumer
demand, as well as in production decisions made by nail manufacturers.
Through millions of individual exchanges enough information is
communicated— without any central organization—for business owners to
set and, more importantly, change prices for all their goods and services to
reflect what is going on in the market.
But unlike capitalist economies that allow prices (and production) to
adjust according to consumer choice, the Soviet system set rigid production
targets, and consumers just had to “choose” whatever was offered to them.
So, instead of a factory producing nails based on sales reports from
retailers, the government would just tell a nail factory that 100,000 nails
were needed by the end of the month. Even though socialist factories
couldn’t go out of business, coercive threats motivated them to meet the
government’s quotas, even when this led to absurd results and provided no
benefit to consumers.
For example, if the government’s production target was based on the
number of nails the factory had to produce, then the factory could simply
make 100,000 tiny, useless nails in order to quickly satisfy the quota. If, on
the other hand, the target was based on the gross weight of the nails, the
factory could produce ten tons of large, clunky nails that were easier to
make than well-crafted nails. And, as one researcher notes: it wasn’t just
nails the Soviet economy had trouble producing:
The prevalence and severity of shoddy workmanship in goods produced
under the Soviet production system boggles the American mind. Factories
turned out washing machines that did nothing but wet clothes, sewing
machines missing essential screws, hair dryers that immediately short-
circuited, and refrigerators without motors (yet Samarkand Refrigerator
Factory won numerous awards and increased annual subsidies for
continually exceeding its production plan).102
No central computer system today, much less a planning committee a
century ago, could calculate the supply and demand variables for every
conceivable product on the market. Even if it could, as Hayek showed,
getting the knowledge for those calculations is impossible because it’s
dispersed across millions of producers and consumers.
Without prices, planners would need consumer surveys that relied on
honest opinions that don’t change in the future. For example, people may
say they want more educational programming on television but end up
watching (and thus paying for) reality television or cable news. That’s why
a socialist system of supply that is blind to demand often leads to the
overproduction of useless products and the underproduction, or shortages,
of vitally important products.
But if socialism is impossible, some may ask, how did the Soviet Union
exist for nearly seventy years under this system?
The answer is that the Soviets could partially avoid the knowledge
problem by relying on prices determined by other, market-based economies
to guide their production targets. This wasn’t ideal, and it still led to
shortages, but it allowed the system to limp along until it finally collapsed
at the end of the twentieth century. In the meantime, the economic
consequences of the system were often hidden from the world, including its
most horrifying consequence: the Ukrainian famine.
MURDER BY ANY OTHER NAME
In 1921, Lenin allowed people to participate in “state-controlled capitalism”
(strict government oversight of private businesses) in order to get the
economy on track. This resulted in some farmers getting rich and being
derided as kulaks, from the Ukrainian for “tight fist.” But in 1928, under the
leadership of Lenin’s successor Joseph Stalin, the Soviets launched their
“Five-Year Plan” to industrialize the country and make it capable of
defending itself against both foreign and domestic threats.
In the real world, a country can’t just over-produce goods in order to
alleviate poverty. It has to choose which resources to produce, and the
Soviets focused on heavy industry at the expense of things like food
production. In 1929, Stalin seized the Kulaks’ assets and “liquidated” the
Kulaks themselves through murder and deportation. Soviet propaganda
blamed the country’s food shortages on “greedy Kulaks,” but the true cause
were Soviet troops that confiscated livestock and grain from peasants of all
classes because those materials “belonged” to the government’s central
planners.
The famine that swept through Ukraine between 1932–1933, killing five
million, was not a natural one caused by something like a bad crop yield. It
was, like the Holocaust, state-sanctioned murder. Today it is called the
Holodomor, which means “to kill by starvation.”103 In an area that once
produced the most grain in all of Europe, hunger drove desperate people to
cook shoes, bones, and finally, as one observer described, “There were
people who cut up corpses, who killed their own children and ate them. I
saw one.”104
Even more appalling, some Western intellectuals who supported the
Soviets’ policies denied the existence of the famine. George Bernard Shaw
wrote to the Manchester Guardian after visiting the Soviet Union in 1933,
“Everywhere we saw hopeful and enthusiastic working class” that provided
“an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us if our
systems supplied our workers with any incentive to follow it.”105
Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Walter Duranty wrote in the New York
Times that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or
malignant propaganda.”106 When Cardinal Theodor Innitzer pleaded for
Western relief efforts for Ukrainians who were resorting to infanticide and
cannibalism, the Times uncritically published the Soviet Union’s chilling
response: in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals nor cardinals.107
George Orwell, whose novels 1984 and Animal Farm contained villains
modeled after the Soviet leadership, chastised fellow Westerners for
obscuring what the Soviets were doing. He specifically called out their use
of ambiguous language, a tactic we now call doublespeak in reference to the
deceptive newspeak language of 1984. Orwell writes:
Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the
roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years
without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in
Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling
up mental pictures of them.108
It’s no wonder Pope Pius XI grimly warned (one year before the
Holodomor) about socialism “sinking” into Communism and how
Communism seeks two objectives: unrelenting class warfare and absolute
extermination of private ownership.
Not secretly or by hidden methods does it do this, but publicly, openly,
and by employing every and all means, even the most violent. To achieve
these objectives there is nothing which it does not dare, nothing for which
it has respect or reverence; and when it has come to power, it is incredible
and portentlike in its cruelty and inhumanity (Quadragesimo Anno 112).
Pius XI also acknowledged the existence of a more moderate form of
socialism that stood in contrast to authoritarian Communism. He noted how
these systems were “opposing each other and even bitterly hostile” to one
another. However, this conflict continued without either the tyrants or the
moderates “abandoning a position fundamentally contrary to Christian truth
that was characteristic of socialism” (111).
We will see why in the next chapter, as we take a closer look at Pope Pius
XI’s condemnation of all types of socialism.

It’s important to remember . . .

• Socialism was finally implemented politically on a national level beginning in 1918, when Lenin
and his Bolsheviks emerged from the Russian Revolution at the head of the new U.S.S.R.

• The infamous Soviet “Five Year Plan” included the forced nationalization and state central planning
of agriculture, resulting in a Ukrainian famine that
killed millions.

• While sympathetic Western intellectuals and journalists downplayed the evils of Soviet policies,
Pope Pius XI warned of Communism’s inherent “cruelty and inhumanity.”
98 Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna” (1848),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/11/06.htm.
99 Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: A Short History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5.
100 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.
101 Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm
102 Myles J. Kelleher, Social Problems in a Free Society: Myths, Absurdities, and Realities (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 2004), 60. The origin of the nail factory example can be traced all the way back to Krokodil, a satirical Russian
magazine, that featured a cartoon depicting a proud factory manager hoisting a single giant nail as evidence of his plant’s
successful output.
103 “Throughout the Soviet Union, the direct loss of life due to the famine and associated hunger and disease was likely to be six
to eight million. Three to five million of this number died in Ukraine and in the heavily Ukraine-populated northern Kuban,
among the richest grain producing areas of Europe. The Ukrainian word Holodomor derives from a combination of the word
for hunger, holod, and mor, to exterminate or eliminate.” Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 70.
104 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), 257.
105 Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin’s Propaganda Machine: Soft Power and Russian Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowan and
Littlefield, 2016), 68.
106 Walter Duranty, The New York Times, August 23, 1933. In 2003 Mark von Hagen, a Columbia University history professor,
hired by the Times to review Duranty’s work, said, “For the sake of The New York Times’ honor, they should take the prize
away.” “N.Y. Times urged to rescind 1932 Pulitzer” (October 22, 2003), https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-
10-22-ny-times-pulitzer_x.htm.
107 Dana G. Dalrymple, “The Soviet Famine of 1932–1934,” Soviet Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (January 1964), 250–284.
108 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1968),
https://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDLPS579/HonorsOrwellPoliticsEnglishLanguage.pdf.
 10

Pius XI and Socialism’s Victims

In Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI reflected on themes Leo XIII put

forward forty years before in Rerum Novarum, including the debate
between capitalist and socialist economic systems. Like his predecessor,
Pius XI had strong words for capitalists who hoarded wealth and treated
workers as dispensable commodities on par with machines or sacks of coal.
But he also said that capitalism “is not to be condemned in itself. And
surely it is not of its own nature vicious” (101).
He went on to say that “when it comes to the present [capitalist] economic
system, we have found it laboring under the gravest of evils.” But whereas
these evils could be remedied, the same was not true for socialism. Pius
bluntly declared, “We have also summoned Communism and socialism
again to judgment and have found all their forms, even the most modified,
to wander far from the precepts of the gospel” (128).
THE SEDUCTIVE POISON OF SOCIALISM
Jose Mena, one of the authors of the socialist Tradinista! manifesto, claims,
“The Church’s condemnations of socialism tend to focus on other facets of
left-wing political tradition: its thoroughgoing materialism and atheism, its
hatred for God and for the natural family, and its totalitarian historical
aspect.”109 He insists that the Catholic tradition still allows for a moderate
socialism that orders private property to the common good through
governmental oversight.
Yet, is it a coincidence that the major socialist states throughout history
have always been atheistic or suppressed religious freedom? For Lenin said,
“Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each
and every religious organization, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that
serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.”110
In order to complete their revolt against the upper class, their allies in
religion had to be done away with as well. In 1922, the Soviet Union
murdered twenty-eight Eastern Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200
priests.111 A friend of Sergius I, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church,
grimly recalled, “We [were like] chickens in a shed, from which the cook
snatches out her victim in turn.”112 The much smaller Catholic Church fared
no better, as by 1926 there were no Catholic bishops left in the country and
by 1941 there were only two Catholic churches.113
Pius XI was aware of a socialism that “not only professes the rejection of
violence but modifies and tempers to some degree, if it does not reject
entirely, the class struggle and the abolition of private ownership”
(Quadragesimo Anno 112). He commended the “just demands” of these
socialists (such as stronger unions and worker protections), but said that
their advocacy is unnecessary because there is “nothing in them now which
is inconsistent with Christian truth, and much less are they special to
socialism. Those who work solely toward such ends have, therefore, no
reason to become socialists” (115).
Pius then spelled out the matter to Christians waiting “in suspense” to see
if Christianity and socialism could ever be compatible with each other:
We make this pronouncement: Whether considered as a doctrine, or an
historical fact, or a movement, socialism, if it remains truly socialism,
even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have
mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church
because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth
(117).
Even if it doesn’t reject the existence of God, or send dissenters to the
gulags (forced labor camps), or terrorize the population with secret police,
true socialism is not compatible with Christianity. One reason is that
socialism rejects the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. This is the belief
that a central, more central authority should subside or “sit back” and
intervene only when lower, local authorities cannot address a problem. Pius
formulated this principle, which “cannot be set aside or changed,” this way:
Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can
accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the
community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and
disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association
 what lesser and subordinate organizations can do (79).
Although this principle wasn’t formally articulated until the twentieth
century, its precedents go all the way back to the Bible.
In the Old Testament, Moses’ father-in-law Jethro warned him against
using his leadership office to hear every dispute among the Israelites. “The
thing is too heavy for you,” he told Moses; “You are not able to perform it
alone” (Exod. 18:18). Jethro then gave Moses this advice: “Choose able
men from all the people, such as fear God, men who are trustworthy and
who hate a bribe; and place such men over the people as rulers of
thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens” (v. 21). In the New
Testament, the apostles came to a similar conclusion when they felt
overwhelmed by problems in local communities, and so they selected
deacons to serve the people’s needs (Acts 6:1–7).
Even Brianne Jacobs, in her defense of democratic socialism, admits that
“[Catholic social teaching] has a clear warning about socialism” that is
“related to the principle of subsidiarity, which states that individuals’ needs
should be met by local government or civil society whenever that is
feasible.”114
A big problem for socialism, be it radical or moderate, is that it says local
authorities can’t routinely provide for their own welfare and so a central
authority (like the federal government) must do it for them. This rejection
of subsidiarity is especially evident in socialism’s scorn for the most
fundamental local unit of authority in society: the family.
ABOLISH THE FAMILY?
In 1930—nearly co-incident with his economic encyclical and not for
nothing—Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical on Christian marriage and the
family called Casti Connubii that upheld the Church’s teaching on
contraception when many people were justifying it in light of the Great
Depression. But he also spoke of another sin against the family that seemed
appealing to the economically disadvantaged: Communism.
He gives as one example, “the daily increasing corruption of morals and
the unheard of degradation of the family in those lands where Communism
reigns unchecked.” Pius also cites Arcanum Divniae, Pope Leo XIII’s
encyclical on Christian marriage written fifty years earlier, which declared
that “unless things change, the human family and state have every reason to
fear lest they should suffer absolute ruin” (Casti Connubii 92).
Both popes repudiated the modern acceptance of divorce and warned how
the destruction of the family leads to the destruction of the state because the
family is the foundation of the state. But for socialists, a collective state
could not exist without the destruction of the family. That’s why The
Communist Manifesto declares, “Abolition of the family! Even the most
radical [men] flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”115
Engels argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
that families bound together in matrimony were a modern invention created
for the purpose of consolidating wealth. Wealth could only be redistributed,
then, once the family unit was broken apart and dissolved into society. The
early Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky said, “The revolution made a
heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’” and replace it with a
“complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by
institutions of the socialist society.”116 This absorption included the
indoctrination of children in government schools, or as Pope Pius XI
described it:
There is a country where the children are actually being torn from the
bosom of the family, to be formed (or, to speak more accurately, to be
deformed and depraved) in godless schools and associations, to irreligion
and hatred, according to the theories of advanced socialism; and thus is
renewed in a real and more terrible manner the slaughter of the Innocents
(Divini Illius Magistri 73).
Another early Soviet revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai, said marriage
would soon no longer be needed because, through “the collectivism of
spirit” as she calls it, “the ‘cold of inner loneliness’ from which people in
bourgeois culture have attempted to escape through love and marriage will
disappear.”117
It’s no wonder that Pope Leo XIII denounced those who “think that the
inherent character of marriage can be perverted with impunity; and who,
disregarding the sanctity of religion and of the sacrament.” He warned that
both private families and public society risked being “miserably driven into
that general confusion and overthrow of order which is even now the
wicked aim of socialists and Communists” (Arcanum 32).
 This assault on the family is not a bygone relic of Soviet Communism; it
still appears in modern works based on Marx’s philosophy—particular
those that connect economic inequities with perceived cultural ones. One
author in the popular anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful says that “we can’t
destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy
marriage.”118 Linda Gordon, writing in the journal Women, longs for the day
when “families will be finally destroyed” after “a revolutionary social and
economic organization permits people’s needs for love and security to be
met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at
all.”119
One way to see how Communism harms family structures is to consider
its fanatical egalitarianism. Under this view, individual citizens owe the
same loyalty and contribution to every man and woman in the state. This
means that citizens who are parents owe no more to their children than they
do to anyone else’s. Preference for one’s family—through, say, special
sacrifice, or bequests, or gifts—have to be strictly forbidden because
otherwise generous, caring families will cause some people to become
unequal with others and create “class conflict.”
But the family as instituted by God is not an egalitarian institution—the
father has a different role from the son, and the daughter-in-law from the
mother-in-law. The family is the classic example of unity arising from
complementarity that we described in chapter eight. Since Communism
wants none of that natural difference to play itself out in society, it must
stamp out the family as the “cell” of society and as the first “school” of
complementarity.
This can be seen in Sophie Anne Lewis’s 2019 book Full Surrogacy Now:
Feminism Against Family, which calls for the abolition of the family by
promoting surrogates (people who gestate other women’s children) as the
primary means of reproduction for society. Her goal is to make it “normal
for us to think about babies as made by many people. I would support
policies that expand the number of people who are socially and legally
recognized as central, fundamental players in the constitution of a
person.”120
THE INTRINSIC EVIL OF COMMUNISM
Although moderate socialism should be lauded for its rejection of class
warfare, Pius XI points out that it still ends up either redundantly adopting
the same ideals of Christian social teaching or else it “sinks into
Communism.” If it does that, then it is beyond any hope of salvaging
because, as the pope wrote in Divini Redemptoris, “Communism is
intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may
collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever” (58).
To say that something is intrinsically wrong means that it is wrong in and
of itself, and thus is never permissible under any circumstances. War can
become wrong if it is waged unjustly, but murder just is wrong because it is
always wrong to directly kill an innocent person. Likewise, capitalism can
become wrong if it allows evils like wage theft to take place, but it’s not
always wrong.
Communism, on the other hand, just is wrong by its very nature, because
it violates a person’s right to private property. Instead of respecting people’s
freedom to form families and associations for their good, socialists “hold
that men are obliged, with respect to the producing of goods, to surrender
and subject themselves entirely to society” (Quadragesimo Anno 119). Pius
explains how this goal naturally leads to oppression:
Indeed, possession of the greatest possible supply of things that serve the
advantages of this life is considered of such great importance that the
higher goods of man, liberty not excepted, must take a secondary place
and even be sacrificed to the demands of the most efficient production of
goods (119).
This inherent infringement of liberty can be seen in the common tactic of
using secret police to maintain order in socialist states. Since socialism
relies on central planning, it cannot tolerate the existence of any kind of
market, including informal ones. In most countries, “black” markets deal
with illegal products like drugs and weapons. But in a socialist country, the
exchange of any product outside government venues constitutes an illegal
black market that must be eliminated lest it disrupt the central planners’
calculations.
In socialist East Germany, the Stasi (secret police) assigned one spy for
every six citizens. Hundreds of thousands of part-time informers were also
tasked with keeping tabs on the activities of their neighbors. According to
John Koehler, a reporter who worked in both East and West Germany, “It
would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer
was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests.”121
Indeed, this same pattern of oppression and disrespect for human rights
can be seen in the corpses socialism left behind as it swept the globe in the
latter half of the twentieth century.

It’s important to remember . . .

• In Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI stressed that
it was not merely on account of political repression
that socialism was to be condemned, but because
“its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to
Christian truth.”

• Socialism rejects the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which says that government power should
be exercised on the most local level possible.

• Just as socialism can have no private economic rivals to its control over the economy, it likewise
naturally opposes the family (and its inherent “inequalities”) as the basic unit of society.
109 Jose Mena, “The Catholic turn to socialism is something to celebrate,” Catholic Herald (May 30, 2019),
https://catholicherald.co.uk/.commentandblogs/2019/05/30/the-catholic-turn-to-socialism-is-something-to-celebrate/.
110 Vladimir Lenin, “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion” (1909),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm.
111 Patrick McNamara, A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., and the Politics of American Anticommunism (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2005), 28.
112 Kent R. Hill, The Soviet Union on the Brink: An Inside Look at Christianity & Glasnost (Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1991),
83.
113 Katherine Bliss Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 289.
114 Brianne Jacobs, “Yes, democratic socialism is compatible with Catholic social teaching,” America (October 1, 2018),
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/10/01/yes-democratic-socialism-compatible-catholic-social-teaching.
115 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), chapter II,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm.
116 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch07.htm.
117 Philip Boobyer, The Stalin Era (New York: Routledge, 2000), 154.
118 “The Feminists vs. The Institution of Marriage,” Sisterhood is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Random House,
1970), 537.
119 Cited in John Hirschauer, “Candace Bushnell’s Childless Misery,” National Review (July 31, 2019),
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/candace-bushnells-childless-misery/.
120 Rosemarie Ho, “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family,” The Nation (May 16, 2019),
https://www.thenation.com/article/want-to-dismantle-capitalism-abolish-the-family/.
121 John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story Of The East German Secret Police (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 9.
 11

Socialism Goes Global

Mao Zedong’s 1964 book of quotations (commonly called the “Little Red
Book”) is alleged to have sold nearly a billion copies worldwide, making it
one of the best-selling books of all time. Along with its call for a
“changeover from individual to socialist, collective ownership” it includes
bits of wisdom like, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”122
This was certainly true for Mao after his Chinese communist party
established itself as a powerful guerilla force whose membership grew from
100,000 in 1937 to 1.2 million in 1945.123
In 1949, Mao’s forces defeated the Chinese nationalist party and the
country was renamed the People’s Republic of China. The nationalists fled
to an island off the coast and formed the Republic of China, which is now
called Taiwan. But whereas Taiwan’s free-market policies helped it grow
into an economic powerhouse over the next few decades, China’s socialist
policies led to one of the worst disasters in the history of humanity.
THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD
The country’s new leader, now Chairman Mao, promised that all citizens
would never have to worry about hunger because the Party would institute
an “iron rice bowl” policy. Workers’ jobs and wages would be guaranteed
for life, with the expectation that worker productivity would increase
because there would be no more worries about poverty. In reality, though,
the absence of incentives and the necessity of turning all profits over to the
government led workers and managers to become less and less productive.
The worst drop in production came in agriculture, where workers were
prohibited from owning their own farms. Instead, farms were collectivized
and all food production was turned over to the government. Most of the
food was sold in order to support the plan for industrializing the country in
accordance with a campaign dubbed the “Great Leap Forward.” As with the
Soviets before them, the government’s mismanagement of food caused a
famine. But the death toll from this famine dwarfed that of the Holodomor
—the Soviet-caused Ukrainian famine in 1932–1933—to become the worst
famine in the history of the world. According to Neil Hughes in his book
China’s Economic Challenge:
The famine that followed in the wake of the Great Leap Forward claimed
30 million lives. Children especially suffered, as reflected in mortality
data showing the median age at death, which fell from 17.6 years of age in
1957 to 9.7 years of age in 1963. One-half of the people dying in China
were under ten years old.124
Yang Jisheng was once a member of the Communist Party but left after its
brutal killing of hundreds of peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square in
1989. He then wrote the most in-depth history of the Chinese famine ever
published, called Tombstone: the Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962. He
explains the book’s title by saying that he sought to erect three tombstones:
“for my father, who died of starvation in 1959 . . . for the 36 million
Chinese who died of starvation, and . . . for the system that brought about
the Great Famine.”125
The book includes grotesque details of corpses being kept in beds in order
to trick government officials into thinking they were alive so that relatives
could receive their food rations.126 Cannibalism was common; children who
ate their own parents admitted “the heels and palms tasted the best.”127 A
government official who opened a granary for starving peasants later
committed suicide in response to what other officials considered to be an
act of treason. Jisheng says, “No matter how loud the peasants’ laments of
starvation, those in the top leadership regarded them as the cries of
opposition to socialism.”128
And, like Walter Duranty before them, Western intellectuals denied the
existence of the famine and praised Mao as a revolutionary figure who
fought for the poor.
The feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said in 1958 that “life in
China today is exceptionally pleasant.” American journalist Hans Koning,
writing in 1966, said China was “almost as painstakingly careful about
human lives as New Zealand.” Also in 1966, Mao launched the “Cultural
Revolution” that sought to purge capitalist influences in the country. An
estimated one million people were killed; Mao bragged that the first
Chinese emperor “only buried alive 460 scholars, while we buried
46,000.”129
THE DARKNESS OF NORTH KOREA
Defenses of socialist China still pop up today, as is evident in British
socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s claim that “the present prosperity in China is
based upon a collective economy and not on an individual and market
oriented economy.” But this is false: China’s economic growth did not
begin to catch up to Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s until after it adopted a
limited market-based economy beginning in 1980. The anthology
Reforming Asian Socialism: the Growth of Market Institutions shows that
almost all socialist countries in Asia have embraced some form of
capitalism in order to avoid economic stagnation. There is only one notable
exception: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—or North Korea.
After World War II, the Korean peninsula ceased to be under Japanese
control and was divided between the pro-American Republic of Korea
(South Korea) and the Communist, Soviet-backed Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea (North Korea). Both nations fought for control of the
peninsula during the Korean War, which ended with an armistice in 1953
and both countries are divided by a heavily guarded “de-militarized zone”
to the present day. North Korea adopted the principle of Juche, or self-
reliance, developed by their first leader Kim Il-Sung. The North Korean
leaders believed their superior lifestyle and production numbers would
encourage a worker’s revolution in South Korea and finally reunite both
countries. Fast-forward six decades and a single nighttime satellite image
proves this kind of thinking is delusional.
When viewed from space, South Korea twinkles like any modern, vibrant
country at night whereas North Korea is almost entirely dark. Ninety-seven
percent of North Korea’s roads are unpaved and, outside the capital of
Pyongyang, some of the best-looking homes are in a fake “Peace Village”
that has no residents and was built along the border solely to impress (and
possibly attract immigrants from) the south.130
The two Koreas weren’t always this unequal, however. In 1960, both
countries had a gross domestic product of about $5 billion. Today, North
Korea’s GDP is barely at $20 billion whereas South Korea has surpassed
$1.5 trillion, making it the fourth-largest economy in Asia. This difference
in wealth is starkly evident not only in satellite photos— thanks to better
access to food and medicine, South Korea’s people average about two
inches taller than their northern counterparts.131 One researcher concludes,
“North Korean performance faltered due to its inward-looking policies . . .
[it] remains a poor country with low growth and a generally isolationist
communist party.”132
But this doesn’t stop Western intellectuals like the World Health
Organization’s Margaret Chan from acting like fools in their stubborn
defense of anything socialist. Because it’s a crime to leave North Korea, the
population has a relatively high percentage of doctors, something Chan says
“most other developing countries would envy.” She also spins the people’s
undernourishment as a good thing: unlike in other Asian countries, North
Koreans don’t suffer from obesity!133
Well, that’s one way to describe the effects of food shortages and the
occasional famine that results from communal food production.
FAULTY LIBERATION THEOLOGY
While socialism was mixing with Korean and Chinese philosophy in East
Asia, in the Western Hemisphere, particularly in Central and South
America, it became tragically intertwined with Catholicism through
liberation theology.
As Trent notes in Counterfeit Christs, one of liberation theology’s key
ideas is the Marxist principle of “class struggle,” or the claim that the upper
classes always cause others to be poor and so the lower classes must seize
political power and establish their own “dictatorship” with the goal of
creating a “classless society.” In Gustavo Gutierrez’s classic text A
Theology of Liberation, he writes, “The class struggle is a fact that
Christians cannot dodge and in the face of which the demands of the gospel
must be clearly stated.”134
In 1984, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released its
Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation.” The CDF
agreed that Christians have a special obligation to help the poor (sometimes
called the “preferential option for the poor”) and should not tolerate unjust
conditions that create widespread poverty. But it also noted that liberation
theology errs when it locates the source of evil in class conflict instead of in
man’s inherent tendency to sin because of our fallen nature.135
In his encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI similarly criticized
Marxism, saying that man “is not merely the product of economic
conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by
creating a favorable economic environment” (21). The CDF also warned
about the consequences that can result from trying to join theology with
something as contrary to the Faith as Marxism. It quoted Pope Paul VI, who
said it was “dangerous” to “enter into the practice of class struggle and of
its Marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society
to which this process slowly leads.”136
In fact, by opposing the conditions for a thriving business economy,
liberation theologians and their political allies have wrought nothing but
harm for the poor that they profess to champion.
COMMUNISM IN CUBA
A prime example of this kind of society is Communist Cuba, which formed
after Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 and has since seen the execution of
more than 10,000 people.137 One of Castro’s most important allies was
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a young revolutionary whose steely gaze can be
found on posters and T-shirts at colleges across the country. The many
students who lionize Che as a “rebel” apparently don’t know that he banned
newspapers and executed people even if he wasn’t sure they were guilty of
anything.138 The new Communist government, like every other one before
and after it, also imprisoned dissidents into forced labor camps—in this
case with the absurd euphemism of “Military Units to Aid Production.”139
Like every other socialist regime, Cuba’s policy of collective food
production led to food shortages and required the government to issue
“ration tickets” for citizens to redeem in small quantities. Yes, U.S. trade
embargoes hampered the economy, but they don’t explain why Cuba
experienced shortages in its own domestically produced goods (especially
during the Cold War when Soviet funds offset the impact of U.S.
embargoes). In Eliana Cardsos and Ann Helwege’s book Cuba After
Communism, the authors explain that under the state’s socialist policies,
Cubans cannot easily set up a small business on the side. People say there
are hairdresser and seamstresses, but few hang up a sign for services. A
broken pipe meant waiting a few weeks for the state plumber to arrive.
 Access to most goods is too limited and the penalties too high for people
to set up illegal shops and kiosks. The state not only fails to provide goods
but prohibits people from filling the gap with informal markets.140
Even as recently as 2019, Cubans were reporting long lines at grocery
stores to buy basic food items like eggs and chicken. One report noted that
“Cuba imports 60 to 70 percent of its food. A handful of agricultural
reforms in recent years have failed to boost output in its inefficient,
centrally planned economy.”141 People who try to circumvent these
inefficiencies through black market sales of things like eggs or meat can be
imprisoned for up to twenty years.142
Despite the state’s harsh penalties, illegal markets supply people with
most of their needs through networks of socios: citizens who steal goods
that can’t be bought in normal markets and then trade with one another for
basic goods. Katherine Hirschfield, who spent nine months in Cuba for her
dissertation research, described how one man would steal towels from his
hotel for his socio, who then repays him with beer he steals from his
factory. The first man, according to one of Hirschfield’s sources, “will then
trade the beer to the maid for a supply of soap, which he’ll either give to his
[suppliers] or sell on the black market. Everybody does it. It’s the only way
to survive.”143
Some socialists denounce Cuba’s violent past but tout its modern
achievements such as its allegedly high life expectancies and low infant
mortality rates. They say this disproves the idea that socialism is
detrimental to the common good. But a 2018 study in the Journal of Health
and Policy Planning paints a darker picture.
It says that health care workers, under pressure to meet government
quotas, alter data, and even pressure women to have abortions. The authors
reveal how “physicians likely reclassified early neonatal deaths as late fetal
deaths, thus deflating the infant mortality statistics and propping up life
expectancy. . . . If we combine the misreporting of late fetal deaths and
pressured abortions, life expectancy would drop by between 1.46 and 1.79
years for men.”144
As a result of these repressive policies, over a million Cubans have fled
the country in makeshift boats to the United States. During the 1960s the
number of unaccompanied minors became so great that the Catholic
Welfare Bureau launched “Operation Pedro Pan” to provide housing and
resources for children whose parents could not join them in their flight from
Castro’s communist regime.145 Even in 2019, Cuba ranked sixth among
countries whose citizens were fleeing to the United States with “credible
fear” asylum claims.146
And, as we’ll see, this constant human desire to flee socialism is what led
to the demise of the largest socialist country in the history of the world.

It’s important to remember . . .

• China’s adoption of socialism following a civil war led to the same economic and agricultural
failures—and similar deadly famines—that Russia experienced.

• Socialism in North Korea has made it a literal and figurative dark spot in what is otherwise an
economically bustling East Asia.

• In South America and the Caribbean, socialism has likewise produced predictable poverty and
human misery. In some places it gets mixed up with Catholic teaching into something called
liberation theology.
122 Mao Zedong, “Problems of War and Strategy” (1938), Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol. II,
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_12.htm#p6.
123 Gabe T. Wang, China and the Taiwan Issue: Impending War at Taiwan Strait (Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
2006), 56–57.
124 Neil C. Hughes, China’s Economic Challenge: Smashing the Iron Rice Bowl (New York: Routledge, 2015), 7.
125 Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), 3.
126 Ibid, 289.
127 Ibid, 40.
128 Ibid, 322.
129 Mao Zedong, “Speeches At The Second Session Of The Eighth Party Congress” (1958),
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_10.htm.
130 “North Korea,” CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kn.html. See also
David Wharton, “‘Peace Village,’ a fake city just outside the DMZ, serves as metaphor for North Korean athletes at the
Olympics” Los Angeles Times (February 17, 2018), https://www.latimes.com/sports/olympics/la-sp-olympics-north-korea-
mystery-20180217-story.html.
131 Chloe Pfeiffer and Elena Holodny, “14 fascinating facts about North Korea,” Business Insider (April 18, 2017),
https://www.businessinsider.com/weird-facts-about-north-korea-2017-4
132 Chris Coney, “East Asia: History and Economic Development,” Encyclopedia of the Developing World, Vol., 1 ed. Thomas
M. Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2006), 511.
133 A transcript of the press conference says, “Question from Shabtai Gold at DPA: Can I clarify something earlier, you said the
height and weight in DPRK is similar to that of other Asian countries, did I hear you right? Dr. Chan: I said what I saw in
Pangung might not be representative for the entire country, but that is what I saw in the capital. Of course, one thing I
recognized is that walking is quite well observed in that country, and I suggest that is why I didn’t see many obese people. And
if you look at me I am also an Asian, I am pretty short by Asian standards, so when I compare to most of the people I saw on
the street, I can only make a very broad comparison. But mind you, as I said, now in Asian countries, because of affluence and
intake of food we are seeing obesity which I don’t see in DPRK.” Transcript of press briefing at WHO headquarters, Geneva
Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General (April 30, 2010),
https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2010/20100430_chan_press_transcript.pdf. And while Chan was born in Hong
Kong, her later education in Canada and Harvard certainly qualify her to be a “western intellectual” who whitewashes the
impact of socialism on the health of North Korean people.
134 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 157.
135 The CDF rebuked the idea that evil can be localized “principally or uniquely in bad social, political, or economic ‘structures’
 as though all other evils came from them so that the creation of the ‘new man’ would depend on the establishment of different
economic and socio-political structures” (15).
136 Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation,” 7.
137 Mary Anastasia O’Grady, “Counting Castro’s Victims,” The Wall Street Journal (December 30, 2005),
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB113590852154334404.
138 “The intention of Cuba’s new leaders was deviously clear. Carlos Franqui, editor of the official newspaper Revolución, has
reported that in a speech of May 18, 1962 at State Security offices in Havana, Ché Guevara stated: ‘It is logical that in times of
excessive tension we cannot proceed weakly. We have imprisoned many people without knowing for sure if they were guilty.
At the Sierra Maestra, we executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the
Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation; it has the obligation to triumph.’” María C. Werlau, “Ché Guevara’s
Forgotten Victims,” Free Society Project (2011), http://cubaarchive.org/home/images/stories/che-guevara_interior-
pages_en_final.pdf. University students who love to sport Ché paraphernalia would be shocked to know that people who
identified as homosexual were considered a byproduct of “bourgeoisie decadence” that needed to be imprisoned and forced
into hard labor. Andrea Pitzer, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (New York: Little, Brown, and
Company, 2018), 278–279.
139 These included not just conscientious objectors and minority religious groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses, but also homosexuals
whose sexual behavior was seen as a bourgeoisie defect. See Ian Lumsden, Machos Maricones & Gays: Cuba and
Homosexuality (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996), 66–71.
140 Eliana Cardsos and Ann Helwege, Cuba After Communism (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), 42.
While the authors’ predictions of Cuba’s collapse or renouncement of socialism by the 21st century were incorrect, the book’s
descriptions of life in Cuba under Castro during the end of the Cold War are still a valuable resource.
141 The article also mentions the U.S. trade embargo as a reason for Cuba’s shortages, but that doesn’t explain why the nation
fails to produce sufficient domestic foodstuffs that do not need to be imported in large quantities (though the collapse of its
major trading partner Venezuela may also be a factor in Cuba’s shortages). Sarah Marsh and Nelson Acosta, “Cuba to ration
more products due to economic crisis, U.S. sanctions,” Reuters (May 10, 2019), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-
economy/cuba-to-ration-more-products-due-to-economic-crisis-u-s-sanctions-idUSKCN1SG2HA.
142 Joe Lamar, “For Cubans, the struggle to supplement meager rations is a consuming obsession,” The Guardian (April 24,
2015), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/cubans-food-struggle-rations-consuming-obsession
143 Katherine Hirschfeld, “Re-examining the Cuban Health Care System: Towards a Qualitative Critique,” Cuban Affairs, Vol. 2,
Issue 3 (July 2007), 7.
144 Gilbert Berdine, Vincent Geloso, and Benjamin Powell “Cuban infant mortality and longevity: health care or repression?”
Health Policy and Planning, Vol. 33, Issue 6, (July 2018) 755–757.
145 See Yvonne Conde, Operation Pedro Pan: The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children (New York: Routledge, 1999).
146 Part of this rise in Cuban asylum claims comes from the reversal of previous immigration policies that allowed Cubans who
reached American shores to remain in the country to pursue citizenship. See Santiago Perez, “Cuban Migrants Are Thwarted in
Mexico by New Asylum Rules,” The Wall Street Journal (August 2, 2019), https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuban-migrants-are-
thwarted-in-mexico-by-new-asylum-rules-11564738202
 12

Modern Popes vs.

Modern Socialism

Soviet first secretary Nikita Khrushchev was not one for subtlety. During a
1960 meeting at the U.N. General Assembly, Khrushchev became enraged
when a delegate from the Philippines spoke of “the peoples of Eastern
Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of
their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to
speak, by the Soviet Union.”147 In response, Khrushchev banged his shoe on
a table in order to disrupt the delegate and get his own turn to speak.148
Some people think the shoe-banging incident was also when Khrushchev
told the U.S., “We will bury you,” but that actually happened four years
earlier at a gathering of Western ambassadors. He said, “About the capitalist
states, it doesn’t depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don’t like
us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come to see you.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!”149
Khrushchev later claimed that he meant the Soviet Union would outlive
capitalist states that would eventually succumb to workers’ revolutions.
And as the twentieth century progressed there were worker revolutions—
but they consisted of workers who overthrew Communist chains as Western
nations and the Catholic Church faithfully stood by them.
SOCIALISM IN GERMANY
In 1961, Pope St. John XXIII published the encyclical Mater et Magistra,
which continued the denunciation of socialism made under Leo XIII and
Pius XI. He affirmed that private property has its origin in natural law and
that paying wages to workers is not unjust in itself but only becomes unjust
under certain conditions that must be avoided. Echoing Pius XI before him,
he wrote, “Justice demands that account be taken not only of the needs of
the individual workers and their families, but also of the financial state of
the business concern for which they work and of ‘the economic welfare of
the whole people” (Mater et Magistra 33). The pope then turned his
attention to socialism:
Pope Pius XI further emphasized the fundamental opposition between
Communism and Christianity, and made it clear that no Catholic could
subscribe even to moderate socialism. The reason is that socialism is
founded on a doctrine of human society which is bounded by time and
takes no account of any objective other than that of material well-being.
Since, therefore, it proposes a form of social organization which aims
solely at production, it places too severe a restraint on human liberty, at
the same time flouting the true notion of social authority (34).
Three months after Mater et Magistra was published, the Soviets unveiled
their newest “restraint on human liberty” in the form of the Berlin Wall,
which was part of the larger, post-war division of the country. East
Germany became a Soviet-occupied “workers’ state” while West Germany
became an independent country that functioned under a capitalist economy.
Like North and South Korea, East and West Germany became perfect
“laboratories” to test socialism’s economic merits. Before World War II, the
eastern part of Germany had a higher per-capita income than the west, but
post-war socialist policies turned East Germany into a drab, run-down
country that Indian economist B.R. Shenoy likened to “a prison camp.”150
During the 1950s, what had been 50 percent marginal tax rates for income
over $600 (recall that the Third Reich was a “national socialist” regime)
were changed in the West only to apply to people who made more than
$42,000 a year. The ensuing growth of efficient industries led to the
Wirtschaftswunder—an “economic miracle” of growth and prosperity—
while East Germany’s economy remained stagnant and unproductive.151 To
provide one example: by the 1980s, the West German automotive industry
had become a global engineering force whereas East German companies
were still mass-producing outdated cars like the infamous Trabant, which
lacked basic amenities like a fuel gauge and rear seat belts and required
drivers to pre-mix gas and oil for its ancient two-stroke engine.152
Shenoy concludes:
The contrast in prosperity is convincing proof of the superiority of the
 forces of freedom over centralized planning. It is difficult to resist the
inference that workers in East Berlin, deprived of the incentives of full
property rights over the fruits of one’s effort, are loath to put in their
best.153
So many Germans fled the country that a 1955 East German propaganda
tract described this behavior as “an act of political and moral
backwardness” for which “workers throughout Germany will demand
punishment.”154 When threats and propaganda failed to stem the exodus,
travel was legally prohibited and, overnight, an 87-mile-long wall was
erected to isolate West-controlled zones in the capital of Berlin. The wall
included barbed wire, 116 guard towers, and “dead zones” in front of the
wall that made it easier to find and shoot would-be defectors.
Socialists may fantasize about workers leaving capitalist countries for
socialist ones, but in the real world, people who want to provide their
children with basic necessities and a hopeful future choose capitalism over
socialism every time. The proof of this can be seen in the contrast between
capitalist countries that use barriers to keep people from illegally entering
and socialist countries (like East Germany and North Korea) that use
barriers to keep people from illegally escaping.
BACK IN THE U.S.S.R.
In 1971, Pope Paul VI lamented about Christians being deceived into
supporting an unrealistic socialism over sound Catholic social doctrine. He
wrote, “Too often Christians attracted by socialism tend to idealize it in
terms which, apart from anything else, are very general: a will for justice,
solidarity, and equality” (Octogesima Adveniens 31). He pointed out that
support for the dignity of workers and human rights is properly found in
Christian moral teaching. An example of this during the Cold War was
Poland’s Solidarity movement.
In the 1980s, Polish workers formed the first non-state-controlled trade
union in a Communist country and called it Solidarity. It used non-violent
tactics to oppose Communist oppression of workers and received significant
support from the Catholic Church. For example, when Communists
imposed martial law in order to disrupt union activity, Catholic Masses
became one of the few safe places for people to gather in public.
This wasn’t just for political show: many members of Solidarity were
devout Catholics who kept pictures of the Blessed Virgin at their factory
work posts. One outspoken priest, Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, not only offered
Mass but explicitly preached against the government’s socialist policies. He
knew such actions were dangerous but considered them better than doing
nothing in the face of evil:
To preserve one’s dignity as man is to remain interiorly free even in
external slavery, to remain oneself in all situations of life, to remain in the
truth, even if that is to cost us dearly. Because it costs a lot to speak the
truth. Only the weeds, in other words, petty, mediocre things, are cheap.
But for the wheat of truth, as with all great and beautiful things, one must
pay the demanding price of self-sacrifice.155
Fr. Popiełuszko finally paid this price on October 19, 1984 when three
members of the country’s security service kidnapped him, beat him to
death, and dumped his body into a reservoir. He was thirty-seven.
But far from crushing the movement, Popiełuszko’s death galvanized
Solidarity, and the Church has declared him a beatified martyr.
For the previous forty years, the Soviet Union had subsidized its satellite
states’ failing economies, but falling oil prices in the mid-eighties forced
Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to cut off economic aid.156 This loosened
the U.S.S.R.’s grip, and Solidarity members were now able to fight for
Poland’s freedom. As a result, in 1989, Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa,
was elected president of Poland in the country’s first free election in
decades.
As other former Communist states renounced their ties to the Soviet
Union, the dismantling of old Soviet borders caused a surge of East German
citizens to bypass the wall and enter West Germany. The flood of refugees
leaving East Germany became so difficult to manage that the government
authorized limited, round-trip travel directly through the Berlin Wall. On
November 9, 1989, East German spokesman Gunter Schabowski made a
media appearance to announce the plan—but hadn’t been told all the details
about the regulations.
When asked when the plans would go into effect, he said, “As far as I
know . . . a decision has been made . . . to issue a regulation that will make
it possible for every citizen . . .
to emigrate.” When German reporter Peter Brinkmann asked Schabowski,
“When does that go into force?” the Communist party leader scanned his
unfamiliar notes and simply blurted out, “Right away.”157 This gaffe
motivated thousands of East Germans to test out their newfound freedom
and overwhelm the wall’s security checkpoints. The crowds were
eventually allowed to pass without any restrictions and, later that night,
exuberant people young and old to begin to demolish the Berlin Wall.
COMMUNIST FAILURES, CAPITALIST WARNINGS
In May 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall but four months
before the Soviet Union officially dissolved, Pope John Paul II wrote an
encyclical called Centesimus Annus, or “one hundred years later” in honor
of Pope Leo XIII’s publication of Rerum Novarum. He said, “By defining
the nature of the socialism of his day as the suppression of private property,
Leo XIII arrived at the crux of the problem” (Centesimus Annus 12). He
then says “the Marxist solution has failed” because:
A person who is deprived of something he can call “his own,” and of the
possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend
on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much
more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders
progress toward the building up of an authentic human community (13).
The fall of Communism did not mean that the answers to man’s economic
problems were now abundantly clear. It “certainly removes an obstacle to
facing these problems,” he wrote, but he also made it clear that the
problems of poverty and corruption still remained. Some might have said
that capitalism could now take over and address those problems, but the
Church took a more nuanced approach. The pope even warned of a radical
capitalistic ideology that “blindly entrusts their solution to the free
development of market forces” (42).
As we’ll see, this does not mean that capitalism is an opposing evil to
socialism. Instead, it means that any science that aims to increase human
well-being, be it medicine, politics, or economics, must be guided by sound
principles ordered toward our ultimate well-being as human beings made in
the image of God.
It’s important to remember . . .
• In the second half of the twentieth century, the Church continued its consistent denunciation of
socialism.

• Socialism in East Germany led not only to decades

of economic and cultural stagnation, but to a wall
with barbed wire keeping its people from escaping to the West.

• Popular movements in Soviet satellite states, particularly in Poland where the papacy of John Paul
II was a rallying point, worked for increased economic and personal freedom until the eventual
collapse of the Soviet Union.
147 “Nikita Khrushchev: Speech on Decolonization,” The Cold War: Interpreting Conflict through Primary Documents, Vol. 2,
ed. Priscilla Roberts (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019), 507.
148 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 2003), 657. Most accounts
say Khrushchev banged his shoe on his desk, but New York Times reporter James Feron claims that he never saw Khrushchev
bang the shoe, but only menacingly wave it in the air.
149 Ibid., 427.
150 B.R. Shenoy, “East and West Berlin: A Study in Free vs. Controlled Economy” (August 15, 1960),
https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/east-west-berlin-study-free-vs-controlled-economy.
151 “It was this systematic lowering of unnecessarily high taxes that produced the German ‘economic miracle.’” Jude Wanniski,
“Taxes, Revenues, and the ‘Laffer Curve,’” The Politics of American Economic Policy Making, 2nd edition, ed. Paul Peretz
(New York, Routledge, 2015), 232.
152 And, to add insult to injury, the East German socialist economy required people to stay on a waiting list for ten years before
they could buy one! Neil Harris, European Business (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 117.
153 B.R. Shenoy, “East and West Berlin: A Study in Free vs. Controlled Economy” (August 15, 1960),
https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/east-west-berlin-study-free-vs-controlled-economy.
154 See Randal Bytwerk, “German Propaganda Archive,” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/notiz3.htm.
Bytwerk lists his source as: Wer die Deutsche Demokratische Republik verläßt, stellt sich auf die Seite der Kriegstreiber,
Notizbuch des Agitators (Agitator’s Notebook), published by the Socialist Unity Party’s Agitation Department, Berlin District,
November 1955. See also Jim Willis, Daily Life Behind the Iron Curtain (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013), 40.
155 Bernard Brien, Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko: Truth versus Totalitarianism, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2016), 110.
156 Socialist leaders often rely on the raw sale of natural resources on the open (world) market to get cash to buy foodstuffs and
other goods that their deformed economies cannot produce. When the world price of such a resource, like oil, plummets,
terrible misery can ensue when the government could no longer import food or medicine. This is what happened in Venezuela
as we note in chapter nineteen.
157 Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 117–118.
 Part Four

Is Capitalism
the Answer?
 13

Capitalism and Human Nature

In the 1987 film Wall Street, cutthroat businessman Gordon Gekko lectures
the members of a shareholder’s meeting. “Greed,” he tells them, “is good.
Greed is right. Greed works.”
For many people since, Gekko became the embodiment of the greedy,
selfish capitalist who elevates profits over people. One author says,
“Capitalism takes the position that ‘greed is good,’ which its supporters say
is a positive thing—greed drives profits and profits drive innovation and
product development, which means there are more choices available for
those who can afford them.”158
Are critics right? Is capitalism an evil economic system that Catholics
can’t support because it relies on the sin of greed?
FROM WANTS TO CREATION
If you ask people what fundamental values drive capitalism, they might
indeed talk about greed, profits, or selfishness. That’s understandable if
their only reference point for capitalism is a character like Gordon Gekko or
an Ayn Rand book like The Virtue of Selfishness. But the fundamental
values that drive capitalism are actually good ones: freedom and creativity.
In a free market, no one can force you to buy what a business is selling;
the business has to persuade you to enter freely into a mutually beneficial
exchange. When I buy a donut for a dollar, it’s because, at that moment, I
value the donut more than the dollar and the baker values the dollar more
than the donut. In that sense, capitalism can be summarized as: Give me
what I want and I will give you what you want. (In contrast, we might
summarizes socialism as: Give the state what you have and it will give you
what it thinks you need.)
Obviously, this isn’t a profound altruism like, “Give to those in need
regardless of what you want,” but capitalism isn’t meant to be a profound
moral system. Capitalism is a tool, based on discovery of the nature of
things, that in spite of its weaknesses encourages people to channel their
natural self-interest in a way that indirectly brings about good for others.
Capitalism also flows from our natural human creativity. When you see
any ten-year-old boy with Lego bricks you see the natural human desire to
wonder, “What can I make” followed by the will to take an idea and “make
it real.” Animals don’t create new or better tools and, as Adam Smith
pointed out, they don’t make deals or exchanges. But human beings have an
innate desire to create and exchange their creations with one another, and
this benefits humanity as a whole even if some people may use it to cause
harm.
Sure, some people will create frivolous goods that don’t really benefit
anyone. The world today doesn’t mourn the disappearance of past fads like
pet rocks! But most entrepreneurs will create useful things or improve
existing goods to make them more beneficial to the world, and some will
create things we couldn’t imagine living without—like cars or computers.
In all these cases, capitalism is a force for good.
Yes, some will create sinful goods and services the world would be better
off without, like pornography or prostitution. But as an economic tool,
capitalism shouldn’t be blamed when it’s used to serve sinful desires any
more than other tools (like kitchen knives) are blamed when they’re used
for evil ends (like stabbing innocent people).
To make an even better analogy, dating (or what we could call “romantic
markets”) can be opportunities for people merely to satisfy their lusts and
engage in fornication. But that wouldn’t justify forbidding free, romantic
interactions and having government central planners arrange everyone’s
marriages. Such a solution would create more evils than it tries to solve, and
of course it would do nothing to reduce sins of lust. In the same way,
forbidding commercial markets in favor of centrally allocating goods only
creates greater evils, and in the end does not eliminate the tendency toward
greed that is part of our fallen nature.
Some critics say that we are only selfish because capitalism, with its
emphasis on satisfying endless wants, makes us that way. They say that if
we adopted socialism we could restore the primitive altruism our ancestors
practiced before we were inundated with a consumerist culture that
brainwashed us into thinking we need “stuff” to be happy. But this view
ignores thousands of years of history that lacked capitalism but still had lots
of avarice—and with it, violent crime. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
argues that we live in the least criminal and war-torn age in all of human
history, and capitalism helped bring this about, because “when it’s cheaper
to buy things than to steal them, people don’t steal them.”159
This tendency for free markets to curb our base impulses is summarized in
Adam Smith’s example of an “invisible hand” that guides producers in the
market to benefit others “in spite of their natural selfishness and
rapacity.”160 Capitalism doesn’t require greed; it restrains it through
voluntary, mutual exchange. In his book Money, Greed, and God, Jay
Richards explains:
Even if the butcher is selfish, even if the butcher would love nothing more
than to sell you a spoiled chunk of grisly beef in exchange for your
worldly goods and leave you homeless, the butcher can’t make you buy
his meat in a free economy. He has to offer you meat you’ll freely buy.
The cruel, greedy butcher, in other words, has to look for ways to set up
win-win scenarios. Even to satisfy his greed, he has to meet your desires.
The market makes this happen. That’s making the best of a bad situation,
and of a bad butcher.161
We must remember that greed and selfishness are not strictly the same as
self-interest, which is a good inclination God instilled within us. The
conflation of a good, healthy type of self-interest with mere greed or
selfishness contributes to a great deal of confusion about economies built on
free exchanges.
Jesus said that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, not that we
should love our neighbor instead of ourselves. There is a proper kind of
self-love, rooted in humility, that moves us to care for our own animal and
spiritual needs in a manner befitting a son or daughter of God. We
ordinarily meet our own needs before we meet the needs of others, which is
good because if we didn’t meet our basic needs we wouldn’t be much help
to others for long.
It’s the same reason that airplane attendants instruct us to secure our own
oxygen masks before those of children next to us. St. Thomas Aquinas put
it this way, “man’s love for himself is the model of his love for another. But
the model exceeds the copy. Therefore, out of charity, a man ought to love
himself more than his neighbor.”162
THE “P” WORD
In Letters to a Young Evangelical, Christian author Tony Campolo
complains that the typical good produced in a capitalist system “doesn’t
meet anybody’s needs, but is simply designed to generate profits.”163 Yet
profit is not the same thing as “money” nor is it something that only exists
for greedy people to hoard.
Profit is a sign that a business is meeting people’s needs by providing
them with something they want at a price that is higher than the cost of
producing it. It’s an indicator of a healthy business, which is a business
poised to grow and thus benefit more people with the good or service.
When critics of capitalism quip about how the system “values profits over
people” they forget that profitable businesses show that people are being
benefited. Workers are getting paid and consumers are getting what they
want, and not just the “well off” ones. The economist Joseph Schumpeter
says, “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing
more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory
girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.”164
Instead of measuring business success with profits, socialist economies
measure it with output. Industries that produce the most goods (irrespective
of whether people actually want them) are considered the most important
and, as a result, are given the biggest budgets by the state. This means
socialist businesses do whatever they can to increase their budgets, even if
that means not meeting consumer needs. When a business in the free market
fails to meet people’s needs, it loses profits and either adapts or closes. But
when industries under socialism (or even some public-sector businesses in
market economies) fail to meet people’s needs, they can operate indefinitely
as long as the state subsidizes them.165
It’s also a fallacy to compare real-world capitalism, with its admitted fair
share of greedy, unscrupulous entrepreneurs, to an idealized socialism that
never has and never can exist because of our fallen human nature. In the
real world, socialism reaps a “harvest of misery” because it expects people
to act in ways that are contrary to their fallen human nature. Remember
what happened when the pilgrims expected everyone to act only for the
interest of others? They quickly used that as an excuse to do whatever they
could to benefit themselves, and this almost led to their ruin.
That capitalism is not essentially built upon greed is evident in the fact
that even if people weren’t greedy they would still be needy—and free
markets allow people to exchange goods and services in order to meet their
needs. In fact, capitalism allows people to accumulate so much wealth that
they are capable of engaging in acts of altruism to a degree previously
unknown in human history.
A GENEROSITY OPPORTUNITY
In 2012, Bruce Springsteen began his “Wrecking Ball Tour” throughout
Europe, dedicating songs to those experiencing economic hardship. One
song described “greedy thieves and robber barons” who “destroyed our
families, factories and they took our homes.” But although it makes for
doleful lyrics, the idea that capitalists are just a bunch of “robber barons”
who get rich at the expense of the poor is a myth.
The term “robber baron” comes from the medieval German raubritter or
“robber knights” who charged illegal tolls on public rivers and roads.166 But
whereas these thieves use force to steal money from poor people who were
just using public goods that actually belonged to them, modern capitalists
like Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller helped create massive
amounts of wealth by providing, among other things, better ways to traverse
public roads and rivers.167
Rockefeller has been called the richest man who ever lived, and he got
that way in the late nineteenth century because his company, Standard Oil,
made affordable kerosene that everybody wanted. He said, “Let the good
work go on. We must ever remember we are refining oil for the poor man
and he must have it cheap and good.”168 Even the poorest of Americans
could now have reliable heating and lamp oil, and the byproducts of
kerosene were used to create cheap gasoline for the newly invented
automobile.
Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire and he gave away half his
fortune (worth $10 billion today) to charity. His philanthropy included
founding a black women’s college and a medical foundation that later
eradicated hookworm.169 That’s why it’s painfully ironic to hear a socialist
like Che Guevara complain about the “poverty and suffering required for a
Rockefeller to emerge” given the violence and suffering that was required
for someone like Guevara to emerge as a socialist icon.170
The generosity of someone like Rockefeller is not an anomaly. The
Charities Aid Foundation has shown the nations that provide the most help
to strangers are those that have the freest economies. The five most
“individualistic” countries in the survey (United States, Australia, New
Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom) ranked second, third, fourth,
sixth, and eighth respectively when it comes to having generous citizens. In
contrast, those few countries that bucked the global trend toward
individualism included some with the lowest socioeconomic development,
including Armenia, Malaysia, Mali, and Uruguay.171
Just to be clear, we are not saying that capitalism by itself creates a just
world and makes everyone charitable and morally upright. Capitalism is a
tool—discovered in nature—that facilitates the exchange of goods and
services, and like any tool it can be abused. For example, some of the
“robber barons” of the early twentieth century did increase their wealth
through unethical business practices, such as insider trading. But abusus
non usum tollit: abuse does not take away the proper use, and this will
become clear when we examine what the Church has to say about
capitalism.

It’s important to remember . . .

• Capitalism is not really based on greed but on self-interest, which is a natural human instinct that
can be channeled to good ends.

• Profit is a natural marker for economic success; and although it can be acquired immorally and used
viciously, it’s also necessary for the creation of wealth, the alleviation of poverty, and the practice
of philanthropy.
158 Kim Kelly, “What ‘Capitalism’ Is and How It Affects People” Teen Vogue (April 11, 2018),
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-capitalism-is
159 Zack Beauchamp, “Steven Pinker explains how capitalism is killing war,” Vox (June 4, 2015),
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/4/8725775/pinker-capitalism.
160 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), Kindle edition.
161 Jay Richards, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem (New York: HarperCollins,
2009), 123.
162 ST. II-II Q. 26 A4
163 “[W]e reject the ‘greed principle’ that motivates so many in the capitalistic world. Capitalism relies solely on the idea that
people work for profits.” Tony Campolo, Letters to a Young Evangelical (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 142.
164 Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, socialism, and democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1950), 67.
165 A similar phenomenon occurs under “crony capitalism” when failing businesses are propped up by government spending,
which distorts free-market exchanges since government has almost endless abilities to raise revenues and continue this kind of
spending through taxation or borrowing.
166 The modern robber-baron myth comes from Matthew Josephson’s 1934 book The Robber Barons. It was a best-seller in an
economically depressed United States eager to pain the rich as villains and markets as their chief weapon against the poor.
167 Vanderbilt started his first ferry service with a $100 loan from his mother. It later grew into the People’s Line which competed
at the time with a state-funded monopoly called the Hudson River Steamboat Association controlled ferry travel into New York
and kept prices artificially high. Through ingenious business plans, Vanderbilt was able to offer lower prices along with more
reliable service. At one point, he was able to give away free tickets because he made more than enough profit by selling food
and drink on his boats. Eventually the other steamboat operators paid Vanderbilt not to compete with them, and it was this act
that earned him the title of “Robber Barron” among later biographers like Matthew Josephson.
168 Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 2004), 257.
169 Ibid., 487.
170 Ché Guevara, “Socialism and man in Cuba” (1965), https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm.
171 Abigail Marsh, “Could A More Individualistic World Also Be A More Altruistic One?” National Public Radio (February 5,
2018), https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/02/05/581873428/could-a-more-individualistic-world-also-be-a-more-altruistic-
one.
 14

The Church on Capitalism

Throughout history, the Church has often used heresy as an opportunity to

define and clarify the true teachings of the Faith. When Arians attacked the
divinity of Christ in the third century, the Church taught correct Christology
at the first ecumenical councils. When heretics branded the Eucharist a
mere symbol in the eleventh century, the Fourth Lateran Council reaffirmed
Christ’s real presence in the sacrament.
In the nineteenth century, socialism became the “founding heresy” that
spurred the development of Catholic social doctrine. It provided an
opportunity to teach “principles of right order” regarding social, political,
and economic questions. Quadragesimo Anno takes up the issue of
capitalism because “its most bitter accuser, socialism” had made serious
arguments against it and, in doing so, the encyclical answers the question:
“If a Catholic can’t be a socialist, can he be a capitalist?” (98).
ANSWERING A “BITTER ACCUSER”
Pius XI’s goal in Quadragesimo Anno was to answer the “social question,”
or the question of what should be done about the growing strife and
inequality between the small class of people who owned property like
factories and the larger class of people who worked for them. Although the
discussion mentions other economic systems that can lead to “miserable
and wretched condition[s],” Pius’s main focus was on capitalism, which he
defined as “that economic system, wherein, generally, some provide capital
while others provide labor for a joint economic activity” (100).
We must point out that the debate over capitalism is not about whether we
should have “laissez-faire” capitalism instead of state-regulated capitalism.
Since capitalism can only exist when the government enforces private
property rights and recognizes contractual agreements, it’s impossible to
leave the state out of it entirely. The question is, rather, “How should the
state view and intervene in the affairs of free market economies?” To that
question, Pius offered two conclusions.
First, he said, the state should not treat capitalism as something
intrinsically evil; this economic system “is not to be condemned in itself”
(101). Second, following Leo XIII, the state should make sure free markets
adhere to “norms of right order” by correcting violations of these norms.
These include conditions that “scorn the human dignity of the workers, the
social character of economic activity and social justice itself, and the
common good” (101). The state could, for example, require factory owners
to implement commonsense safety measures to protect workers from
occupational hazards.
But nowhere did Pius XI say that socialism could be acceptable provided
it adhered to certain moral norms. He admitted that, “like all errors,”
socialism “contains some truth” (120). But the truths of socialism (which
are shared by Christianity, thus making them not strictly socialist in nature)
are not enough to redeem a system that, he continues, “is based nevertheless
on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true
Christianity.”
And so, whereas there can be Christian capitalists who use their wealth to
better the world, according to Pius, “Religious socialism, Christian
socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good
Catholic and a true socialist.”172
POPE FRANCIS ON CAPITALISM
Being critical of capitalism doesn’t mean you are an anti-capitalist. Adam
Smith, the father of modern economic thought, warned about capitalism’s
vices. For example, he noted how the ability to freely set prices can lead
businessmen into “a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance
to raise prices.”173 But Smith recognized that capitalism is a worthwhile
system because it works despite human imperfections. Socialism, on the
other hand, requires everyone always to be perfectly altruistic, and that’s
why it always fails.
So when Pope Francis says that under capitalism “people can easily get
caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending” (Laudato Si
203), he’s absolutely right. Markets may be able to provide lots of things to
buy, but that doesn’t mean we should try to find meaning and happiness in
those things. The pope also said that “once greed for money presides over
the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society.” But, as we saw in the last
chapter, greed is a property of morally defective capitalists—it is not
intrinsic to capitalism in the same way that confiscation and redistribution
are intrinsic to socialism.174 William F. Buckley put it well: “The trouble
with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.”175
When the pope visited the United States in 2016, he even gave an address
to Congress where he affirmed that capitalism could be a good thing when
it is properly ordered toward the good. He commended the U.S.’s efforts to
fight poverty and said that “part of this great effort is the creation and
distribution of wealth.” He went on:
The right use of natural resources, the proper application of technology
and the harnessing of the spirit of enterprise are essential elements of an
economy which seeks to be modern, inclusive, and sustainable. “Business
is a noble vocation directed to producing wealth and improving the world.
It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the area in which it operates,
especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to
the common good”176 (Laudato Si 129).
Pope Francis’s former mentor, Fr. Juan Carlos Scannone, says the pontiff
“doesn’t criticize market economics, but rather the fetishization of money
and the free market.”177 When critics labeled Francis a Marxist for his
criticism of “trickle-down” economics, the pope said in response that
“Marxist ideology is wrong.”178 In fact, Pope Francis’s dual criticisms of
capitalism and socialism echo the writings of John Paul II.
THE CHURCH AND ECONOMICS
In Centesimus Annus, John Paul II said that profit has a “legitimate role” in
the function of a business but that it’s not the only indicator that a business
is doing well. The human dignity of workers matters too, and if capitalism
is left unchecked it can become “ruthless” and leads to “inhuman
exploitation” (33). But despite his criticisms, the pope never said that this
system is intrinsically evil like socialism, nor does he offer an alternative
economic system in its place. In fact, John Paul reaffirms the teaching of
previous popes who said that the Church not only does not offer the world a
“Catholic” system of economics, it can’t offer such a system.
The Church’s authority relates to teaching about faith and morals; but
economics is a science that studies the production, distribution, and
consumption of goods and services. As Nobel economist James Buchanan
put it, economics studies “the ordinary business of man making his
living.”179 Economics can answer questions like, “What gives rise to the
wealth of nations?” but not moral questions like, “How should I make use
of my wealth?” The Church can offer moral and theological principles to
guide secular disciplines, but it can’t replace those disciplines.
To make an analogy, the Church offers principles to doctors to guide them
in practicing medicine morally. Some of these values have their roots in
classical wisdom, like the Hippocratic Oath’s condemnation of abortion and
assisted suicide, and some in teachings stemming from divine revelation.
But the Church doesn’t tell doctors how to create health in their medical
interventions. Only the science of medicine can tell us how to restore a
person’s health when he becomes sick.
Likewise, the Church offers principles to economists to guide them in
moral application of economics, but it doesn’t dictate a “Catholic” way to
create wealth. That’s the job of those competent in the science of
economics. That’s why Pope Pius XI taught that “economics and moral
science each employs its own principles in its own sphere” (Quadragesimo
Anno 42). He said God entrusted the Church with exercising its authority
“not of course in matters of technique for which she is neither suitably
equipped nor endowed by office, but in all things that are connected with
the moral law” (41).
JOHN PAUL II ON CAPITALISM
Since economics is not a field related to theology or the moral law, John
Paul II made it clear that “the Church has no models to present.” Instead,
economic models “that are real and truly effective can only arise within the
framework of different historical situations, through the efforts of all those
who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic,
political, and cultural aspects.” The Church does have, however, a role to
play in offering guidance on economic questions that overlap with moral
and social doctrine. “For such a task,” he says, “the Church offers her social
teaching as an indispensable and ideal orientation” (Centesimus Annus 43).
In that respect, in Centesimus Annus John Paul asks if capitalism is the
economic model that should be proposed to developing, third-world
countries. He admits the answer is complex and says it depends on what
you mean by “capitalism.” He writes:
If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the
fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property,
and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free
human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the
affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of
a “business economy,” “market economy,” or simply “free economy” (42).
John Paul did not directly call this system capitalism, but the name is still
appropriate. When people are free to sell services and goods in the
marketplace and can retain profits for their good and the good of their
company, then capital will naturally accumulate. However, the pope goes on
to say:
But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the
economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework
which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which
sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical
and religious, then the reply is certainly negative (42).
A THIRD WAY?
Although capitalism is subject to abuse when it operates without legal
limits, John Paul II stressed that “the Church’s social doctrine is not a ‘third
way’ between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism” (Sollicitudo Rei
Socialis 41). The Church’s social doctrine isn’t economics or even a system
of “Catholic economics.” The search for this supposed third-way alternative
to capitalism and Communism, which some Catholics see as necessary,
actually involves a logical mistake that can be best understood through a
theological analogy.
It is heretical to say either that Jesus is God but not man (as the Docetists
did) or that he is man but not God (as the Arians did). But that doesn’t mean
there is a “third way” that splits the difference, understanding Christ to be
half God and half man. The only acceptable formula is to believe that Jesus
is fully God and fully man and that there is no contradiction in one person
possessing two distinct natures, one fully human and the other fully divine.
 Likewise, Pope Pius XI warned of social heresies like individualism,
which denies that property ever has a public purpose, and collectivism (i.e.,
Communism), which denies it ever has a private purpose. But the Church
does not advocate a “third way” in which property is considered half private
and half public, or split in some other proportion between the two. Instead,
Christian tradition had always taught that property has both a fully private
and fully public character.
Property is meant to serve its public character by means of private
ownership. This places enormous moral obligations on individuals and
property owners to put their wealth at the service of the common good, an
application of which we will see in our discussion of what constitutes a
“just wage.”

It’s important to remember . . .

• The problem of socialism spurred the Church to develop its modern social doctrine, addressing
questions of political and economic justice.

• The science of economics is a matter for economists, not popes. Catholic social doctrine offers
moral principles but not a comprehensive “Catholic economics” that the faithful must follow.

• Still less does the Church mandate a “middle way” that splits the difference between capitalism and
socialism.
172 Ibid., 120.
173 Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2 (London, William Clowes and Sons,
1835), 54.
174 “Participation At The Second World Meeting Of Popular Movements Address Of The Holy Father” (July 9, 2015),
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/july/documents/papa-francesco_20150709_bolivia-movimenti-
popolari.html
175 William F. Buckley credits the quote to early National Review collaborator Willi Schlamm. For more, see
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/30/trouble/#return-note-13985-5.
176 “Visit To The Joint Session Of The United States Congress Address Of The Holy Father” (September 24, 2015),
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/september/documents/papa-francesco_20150924_usa-us-
congress.html
177 Thomas D. Williams, “Pope Francis’s praise of capitalism a surprise on US trip,” Crux (September 21, 2016),
https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2016/09/21/pope-franciss-praise-capitalism-surprise-us-trip/.
178 Collin Ruane, “Pope Francis: ‘The Marxist ideology is wrong,’” Atlanta Journal Constitution (December 15, 2013),
https://www.ajc.com/news/national/pope-francis-the-marxist-ideology-wrong/aNTHEz6PA621Kurl0ZHJWP/.
179 James M. Buchanan, What Should Economists Do? Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3 (January 1964), 213–222.
 15

The Church on Just Wages

In 1 Timothy 5:18, St. Paul defends paying priests a salary for their work by
citing the words of Jesus: “The laborer deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7).
Employers must pay workers what they were promised, and unjustly
holding back these wages is the sin of wage theft. St. James has a frightful
message for these sinners: “Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed
your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the
harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts” (5:4).
But there is more to the Church’s teaching on what constitutes a just wage
than merely keeping a promise to pay someone (CCC 2434). In Rerum
Novarum, Leo XIII reminds employers that the most important thing they
must give an employee is not a wage, per se, but respect as a human being.
WRONG PRINCIPLES FOR RIGHT WAGES
Leo says that “to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of
gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers—that is truly
shameful and inhuman.” Workers are not mere instruments that produce
labor for a company. Employers owe them fair conditions along with fair
wages, which includes conditions that support the worker’s spiritual good:
The employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious
duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous
occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or
to squander his earnings. Furthermore, the employer must never tax his
work people beyond their strength, or employ them in work unsuited to
their sex and age. (Rerum Novarum 20)
In the forty years that elapsed between Rerum Novarum and
Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI noted how the state passed numerous laws,
unknown in Leo’s time, that mandated these fair conditions. These laws
“undertake the protection of life, health, strength, family, homes,
workshops, wages, and labor hazards, in fine, everything which pertains to
the condition of wage workers, with special concern for women and
children” (Quadragesimo Anno 28).
Leo says the employers’ “great and principal duty is to give everyone
what is just” which includes right conditions along with right wages (Rerum
Novarum 20). Justice means giving people what they deserve and though
it’s obvious that laborers deserve their wages, it’s less clear what makes any
particular wage just or unjust.
For example, Leo rejects the idea that the only just wage is the one a
worker agrees to receive. This may be the case for certain personal kinds of
labor (like agreeing to fix a friend’s fence) that are be done for little or no
money at all. But because labor is primarily ordered toward man’s self-
preservation, “there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious
and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages
ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well behaved wage-
earner” (45). Because God gave human beings labor as a way to provide for
their own existence, it follows that there must be a way for people to
support themselves through honest work. The fruit of labor is meant to
benefit the worker in this way, but that fruit does not solely belong to the
worker.
On the other hand, Pius XI dismisses the Marxist “labor theory of value”
that says a worker is simply entitled to all the surplus value of his work.
Pius calls it a “fictitious moral principle” that claims “all products and
profits, save only enough to repair and renew capital, belong by very right
to the workers” (Quadragesimo Anno 55). According to this fictitious
principle, if a worker makes a pair of shoes that are sold for $50, he is
entitled to that sum minus expenses and overheads. Pius says approaches
like these are “shallow” because those who peddle them “think this most
difficult matter [about wages] is easily solved by the application of a single
rule or measure—and one quite false” (67).
We’ll talk more about the labor of theory of value in the next chapter, but
for now you can see this theory is flawed because it denies the employer the
right to be compensated for the risks he takes in creating and operating the
shoe company. Pius speaks of these entrepreneurs as representing
“property” interests because they own property like factories, whereas
workers represent “labor” interests. Pius says that “it is wholly false to
ascribe to property alone or to labor alone whatever has been obtained
through the combined effort of both, and it is wholly unjust for either,
denying the efficacy of the other, to arrogate to itself whatever has been
produced” (53).
Instead, this value must be divided between the parties and, although the
Church does not give an exact formula for how to do this, it does give
principles that set upper and lower limits for wages.
FAIR PRINCIPLES FOR FAIR WAGES
Concerning the upper limit for wages, Pius says that “it would be unjust to
demand excessive wages which a business cannot stand without ruin and
consequent calamity to the workers.” If a company reduces wages because
of its own mismanagement, he adds, they are morally responsible for the
harm that befalls its workers. But, if an external pressure forces companies
to, for example, “sell its product at less than a just price,” then companies
are not morally responsible for providing less-fair wages. Instead, it is the
parties who exerted these unfair external pressures that are to blame.
Moreover, there must be an upper limit to wages in order to preserve a kind
of equilibrium in the workforce that provides “suitable means of livelihood
. . . to the greatest possible number.” Pius explains how
the opportunity to work [ought] be provided to those who are able and
willing to work. This opportunity depends largely on the wage and salary
rate, which can help as long as it is kept within proper limits, but which on
the other hand can be an obstacle if it exceeds these limits. For everyone
knows that an excessive lowering of wages, or their increase beyond due
measure, causes unemployment (Quadragesimo Anno 74).
When wages are too low, people don’t have incentive to work and thus
they remain unemployed. But when wages are too high, employers may
reduce their operating costs by hiring fewer workers.
Even though labor is not merely a commodity, the price for a person’s
labor does behave like the prices for other goods. When a certain kind of
labor skill is relatively rare (like dishwasher repair and maintenance) the
price to buy this labor is higher than the price for more-common labor skills
(like dishwashing). Catholic social doctrine strikes a balance between
paying someone for the objective value of his labor (which is always a
function of the overall supply of labor) and insuring that his basic human
needs are met. The Catechism says,
In determining fair pay both the needs and the contributions of each
person must be taken into account. Remuneration for work should
guarantee man the opportunity to provide a dignified livelihood for
himself and his family on the material, social, cultural, and spiritual level,
taking into account the role and the productivity of each, the state of the
business, and the common good (CCC 2434).
Pope Leo said that “the worker must be paid a wage sufficient to support
him and his family.” But in a modern economy, it’s not possible for every
single occupation to pay a “family wage” that can support a spouse and
children. The federal minimum wage, for example, is about half or a third
of a family wage that can support dependents in most places.
For popes like Leo XIII and Pius XI, the answer to this dilemma is not
found in a simple government policy like a law mandating a family wage
for all jobs, which would raise unemployment to obscene levels. Leo
proposes that, following the principle of subsidiarity, workers should seek
just wages through organized bodies like labor unions, with state
intervention being a last resort to ensure they are treated justly (Rerum
Novarum 45). The pope sees unions operating under Christian principles as
the best replacement for defunct guilds (which in the Middle Ages kept
wages higher by restricting competition) and adds:
The state should watch over these societies of citizens banded together in
accordance with their rights, but it should not thrust itself into their
peculiar concerns and their organization, for things move and live by the
spirit inspiring them, and may be killed by the rough grasp of a hand from
without (55).
Pius warns that these incursions into the market can be bad for the state as
well as workers. If the state took over every labor issue that used to belong
to guilds and unions, it would be “overwhelmed and crushed by almost
infinite tasks and duties” (Quadragesimo Anno 78). Such incursions would
also fail to respect “the role and the productivity of each [worker], the state
of the business, and the common good,” so a more complex solution is
required to make sure that a worker’s needs are met without disrupting the
common good of society.

It’s important to remember . . .

• Catholic teaching on fair wages is based on principles of justice, not on the theory that a laborer is
entitled to all the fruits of his labor.

• The Church recognizes that just wages take into account the legitimate interests of labor and
ownership, which both play an indispensable role in the creation of wealth.

• Leo XIII and Pius XI believed that organized bodies of workers, such as labor unions, negotiating
with ownership, is a better way to achieve just wages than state intervention.
 16

Capitalism and Human Labor

Some critics of capitalism say it is unjust to expect people to work for any
wage, be it high or low. One critic claims, “The ruthless emphasis on profits
over people [leads to] the proliferation of wage slavery—in which people
have no choice but to sell their labor.”180 The “wage slavery” argument
asserts that there is no morally relevant difference between forcing a person
to work under the threat of punishment (i.e., traditional slavery) and forcing
a person to work under the threat of withholding the wages he needs to
survive.
The anarchist Emma Goldman once compared working for a wage to
working for a slave owner, saying, “The only difference is that you are
hired slaves instead of block [auction-bought] slaves.”181 Noam Chomsky
agrees, saying, “It’s not an odd view, that there isn’t much difference
between selling yourself and renting yourself.”182 These kinds of arguments
are common among socialists, especially anarchist socialists who believe
human beings should not have to submit to any authority. But they aren’t
persuasive because, as Leo XIII said, they don’t “see the world as it really
is.”
THE MYTH OF “WAGE SLAVERY”
Slave owners in the antebellum South made the same basic argument as
Chomsky, saying that if blacks could be “forced” to work in Northern
factories for wages then there was nothing wrong with forcing them to work
on Southern plantations.183 But obviously there is a difference between
working for a master and working for an employer. Slaves can’t quit and
choose to work for another master, but wageworkers can. Not only does this
respect human freedom, unlike slavery, but it also encourages employers to
compete for their labor and helps raise wages over time.
“Wage slavery” is really just an obtuse way of saying that people have to
work even if they don’t want to, because the alternative is starvation. This
objection also assumes that capitalists never have to worry about money
because they own the means of production. But factories don’t produce
money; they produce goods, and if no one buys what the capitalist offers
then he can’t support himself either.
Comparatively few people want to undertake the risks and long hours that
most business owners face. That’s why most of us choose to work for
someone else, someone who has taken on those entrepreneurial risks for us.
Does the fact that we choose not to live off the land or run our own business
(or are unable to) in order to survive really make us slaves? On the other
hand, the economist Bryan Caplan says that if society can take all of your
excess wealth and redistribute it, then you would essentially be a slave,
since in exchange for their labor slaves are only given enough to survive.184
EXPLOITATIVE WORK?
Even if we aren’t “wage slaves,” many other critics say that jobs under
capitalism still exploit workers, since work is by its nature onerous. Marx
said that modern industries “destroy every remnant of charm in his work
and turn it into a hated toil.”185 Socialist journalism professor Robert Jensen
laments that “the jobs we do are not rewarding, not enjoyable, and
fundamentally not worth doing. We do them to survive. Then on Friday we
go out and get drunk to forget about that reality.”186
Except, when we look at actual data, this isn’t true.
In 1830, Americans in manufacturing jobs worked close to seventy hours
a week.187 But as companies increased their production output that number
dropped to sixty hours in 1890 and then to forty-two hours in 1930.188 And
while the number of hours has remained at that level, the number of
Americans who reported being completely or somewhat satisfied with their
job has continued to rise, going from 79 percent in 1993 to 90 percent in
2018.189
What about developing countries? Some socialists claim we are only able
to work less because capitalism exploits poor workers abroad. Jensen says
we should “put this in a global context. Half the world’s population lives on
less than $2 a day. That’s more than three billion people.”190 But this is like
blaming a firefighter because he was only able to keep half the house from
burning down. If he hadn’t shown up, the entire home would be in ashes,
and the same is true when it comes to capitalism and global poverty.
 In 1820, 94 percent of people lived on the equivalent of less than $2 a day,
and for all previous human history that figure was probably closer to 99
percent.191 Today, it is not half of people that live in such extreme poverty
(as Jensen claims), but 10 percent.192 That’s still hundreds of millions of
people who are suffering, but capitalism shouldn’t be blamed for this, but
rather be given credit for doing in 200 years what the human race couldn’t
achieve in the previous 20,000.
Indeed, areas of extreme poverty around the world need more capitalism,
not less.
FREE MARKETS AND PROSPEROUS PEOPLE
In 1990, 60 percent of people in East Asia lived in extreme poverty, higher
even than sub-Sahara Africa. By 2015, less than 3 percent of East Asia
experienced extreme poverty while southern African poverty was still stuck
at around 40 percent.193 Capitalism explains much of this difference. East
Asian “tiger economies” like Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea (along
with China, a latecomer to some free market activity) respect private
property rights and have allowed businesses to grow and flourish. But in
many sub-Saharan African countries, socialism, corruption, and
government incompetence have combined to repress property rights and
stifle the generation of wealth.
As Greg Mills describes in his book Why Africa Is Poor, the nation of
Zambia suffered for three decades under the policies of the socialist UNIP
party and its president Kenneth Kaunda. Mills shows how
Kaunda’s socialism has created a civil service geared to protectionism and
regulation at all costs, and a private sector attuned to working within a
system that rewards insiders and discourages independent
entrepreneurship. (We should not underestimate the fact that this system, a
feature of most African countries, works just fine for the elite.)194
Critics often point to manufacturing sweatshops and other harsh working
conditions in Asian countries as evidence that capitalism is evil. And in
many cases there certainly is room for making those conditions more just
and humane. But we must also bear in mind that for many of these workers
the alternatives are even worse. The economist Paul Kruger points out that
when sweatshops in Bangladesh stopped hiring children, the “displaced
child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets—and that a
significant number were forced into prostitution.”195 What the Austrian
economist Ludwig von Mises said of nineteenth-century factory workers is
still true for many workers around the world today:
It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives
from the nurseries and the kitchens and the children from their play. These
women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children
were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved
them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation.196
Many people today labor under unjust or undignified conditions. The
solution to their suffering, however, is to improve those conditions, not do
away with the economic system that offers the best chance to provide those
improvements. To that end, we should remember the old saying, “Do not
make the perfect the enemy of the good.”
NO EASY SOLUTIONS
When Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright quipped that “the hallmark of
capitalism is poverty in the midst of plenty,” he did have a point. We should
be upset when some people don’t have enough to eat while others eat so
much that it becomes a health problem. The title of Ronald Sider’s 1978
book on poverty—Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger—is a gut punch for
people of faith. But we must remember that capitalism did not create
poverty among the wealthy: it created wealthy people among the poor.
Poverty was the normal existence for 99 percent of all human beings
before the Industrial Revolution, and since that time poverty levels around
the globe have fallen. The reason poverty persists is not primarily an
economic problem; it’s a moral problem. This is why Popes Leo XIII and
Pius XI emphasized the so-called “social question,” which is the problem of
poverty.
This wasn’t a new question because poverty was new—it was a new
question because with modern economic growth not all men were poor.
Since there were now more people who were not poor and more people who
were rich, the “problem” was how the new, relatively wealthy were
supposed to use their wealth (to provide relief to the poor) and how the poor
were to bear their lot (that is, not agitate for socialism). Whence, in relation
to the newly wealthy, Pope Pius XI said:
A person’s superfluous income, that is, income which he does not need to
sustain life fittingly and with dignity, is not left wholly to his own free
determination. Rather the sacred scriptures and the Fathers of the Church
constantly declare in the most explicit language that the rich are bound by
a very grave precept to practice almsgiving, beneficence, and munificence
(Quadragesimo Anno 50).
People have a moral obligation to use their excess wealth to help those
who cannot even afford the basic necessities of life. But the Church also
teaches that the state should not legally enforce all of our moral obligations.
Imagine if it was a crime to break any promise or tell any lie. The evils
created by a state that meddled in every aspect of our lives would be worse
than the evils it tried to eliminate. St. Thomas Aquinas said on this matter:
The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but
gradually. Wherefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men
the burdens of those who are already virtuous, viz. that they should
abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear
such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils.197
Our study of history shows that the same is true when the state uses
socialist policies to force people to carry out their duty to help the poor.
Socialists have never succeeded in creating the classless, poverty-free
worker’s paradise they perpetually promise to the impoverished who put
their hope in them. Instead, their collectivist solutions simply increase
poverty for everyone—except for leaders who end up having more than
they need.
As we will see in our examination of the modern “return of socialism,”
what Winston Churchill said sixty years ago is still true today: “The
inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent
virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”198

It’s important to remember . . .

• The idea that working for a wage is “slavery” is a myth. In a fallen world we all must work even if
we don’t want to—even the owners of the means of production.
• Far from worsening the conditions of “wage slaves,” modern capitalism has made labor much less
burdensome and much more remunerative.

• In places where people still labor in comparative poverty, evidence suggests that economic freedom
rather than collectivist control offers the best chance for the development necessary to lift them out
of poverty.
180 Kim Kelly, “What ‘Capitalism’ Is and How It Affects People,” Teen Vogue (April 11, 2018),
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-capitalism-is.
181 Emma Goldman, “Anarchy,” Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume One: Made for
America 1890–1901, ed. Candace Falk (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 283.
182 Harry Kreisler, “Activism, Anarchism, and Power: Conversation with Nam Chomsky” (March 22, 2002),
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Chomsky/chomsky-con2.html
183 See, for example, Wilfred Carsel, “The Slaveholders’ Indictment of Northern Wage Slavery,” The Journal of Southern
History, Vol. 6, No. 4 (November 1940), 504–520.
184 “I loathe hyperbole, but if a socialist government enforced the obligation to give away all your surplus to the poor, you would
literally be a slave.” Bryan Caplan, “Capitalism vs. Socialism: The Bruenig-Caplan Debate” (March 2018),
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/03/capitalism_vs_s.html
185 Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter XXV (1867), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm.
186 Robert Jensen, Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes Counter Punch (April 30, 2007),
https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/04/30/anti-capitalism-in-five-minutes/
187 Robert A. Margo, “The Labor Force in the Nineteenth Century,” The Cambridge Economic History of the United States vol.
II, eds. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 229-230.
188 Ethel B. Jones, “New Estimates of Hours of Work Per Week and Hourly Earnings, 1900–1957,” The Review of Economics
and Statistics, Vol. 45, No. 4 (November 1963), 375.
189 “Work and Workplace,” Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1720/work-work-place.aspx.
190 Robert Jensen, Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes Counter Punch (April 30, 2007),
https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/04/30/anti-capitalism-in-five-minutes/
191 François Bourguignon and Christian Morrison, “Inequality among World Citizens: 1820–1992,” The American Economic
Review, Vol. 92, No. 4. (September 2002) 733. Cited in Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” Our
World in Data (March 27, 2017), https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty.
192 “Nearly Half the World Lives on Less than $5.50 a Day,” The World Bank (October 17, 2018),
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/17/nearly-half-the-world-lives-on-less-than-550-a-day
193 “Regional aggregation using 2011 PPP and $1.9/day poverty line,” The World Bank,
http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/povDuplicateWB.aspx Cited in Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global
Extreme Poverty” Our World in Data (March 27, 2017), https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
194 Greg Mills, Why Africa is Poor (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), Kindle edition.
195 Paul Krugman, “Reckonings: Hearts and Heads” The New York Times (April 22, 2001),
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/opinion/reckonings-hearts-and-heads.html
196 Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition (Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1998), 615.
197 Summa Theologiae, I–II, Q. 96, A. 2
198 James C. Humes, Churchill: The Prophetic Statesman (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Books, 2012), 73.
 Part Five

Socialism
Reconstructed
 17

The Nordic Myth

There was once a group of mice that wanted a solution to the cat who
constantly hunted them. One mouse proposed that a bell be tied around the
cat’s neck to provide them with a warning whenever it was near. The other
mice applauded his plan until an older mouse spoke up and said, “Yes, but
who will bell the cat?”
One collection of fables describes the lesson to be learned: it is easy to
propose impossible remedies. The same lesson applies to socialism.
Like belling the cat, the rewards and goal are easy to explain. They want
to eliminate poverty by planning the economy and redistributing wealth.
But the mechanism to achieve the goal isn’t spelled out, because it can’t be
done. Central planners can never efficiently meet diverse consumer needs,
which is something all the failed socialist states we’ve examined in this
book prove beyond doubt.
“But they didn’t practice true socialism!” the critic responds.
Well, if they weren’t practitioners of “true socialism,” then who is?
Socialists know that they can’t be taken seriously if they can’t provide
even one example of their theory working in real life. That’s why when
critics ask them about China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union, they
usually reply in kind by asking, “What about Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden? They practice democratic socialism and they have the highest
living standards in the world!”
(NON-) SOCIALIST SCANDINAVIA
In her Catholic defense of democratic socialism, Brianne Jacobs says young
people are not afraid of socialism because, unlike their parents, they don’t
associate socialism with threats to freedom like the Soviet Union. Instead,
“We tend to associate socialism with democracies: Sweden, Norway,
Denmark, Finland—countries that have low economic inequality and a high
quality of life, achieved through universal social programs and financed
through high tax rates.”199
But remember that social welfare, or government spending on the poor, is
not the same as socialism, or government planning of the economy. Nordic
countries have generous social welfare programs, but they are nowhere near
socialism because they have a robust system of private property protections.
According to the Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom index, Hong
Kong and Singapore are the most capitalist economies on earth while North
Korea and Venezuela are the most socialist. In between these two extremes,
you have countries with mixed models like France, which ranks 70 out of
180 when it comes to economic freedom. This is probably due to that
country’s “indicative planning” that relies on government persuasion to
plan the economy through things like grants and tax breaks instead of
government coercion through socialist policies like price controls and
production quotas.200
So where do the Nordic countries fall on the economic freedom index?
Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway rank fourteen, nineteen, twenty,
and twenty-six respectively.201 Compared with the rest of the world, they
have relatively free markets and are much more like the United States
(which ranks twelfth) than socialist Venezuela (which ranks at 177). When
Denmark was held up as an example of socialism in the 2015 presidential
primary debates, the prime minister of Denmark said in response:
I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some
sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark
is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.
The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high
level of security for its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy
with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you
wish.202
ECONOMIC TRADEOFFS
It’s understandable why so many people are attracted to Nordic economic
models. They claim to offer free college, free health care, generous
minimum wages, along with vacation plans and retirement benefits for
workers. These countries also have relatively low poverty rates and come in
at the top of lists that rank countries by the quality of life they provide for
their citizens. But economic models always involve trading one kind of
good for another kind of good, and the Nordic model is no exception.
Unlike with socialism, Catholics can reasonably disagree over whether the
Nordic model should be replicated in other countries, but that debate should
highlight some of the tradeoffs inherent in these models as well as
misconceptions people have about them, such as:
• Nordic countries do not have minimum wage laws. Their higher wages are
usually the result of collective bargaining agreements between unions and
employers, which, you’ll recall, was Pope Leo XIII’s preferred alternative
to government regulation.203
• Nordic countries have very high tax rates and their citizens have lower
average incomes than citizens in countries like Japan or the United
States.204
• Nordic countries have some of the longest wait times to see medical
providers, which may explain why the number of private health insurance
plans doubled in Sweden between 2006 and 2011.205
• Although Nordic schools, including colleges, do not charge tuition, they
often charge high fees, and students still accumulate debt because of the
region’s high cost of living.206 Education options are also limited, which
can be seen in the non-existence of private schools in Finland and the
illegality of homeschooling in Sweden.207
• Welfare states like those in Scandinavia can experience slower economic
growth when immigration rates increase.208 Consequently, these countries
have to make a choice between reducing social services or reducing the
number of immigrants they are willing to accept into the country.
In some cases, these tradeoffs would make these models impermissible
from a Catholic perspective. These include policies that forbid parents from
providing their children with religious education by outlawing home and
parochial schools in favor of government education. But in other cases they
can represent a legitimate model Catholics may support, provided that these
models are not employed as a path to socialism.
THE SCALING PROBLEM
Economic models cannot be applied universally and, at certain scales, they
stop working. Centralizing food storage and allocating it based on
individual need works great for a single-family home or even a small
religious community. But such a model would be impractical for entire
neighborhoods and, as history grimly reminds us, can be fatal for entire
countries. The same is true for some national economic policies, which can
work in smaller, more homogenous countries whose citizens share similar
values but may become unwieldy in larger, more diverse ones.
Monaco and Luxembourg have even higher standards of living than the
Nordic countries, but they only have populations of 40,000 and 600,000
people respectively. After the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama was
asked about copying Sweden’s plan to nationalize banks in order to protect
them from insolvency due to bad investments. In response, President
Obama said, “Sweden looks like a good model. Here’s the problem:
Sweden had like five banks. We’ve got thousands of banks. You know, the
scale of the U.S. economy and the capital markets are so vast . . . it
wouldn’t make sense.”209
Among countries that have more than 100 million citizens, Japan and the
United States rank first and second when it comes to providing people with
a high quality of life.210 Of course, when a country has both a large
geographic area and a high population, there can be dramatic differences in
the quality of life people enjoy in the various cities in that country. But the
cities across the globe with the highest quality of life tend to be found in
free democracies, whereas the worst cities in the world, such as Lagos,
Nigeria and Caracas, Venezuela, tend to be found in countries that restrict
both personal and economic freedoms.211 As we turn in the next chapter to
the reality of what happens when countries fully embrace socialist policies,
you’ll see why Venezuela earns this failing grade.

It’s important to remember . . .

• Claims that “democratic socialism” in Scandinavian countries has successfully combined state
economic control with prosperity and social stability tend to ignore basic facts about how their
economies
actually work.

• Economic and political models that are reasonably successful on small scales—a family, a town,
even a small nation—often do not translate to larger scales.
• These “Nordic models” also come with tradeoffs, some of which would be intolerable from a
Catholic perspective.
199 Brianne Jacobs, “Yes, democratic socialism is compatible with Catholic social teaching,” America (October 1, 2018),
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/10/01/yes-democratic-socialism-compatible-catholic-social-teaching.
200 For an overview, see chapter seven of Barkley Rosser Jr. and Marina V. Rosser’s Comparative Economics in a Transforming
World Economy (2004).
201 See “2019 Index of Economic Freedom,” https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking.
202 “Danish PM in US: Denmark is not socialist,” The Local (November 1, 2015), https://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-
in-us-denmark-is-not-socialist
203 “None of the Nordic countries has a statutory minimum wage. Nor, with the exception of Finland, do they have a tradition of
extending collective agreements to unorganized enterprises.” Kristine Nergaard, “Social Democratic Capitalism,” The Oxford
Handbook of Employment Relations, eds. Adrian Wilkinson, Geoffrey Wood, Richard Deeg (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014),
204 “The 4.4 million or so Americans with Swedish origins are considerably richer than average Americans, as are other
immigrant groups from Scandinavia. If Americans with Swedish ancestry were to form their own country, their per capita GDP
would be $56,900, more than $10,000 above the income of the average American. This is also far above Swedish GDP per
capita, at $36,600. Swedes living in the USA are thus approximately 53 per cent more wealthy than Swedes (excluding
immigrants) in their native country (OECD, 2009; US Census database).” Nima Sanandaji, “The surprising ingredients of
Swedish success – free markets and social cohesion,” IEA Discussion Paper, No. 41 (August 2012), https://iea.org.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/Sweden percent20Paper.pdf
205 “Voluntary health insurance in Europe: Country experience,” Observatory Studies Series, No. 42. eds. A. Sagan and S.
Thomson (2016), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK447719/.
206 Matt Phillips, “The High Price of a Free College Education in Sweden,” The Atlantic (May 31, 2013),
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/the-high-price-of-a-free-college-education-in-sweden/276428/
207 “Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to
charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public
school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.” Anu Partanen, “What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success,” The
Atlantic (December 29, 2011), https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-
finlands-school-success/250564/. “Placing much more control in the hands of the government, the new law affects not only
homeschoolers but all families in Sweden. The law now mandates a national curriculum and obliterates the notion of
‘independent’ (or private) schools and school choice.” John Warwick Montgomery, “The Justification of Homeschooling Vis-à-
vis the European Human Rights System,” Homeschooling in America and in Europe: A Litmus Test of Democracy, ed. John
Warwick Montgomery (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 80.
208 Marianne Frank Hansen and Marie Louise Schultz-Nielsen, “The fiscal impact of immigration to welfare states of the
Scandinavian type,” Journal of Population Economics, Vol. 30, Issue 3 (July 2017), 925–952.
209 Joe Weisenthal, “Obama: Swedish Model Would Be Impossible Here,” Business Insider (February 11, 2009),
https://www.businessinsider.com/obama-swedish-model-would-be-impossible-here-2009-2.
210 As of 2019, the countries with populations of more than 100 million include China, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan,
Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. According to the Numbeo quality of life
index, Japan scores a 180.5 and the U.S. scores a 179.2. The next closest is Mexico with a 123.48. The highest scoring country
is Denmark with a 198.57. “Quality of Life Index for Country 2019,” https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-
life/rankings_by_country.jsp?title=2019.
211 “Quality of Life Index 2019 Mid-Year,” https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings.jsp.
 18

The Venezuelan
Reality

In the 1970s, Venezuela was one of the richest, most stable countries in
Latin America, due in large part to its vast oil reserves. The government’s
revenue quadrupled during the 1973 oil crisis and politicians made plans
like La Gran Venezuela that would nationalize the oil industry and allow the
country to splurge on public entitlement programs. According to journalist
Michael McCaughan, “Venezuelan workers enjoyed the highest wages in
Latin America and subsidies in food, health, education, and transport
sectors.”212
But when oil prices began to decline in the 1980s, so did the Venezuelan
economy.
By the late 1990s, worker income was half of what it had been in the
1970s, and riots in the city’s capital of Caracas left hundreds dead.213 In
1998, populist presidential candidate Hugo Chavez promised to use
Venezuela’s oil reserves for the benefit of the poor and campaigned on the
slogan, “Motherland, Socialism, or Death.”214 Chavez won the election with
56 percent of the vote, most of it coming from the country’s poor and
middle-class citizens. He appointed his own advisers to lead the country’s
oil industry, which subsequently became a piggy bank from which Chavez
spent lavishly on social programs. In a speech he gave to the World Fund he
declared:
We must transcend capitalism. But we cannot resort to state capitalism,
which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must
reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project, and a path, but a new type of
socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the
state ahead of everything.215
 ¡VIVA CHAVEZ!
In the early 2000s, Chavez launched a series of welfare programs called
“missions” that provided subsidized food and free medical care to
impoverished citizens. One 2006 report showed that the programs helped
Chavez win reelection, but problems were already starting to emerge with
the demand they created. The reporter observed “long lines form outside the
supermarkets known as Mercals,” with a “mother of three shout[ing] at
security guards keeping her waiting for an hour.” However, the mother
admitted she would still vote for Chavez because, “He’s giving us all these
benefits and needs our support . . . so he can keep giving more benefits.”216
In order to keep the welfare system functioning, Chavez initiated price
controls on staples like rice, milk, and meat. He ordered companies that
produced these goods both to sell them at low prices and increase their
production in order to meet consumer demand. When the companies
complained that they would go out of business by being forced to sell goods
at such low prices, Chavez sent his troops in to make sure they would
comply. When that didn’t work, he had the government take over the
businesses through a process called expropriation.
According to a 2019 feature in the Washington Post, “In two decades, the
government seized nearly five million acres of productive farmland that has
now been largely abandoned. In 1999, there were 490,000 private
companies in Venezuela. By last June—the most recent count available—
that number had fallen to 280,000.”217 Venezuela also drove out foreign oil
companies and nationalized domestic steel, glass, and food production. A
2010 article in The Economist described how a typical “expropriation”
occurs with the example of Owens Illinois, an American-owned bottle
manufacturer:
In his usual style, Mr. Chavez offhandedly slipped the announcement into
the middle of a speech lasting several hours, which all radio and television
stations were required to carry . . . Owens Illinois was given no advance
warning of the measure, and new management entered the factory just a
few days after it was announced.218
The article goes to describe how Chavez was committed to “the
elimination of capitalism” and that he “believes individuals should be
entitled to their personal belongings, but not control of the means of
production.” But although in theory “the people” owned the means of
production, it was the state that controlled the factories that produced the
goods. And without any profit motivation, their production rates steadily
declined until Venezuela went from being a country that produced most of
its own food to one that imported most of it.219
In spite of these moves, Venezuela was still surviving economically
because of oil prices that went (when adjusted for inflation) from $19 a
barrel when Chavez was first elected to nearly $100 a barrel when he died
in 2013. In the wake of his death, journalists, academics, and celebrities
lionized Chavez and praised Venezuela as evidence that socialism can work
if it’s “done right.”
A BETTER WORLD
Remember that, at this point, hardly anyone doubted that Venezuela
represented “true socialism.” The economy was centrally planned, the
government abolished large sectors of private industry, such as factories and
farms, and the wealth produced from these resources was redistributed
among the people, just as with every other socialist country in history.
Noam Chomsky visited the country in 2009 and said, “What’s so exciting
about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being
created.”220 David Sirota of Salon.com admitted “Chavez was no saint” due
to his authoritarian policies but he still called the Venezuelan economy “a
miracle” that can teach us how to alleviate poverty.221 Jacobin magazine
likewise praised Venezuela’s reduction in poverty and said, “Today we
mourn the death of Chavez, tomorrow we return to the grind for
socialism.”222
When conditions deteriorated after Chavez’s death and lines to buy items
like toilet paper started to emerge, economist Mark Weisbrot called those
who predicted disaster “haters” who had “cried wolf.” He asked, “How can
a government with more than $90bn in oil revenue end up with a balance-
of-payments crisis?” His answer: “It can’t, and won’t.”223
Weisbrot had also served as an adviser to Oliver Stone’s 2009 film South
of the Border, which portrayed Latin American socialism as an economic
boon to the region and its socialist leaders as friendly rulers that people
would love if they got to know them. In one scene, Chavez rides a bicycle
in his grandmother’s backyard but the bicycle collapses under his weight—
a prophetic symbol of the Venezuelan economy.
When Chavez died, filmmaker Michael Moore wrote on social media,
“Hugo Chavez declared the oil belonged to the people. He used the oil
money to eliminate 75 percent of extreme poverty, provide free health care
and education for all.”224 Stone simply said that Chavez “will live forever in
history.”225
CONSEQUENCES AND EXCUSES
From 2014 to 2016, oil prices dropped from $110 a barrel to less than $40,
gutting Venezuela’s economy. Without ample revenue from oil exports, the
government had to cut back on its social programs and could no longer
subsidize its thousands of nationalized industries.
The electric companies, which were supposed to provide “free electricity”
for the people, were now experiencing weekly blackouts.226 The national
water company made similar promises of cheap utilities, but because it had
no incentive to invest in its infrastructure, water pumps failed and people in
the capital of Caracas could only access water for about an hour a day.227
Food also became scarce because imports necessary to offset the loss of
domestic food production were now too expensive.
In 2016, the government tried to offset the shortage by passing a law
allowing it to force people to engage in agricultural work. Not only was this
repressive and hypocritical according to socialism’s alleged “pro-worker”
ideals, it was also futile. As a director of the human rights organization
Amnesty International said in response, “Trying to tackle Venezuela’s
severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to
fix a broken leg with a band aid.”228
Indeed, grocery store shelves remain empty. In 2017, the average
Venezuelan lost 24 pounds, thanks to what the locals wryly dubbed the
“Venezuelan diet.”229 The country has refused to release medical statistics
since 2013, but outside researchers estimate infant mortality has increased
by about 50 percent, to a level that hadn’t been seen in nearly two
decades.230 Chavez’s successor Nicholas Maduro tried to solve the problem
by printing more money, but this led to hyperinflation, making Venezuelan
currency essentially worthless.
By 2019, the Venezuelan economy was half of what it had been under
Chavez and inflation rates were at nearly ten million percent.231 Maduro
raised the country’s minimum wage to 18,000 bolivars, which in previous
years would have been equivalent to $3,000. However, because the bolivar
wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, this monthly minimum wage was
equivalent to six U.S. dollars; enough to buy three pounds of chicken.232
With the currency now worthless, people resorted to bartering to get what
they needed. Taxi rides were paid in cigarettes and you could get a haircut
for five bananas and two eggs.233
Defenders of socialism have come up with a variety of excuses for the
Venezuelan crisis that try to place the blame on anything but socialism.
Most point to falling oil prices; but that doesn’t explain how countries with
similar dependencies on oil exports, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,
managed to avoid economic catastrophe. Others blamed the collapse on
“mismanagement,” but that’s just a variation on the claim that when
socialism fails it’s because it wasn’t “true” (properly managed) socialism.
Yet the reality is, that’s what always happens in socialist economies. Instead
of allowing prices to be set by natural consumer demand and realistic
business supply, socialist governments like Venezuela set price controls and
production quotas that can’t be sustained. Socialism is mismanagement by
definition.
Since 2014, four million Venezuelans have fled the country, resulting in
the largest displacement of people in recent Latin-American history.234 In an
editorial with the headline, “Venezuela was my home, and socialism
destroyed it. Slowly, it will destroy America, too,” Venezuelan expatriate
Daniel Di Martino calls the government’s excuses for the country’s woes
“hollow.” He writes, “Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the
world to use for electricity, and three times more fresh water resources per
person than the United States. The real reason my family went without
water and electricity was the socialist economy instituted by dictators Hugo
Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.”235

It’s important to remember . . .

• Venezuela is an object lesson in how even a relatively wealthy economy blessed with natural
resources can be decimated by state collectivization—even when it is done in the name of
humanitarianism.

• The hyperinflation, degradation of industry and agriculture, and political repression that socialism
 brought to Venezuela are features, not bugs, of that economic system.
212 Michael McCaughan, The Battle of Venezuela (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 63.
213 Ibid., 65–66.
214 Adriana Bolívar, Political Discourse as Dialogue: A Latin American Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2018), electronic
edition.
215 Mike Cole, Critical Race Theory and Education: A Marxist Response (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 127.
216 Julie McCarthy, “Chavez Reaches Out with ‘Bolivarian Missions,’” NPR (December 3, 2006),
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6572676
217 Anthony Faiola, “In socialist Venezuela, a crisis of faith not in just their leader but their economic model,” The Washington
Post (February 11, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-socialist-venezuela-a-crisis-of-faith-not-in-
just-their-leader-but-their-economic-model/2019/02/11/ea67849e-2b33-11e9-906e-9d55b6451eb4_story.html
218 “Full speed ahead,” The Economist (October 29, 2010), https://www.economist.com/americas-view/2010/10/29/full-speed-
ahead.
219 Emma Graham-Harrison, “Hunger eats away at Venezuela’s soul as its people struggle to survive,” The Guardian (August 26,
2017), https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/26/nicolas-maduro-donald-trump-venezuela-hunger.
220 James Suggett, “Chomsky praises Venezuela’s revolution” Green Left Weekly (September 5, 2009),
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/chomsky-praises-venezuelas-revolution.
221 David Sirota, “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle,” Salon.com (March 6, 2013),
https://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/hugo_chavezs_economic_miracle/
222 Jeffrey Webber, “Venezuela after Chávez,” Jacobin (March 8, 2013), https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/03/venezuela-after-
chavez
223 Mark Weisbrot, “Sorry, Venezuela Haters: This Economy Is Not the Greece of Latin America,” Common Dreams (November
7, 2013), https://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/11/07/sorry-venezuela-haters-economy-not-greece-latin-america.
224 “Hugo Chavez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75 percent of extreme poverty, provide free
health & education 4 all” (March 5, 2013). We have edited the tweet for readability.
https://twitter.com/mmflint/status/309124649244057600?lang=en.
225 “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history. My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned. 2/2”
(March 5, 2013), https://twitter.com/theoliverstone/status/309106639426949120.
226 Sam Jones, “Venezuela blackout: what caused it and what happens next?” The Guardian (March 13, 2019),
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/13/venezuela-blackout-what-caused-it-and-what-happens-next.
227 Anatoly Kurmanaev and John Otis, “Water Shortage Cripples Venezuela,” The Wall Street Journal (April 3, 2016),
https://www.wsj.com/articles/water-shortage-cripples-venezuela-1459717127. See also “Venezuelan water shortage deepens
humanitarian crisis,” The Washington Post (April 4, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/why-are-
you-crying-mami-in-venezuela-the-search-for-water-is-a-daily-struggle/2019/04/04/39972ce4-5547-11e9-814f-
e2f46684196e_story.html.
228 “Venezuela: New regime effectively amounts to forced labour,” Amnesty International (July 28, 2016),
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/07/venezuela-new-regime-effectively-amounts-to-forced-labour/.
229 Vivian Sequera, “Venezuelans report big weight losses in 2017 as hunger hits,” Reuters (February 21, 2018),
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelans-report-big-weight-losses-in-2017-as-hunger-hits-
idUSKCN1G52HA.
230 Jenny García, Gerardo Correa, and Brenda Rousset, “Trends in infant mortality in Venezuela between 1985 and 2016: a
systematic analysis of demographic data,” The Lancet Vol. 7, Issue 3, (March 1, 2019),
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(18)30479-0/fulltext
231 Megan Specia, “Five Things You Need to Know to Understand Venezuela’s Crisis,” The New York Times (May 3, 2019),
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/world/americas/venezuela-crisis-facts.html
232 Renzo Pipoli, “Maduro raises minimum wage in Venezuela to $6 per month,” United Press International (January 15, 2019),
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2019/01/15/Maduro-raises-minimum-wage-in-Venezuela-to-6-per-
month/9171547575404/
233 Fabiola Zerpa, “In Venezuela, a Haircut Costs 5 Bananas and 2 Eggs,” Bloomberg (May 4, 2018),
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-04/in-caracus-venezuela-a-haircut-costs-five-bananas-and-two-eggs.
234 “The United Nations says more than 4 million refugees and migrants have left the country, which is suffering from political
chaos, food shortages and hyperinflation. The U.N. has called this exodus the ‘largest in the recent history of Latin America
and the Caribbean.’” Merritt Kennedy, “U.N. Says More Than 4 Million People Have Left Venezuela,” NPR (June 7, 2019),
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730687807/u-n-says-more-than-4-million-people-have-left-venezuela.
235 Daniel Di Martino, “Venezuela was my home, and socialism destroyed it. Slowly, it will destroy America, too,” USA Today
(February 15, 2019), https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/02/15/donald-trump-venezuela-socialism-bernie-
sanders-ilhan-omar-column/2861461002/.
 19

Debunking Catholic Socialism

In Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, a policeman says he

is not afraid of atheists, revolutionaries, and other socialists. But he does
fear “a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are
Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the people we are
most afraid of. They are dreadful people! The socialist who is a Christian is
more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.”236
No matter how hard atheistic regimes try to create heaven on earth, they
can’t extinguish the natural desire to worship the divine. So when socialists
try to stamp out religion, even nominally faithful people recoil in horror. A
far more insidious problem arises when socialists co-opt religious language
to make it seem like their crusade is in complete harmony with—or even
required by—Christian values.
Dean Dettloff’s “The Catholic Case for Communism,” published in the
official Jesuit magazine America, is probably the most conspicuous recent
example. Another was the Tradinista Manifesto published in 2016 by a
group of young Catholics committed to “the destruction of capitalism, and
its replacement by a truly social political economy.”237
The manifesto’s name is a combination of traditionalist Catholicism that
seeks the return of the Catholic state with the principles of the Sandinistas,
a socialist political party in Nicaragua that came to prominence in the
1980s, were opposed by the U.S.-backed Contras, and dominates politics in
that country today. Strangely absent in the manifesto, though, is any
denunciation of the Sandinistas’ mob violence, their practice of making
political enemies “disappear,” and the intimidation tactics they still use in
opposition to the local Catholic Church’s pro-democracy stance today.238
Far from being an obscure online publication, the document made the
rounds on the internet and even got attention from the New York Times and
the Catholic publication First Things, whose editor said, “When it comes to
the Tradinistas, I think I’m not a contra.”239 But a closer examination of
their defense of Catholic socialism reveals that it is certainly socialist but it
isn’t Catholic—or even plausible.
DOWN WITH CAPITALISM!
In the section of the manifesto on abolishing capitalism, we find this claim:
“The foundational relation of capitalist society is between those who are
compelled to sell their labor-power on pain of destitution and those who, by
their ownership of capital, are enabled to exploit the former.”
In fact, the foundational relation in capitalist societies is between
producers and consumers, not owners and workers. There are, of course,
villainous owners and toiling workers, but it is not true that they make up
two classes within society that are at necessary war with each other. Instead,
society consists of a network of people, each of whom produces goods and
services and also consumes goods and services.
Consider a butcher who hires a plumber to fix his sink, for which he pays
him $100. That evening, the plumber returns to buy $100 worth of meat to
feed his family. Which one is “compelled to sell their labor-power on pain
of destitution” and which is the evil capitalist who “exploits” a helpless
worker? It looks like each of these men belongs to both groups, which
means they actually belong to neither. The plumber and the butcher each
owns means of production, but these means do not make them self-
sufficient. They must offer something that is valuable to another person in
order to obtain wages that they can spend on their livelihood.
Modern socialists who are obsessed with reviving Marx’s arguments about
exploitation of labor also neglect a dramatic change in the workforce since
the publication of The Communist Manifesto. In 1910, 46 percent of the
U.S. economy was devoted to producing goods through mining, farming,
manufacturing, and construction. That percentage was probably higher in
Marx’s time, but even by the early twentieth century only 3 percent of
workers were devoted to fields like information services, business services,
health care, and social assistance. Today these “other services,” as the
Department of Labor calls them, make up the largest group of workers in
the United States. Instead of working on farms or in factories, nearly one-
third of all workers provide these services, in contrast to the 9 percent of
workers involved in manufacturing.240
 That’s one reason why the manifesto’s goal of doing away with “the
capitalist class—which serves its own ends, detrimental to the common
good of society” is wrongheaded. Economic development has led, not to
two distinct, warring classes, but to a genuine interdependence among all
human beings, of the sort that Pope Leo XIII discussed in Rerum Novarum.
NOTHING MORE THAN A SLAVE?
The Tradinista Manifesto also contains a fatal omission. It says workers are
economically exploited because they “must sell their labor-power on the
market in order to survive. While citizens should be free to engage in
market exchange, the polity should ensure that no basic needs—food,
clothing, shelter, health care, etc.—go unmet, guaranteeing a livelihood
independent of the market.”
One of the manifesto’s authors, Jose Mena, says in another article that
“Pope St. John XXIII teaches that the rights of man include the basic
necessities of life—medical care, food and shelter, rest—independent of
anyone’s ability to secure these through labor. Is this not socialism?”241 It
isn’t, because here is what Pope John XXIII actually said:
Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the
means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food,
clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social
services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of
ill health; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age;
enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own
[emphasis added] he is deprived of the means of livelihood (Pacem in
Terris 11).
No one should be deprived of his basic needs simply because he can’t
work. Charity, and to some extent government programs, should provide
these resources to those who cannot work—such as the sick or the disabled.
But that’s a far cry from saying that all people should have their basic needs
met independent of having to work for others. After all, basic needs like
food, clothing, and medicine have to be produced by someone, and so the
question in the socialist system becomes, “Who gets tasked with that job?”
In his critique of the Tradinista Manifesto, Matthew Shadle engages one
of its authors, C.W. Strand, who attempts to resolve this problem. Strand
says that workers could be compelled by the state to create these goods by
giving them “a diminution in their guaranteed, state-provided basic goods
and services.” In other words, those who don’t work, or don’t work enough,
or don’t perform the designated kind of work, will be cut off by the state
from their share of communal goods. Which, when you think about it for
more than three seconds, is just an oblique way of describing a totalitarian
regime.
Instead of “sell[ing] their labor-power on the market in order to survive,”
then, the Tradinistas want a society where people must hand over their
labor-power to the state in order to survive. Strand sees how this seems like
state-run capitalism, but responds by claiming that, at least under socialism,
the state compels people to work for the benefit of the common good,
whereas under capitalism there is a “structural compulsion to work” that
only benefits private interests. But Shadle notes the flaw in this argument:
The “structural compulsion to work” is exactly the same under capitalism
and socialism: people must work to produce a livelihood, one way or
another. Tradinista socialism then adds the further compulsion of having
to work for the state at risk of losing one’s livelihood. So the problem with
capitalism, for the Tradinistas, is not that people are compelled to work,
but rather that they are compelled to work for capitalists.242
Moreover, unlike in most capitalist systems—where a person is free to
work for another employer who offers better terms—under Catholic
socialism you can either take the government’s terms or enjoy the
“diminution” of your rations. In the face of proposals like these, one is
reminded of Ronald Reagan’s eloquent criticism of socialism and its
promises of free food, medicine, and all other necessities for just a little
“communal work”:
Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you
shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you’re ill, all
the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don’t understand that
we also dream.”243
PUT NOT YOUR TRUST IN PRINCES
Poverty and unjust working conditions are real problems, and sometimes
their root lies in an unjust and dysfunctional economic system—socialism
being the example par excellence. But usually, societal injustices are the
result of deeper moral evils like greed, envy, indifference, and selfishness.
Simply reordering society so people aren’t poor can’t eliminate these vices
(and doesn’t solve poverty, either). That’s the error of liberation theology
which, as we’ve seen, unsuccessfully tries to wed Marxism and Christianity.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith accordingly rebuked its
central premise: that evil can be localized “principally or uniquely in bad
social, political, or economic ‘structures’ as though all other evils came
from them so that the creation of the ‘new man’ would depend on the
establishment of different economic and socio-political structures.”244
We believe that many people (including self-styled “Catholic socialists”)
support socialism because they believe that whereas private citizens are
mostly self-interested, governments are altruistic. “Government” becomes
almost a magical entity whose vast resources could solve all our problems if
it was just put to work in the right way.
But governments are really just groups of individuals who have been
given weighty responsibilities. Those individuals are not immune to the
effects of vice; in fact, the temptations that government officials face make
them more susceptible to sin and the magnitude of the problems they face
make them more prone to error. The Psalmist presciently warned us, “Put
not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help. When
his breath departs he returns to his earth; on that very day his plans perish”
(146:3–4).
Christians should strive toward making governments and societies more
just, but it’s fruitless to try and build a heaven on earth as long as human
beings are the ones running this “heaven.” Instead, the problem of poverty
must be tackled at its root in the poverty of virtue that lies in people’s
hearts. In other words, we’re not just dealing with honest mistakes about the
economic and political order; we’re looking at sin in the human heart. This
is why the complete response to the “problem of the workers” (as Rerum
Novarum is sometimes called) is both the right principles (including a
rejection of socialism in all its forms) and a deeper conversion to the truth
—the life of grace and the sacraments lived in the bosom of the Church.
Pope Leo opened Rerum Novarum saying that the socialists look to exploit
the “poor man’s envy of the rich” [4]. Envy, which springs from the feeling
of sorrow or sadness at another person’s good, seeks to diminish the good
things of another. Thus, the socialists aren’t merely jealous that some
people have more than others—they seek to harness state power to take
property away from those who have it and to destroy the institutions related
to the protection of property. It is counted as a capital sin because of the
other vices that arise from it, including hatred and violence.
What is needed in response, then, is not merely a superior system but
repentance and grace. And we must begin with ourselves, examining how to
live a godly life through the economic decisions we make every day.

It’s important to remember . . .

• Even today there are movements among progressive and traditional Catholics alike to rehabilitate
socialism as an economic system in line with—or even required by—the gospel.

• Collectivist solutions to poverty and economic injustice substitute political fiat for the free and
virtuous living-out of human interdependence.

• Government-controlled wealth redistribution exploits “the poor man’s envy of the rich” to grow the
power of the state at the expense of the Church, the family, and other institutions that we should
trust and love more.
236 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Dover, 2005), 56.
237 “Tradinista Manifesto,” https://tradinista.tumblr.com/manifesto.
238 “Ortega supporters try to infiltrate parishes. Security forces surround churches during Mass. Priests suffer harassment and
death threats. Police ring the Jesuit university when students dare to wave Nicaraguan flags and chant anti-government
slogans.” Mary Beth Sheridan, “Spies, harassment, death threats: The Catholic Church in Nicaragua says it’s being targeted by
the government.” The Washington Post (July 23, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/spies-
harassment-death-threats-the-catholic-church-in-nicaragua-says-its-being-targeted-by-the-government/2019/07/23/2881f814-
a3ec-11e9-a767-d7ab84aef3e9_story.html.
239 Matthew Schmitz, “I Think I’m Not a Contra,” First Things (September 29, 2016),
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/09/i-think-im-not-a-contra.
240 “Employment by industry, 1910 and 2015,” Bureau of Labor Statistics (March 3, 2016),
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-by-industry-1910-and-2015.htm
241 Jose Mena, “The Catholic turn to socialism is something to celebrate,” Catholic Herald (May 30, 2019),
https://catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2019/05/30/the-catholic-turn-to-socialism-is-something-to-celebrate/.
242 Matthew Shadle, “Tradinistas: A New Catholic Socialism?, Part 2,” Political Theology Network (October 9, 2016),
https://politicaltheology.com/tradinistas-a-new-catholic-socialism-part-2-matthew-shadle/.
243 Ronald Reagan, “Socialism,” Stories in His Own Hand: The Everyday Wisdom of Ronald Reagan, eds. Kiron K. Skinner,
Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 91. This quote comes from a letter Reagan wrote
in 1976 about a young conservative named Brad Linaweaver’s interaction with a woman who was defending socialism. Brad
said that government should guarantee people not just food and medicine but also a yacht. When his critic said that people like
him were what kept socialism from working, he deftly replied, “How many are there like me?” That’s why the original quote
ends by saying, “They don’t understand that we dream—yes, even of sometime owning a yacht.”
244 Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation,” 15.
 20

Catholicism and Moral Capitalism

For some people, the aspiration to pursue “moral capitalism” sounds like
the claim of being an “honest thief.” Even those who know that capitalism
is not intrinsically wrong may still imagine that walking the path of “moral
capitalism” is like strolling along the edge of a cliff: step over the line too
far in one direction or another and you might fall into exploitation, abuse, or
greed.
But this isn’t how the Church sees it, and it isn’t how we should see it.
The reason that Church teaching has always stressed the importance of
principles of right order is just this: so we can have confidence and peace
that in applying ourselves with hard work and diligence we can joyfully
participate in God’s co-creation—a task we are urged to take up for the
good of our families and our communities.
FOR WANT OF WANTS
Capitalism satisfies our desires to create and consume but, of itself, it
cannot tutor or censor our wants. So, for instance, capitalism is a very
effective way of satisfying the seemingly insatiable demand (want) for
pornographic material, and this was true long before the internet age.
Unlike greed, which finds a natural check of sorts in competitive markets,
disordered, evil desires do not find a natural check.
This is why Michael Novak, Catholic philosopher and friend of John Paul
II, wrote his greatest work, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, to talk
about the “three-legged” stool that was needed for a healthy political
economy, comprising: 1) free and democratic political order, 2) economy of
free enterprise, and 3) virtuous citizens shaped by a sound moral order.
Each of these, he believed, vitally depended upon a strong religious
framework, and the absence of any of these elements would sabotage any
economy.
For even if people are to vote, buy, and sell whatever they want, they can
still enslave themselves to inhuman wants and desires. As St. Paul said, “If
you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the
one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience,
which leads to righteousness?” (Rom. 6:16).
A good analogy to how we can practice moral capitalism is how we can
morally relate to food. Modern economies have made food and drink nearly
omnipresent. And since eating is pleasant, it is really easy to slide into a
kind of “food-ism” analogous to consumerism. It can happen even without
overeating or practicing the vice of gluttony in the traditional sense. We
might think of ourselves as a “foodie” who becomes obsessed with our
food, where it’s made, what it will do to us, how much we will have, and
when we will have it. Our sense of self becomes a little too wrapped up in
what we eat and how we eat.
What goes into making this possible? The easy availability of an activity
(or thing) that is pleasant, good for us, and intended by God for our joy. It’s
the same with our economic life. There was a time when we poked fun at
businessmen clutching Blackberries with a whole keyboard at their palms.
Now we are all “that guy,” and we have the capacity with a little device to
engage in more economic transactions in ten minutes than merchants of
Venice hoped for in a year’s time.
Modern capitalism makes the temporary euphoria and pleasure associated
with the activities of buying and selling a temptation to engage in too much,
too often, to where it becomes an idol, wholly divorced from its purpose of
serving virtue and the genuine human needs of ourselves and others.
Buying and selling becomes our identity, or at least a place where we
inadvertently deposit too much of our sense of security. Whatever else
happens today, we may effectively think to ourselves, at least I bought
something.
As sons and daughters of God, we are more than “producers,”
“consumers,” “utility maximizers” or even “shoppers” (no matter many
preferred customer membership cards are bloating our wallets). We are
Christians, which means capitalism isn’t a way of life, much less our
identity. However optimistic we are about entrepreneurship, business, and
free markets, economic values are not, and cannot be, the only values
(Centesimus Annus 39).
So how do we practically break free from capitalism’s consumerist
temptations?
PUTTING THINGS DOWN
First, we have to notice and understand the temptation, which is the
warping of a good thing. Just as food isn’t the problem, but giving it too
much importance is. Similarly, shopping, work, and market economies
aren’t the problem; giving it all too much importance makes it a problem.
Second, the task is to put things in order, which is also a way of putting
ourselves and our souls in order. Putting things in order has been described
as part of the virtue of justice, which is one reason why justice is not just a
cardinal virtue but is chief among the cardinal virtues. The first task of
social justice is to put ourselves into right order: in relation to ourselves, to
our neighbor, and to God.
This is a simple exercise of the sort that children practice naturally—like
putting blocks or rings of different sizes into place. The liturgical calendar
is designed for us to do just this: We put food, or drink, or other pleasures,
in their right place. We fast when a special occasion calls for it; and when
things that are not God have creeped too high in our lives, we put them
down and elevate prayer and penance above them. The wisdom of
Ecclesiastes reminds us, “For everything there is a season, and a time for
every matter under heaven . . . a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time
to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together” (3:1,4).
We do this repeatedly year after year because we need it. We should trust
this solution. It works—because it conforms to how we were made, and
how we are able to be sanctified in the world.
The greatest prayer of the Church is the sacramental life: thus, the path to
living morally within a market economy is to renew and exercise our
commitment to grounding our identity in God who is the supreme and final
good for us, and in the life of grace that the Church offers to us as a good
mother. We can say with confidence: If prayer and the sacraments have the
first place in our lives, we do not have to worry about falling off the
consumerist cliff. Because we were made to be vessels of grace, and when
we are filled with grace we are filled with virtue; and virtue, as the great
saints have always shown, is a life of balance and stability.
WITH ALL OUR STRENGTH
To put this in relation to our lives in a market economy—whether we think
about our role as buyers or sellers, workers or entrepreneurs, or members of
the new creative class—at the very least we need to fast from market
activities as often as sensible. This means spending more time reflecting on
the ancient traditions.
Many traditional Christian cultures have discouraged shopping on Sunday.
It’s not that shopping is wrong—but that a fast helps put it in its place, and
provides room for moving prayer and time spent outside the market higher
in our lives. John Paul II said, “When Sunday loses its fundamental
meaning and becomes merely part of a ‘weekend,’ it can happen that people
stay locked within a horizon so limited that they can no longer see ‘the
heavens.’ Hence, though ready to celebrate, they are really incapable of
doing so” (Dies Domine 4).
Other ways of fasting from economic activity—or putting things in their
place—include examining and rededicating ourselves to charitable giving.
This also helps us fight the temptation to hoard money and goods once we
accumulate a lot of them. Psychology researcher Paul Piff has shown that
poor people are actually more charitable than the wealthy because they are
better at identifying with the suffering of the poor and thus having
compassion for them.245 This leads them to make more sacrificial gifts than
wealthy people who may only give away a small percentage of their wealth.
When you read this study you can’t help but think of the widow who
deposited two coins in the temple treasury while the rich deposited their
abundant gifts. But Jesus tells us that the widow gave more than all of those
rich men put together because “they all contributed out of their abundance,
but she out of her poverty put in all the living that she had” (Luke 21:4).
In Deuteronomy 6:5, the Israelites were commanded, “Love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might [or
strength].” The word for “might” is meodekah and probably referred to
one’s material possessions.246 In both the ancient and modern world, a
person’s “strength” comes not from what he can bench press but from what
he can purchase. We are commanded to love God with all our economic
strength and to use that strength to love our neighbor as ourselves. When
we don’t, we incur the same condemnation Pope Pius XI gave to the stingy
rich of his time that gave credence to the arguments of the socialists:
It is certainly most lamentable, venerable brethren, that there have been,
 nay, that even now there are men who, although professing to be
Catholics, are almost completely unmindful of that sublime law of justice
and charity that binds us not only to render to everyone what is his but to
succor brothers in need as Christ the Lord himself (Quadragesimo Anno
125).
But sacrifices cannot stop at just giving money to the needy (as important
as that is). We can also sacrifice our felt need to buy things by making do
with what we have for longer, repairing instead of replacing them. We can
also sacrifice our time for the poor through volunteering or by offering up
prayers for them (indeed, in the Church’s tradition prayer and fasting
always go together).
A first step toward living good lives in a capitalist order is to follow the
five recommendations of all holy men and women: daily Mass, daily rosary,
morning and evening offering, daily reflection on Scripture, and frequent
confession. If all Catholics in capitalist economies practiced these norms,
capitalism’s inherent weaknesses would be less evident in society and its
strengths would shine brighter.
WHAT’S OLD IS STILL NEW
We have focused mainly on consumer behavior, since that reflects the
position of most readers, but moral capitalism also entails that producers
engage in acts of sacrifice for the good of their workers.
This can include making the best effort to provide high wages and benefits
that do not adversely affect overall the company’s overall financial health. It
could also include voluntarily adopting policies that allow for profit sharing
and for corporate decision-making to be more widely dispersed among a
firm’s employees. For example, witness the Catholic Mondragon
Corporation in Spain, the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world—
though socialists like Noam Chomsky still complain that it exploits its
workers because it seeks profits.247
Such proposals for employers could fill an entire other book, but we raise
them here to make it clear that opposition to socialism does not entail
support of the capitalism that John Paul II condemned: a system that lacks
moral principles and a “strong juridical framework.” Edward Feser, editor
of The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, says capitalism is immoral when it
turns into “fetishizing capitalism, of making market imperatives the
governing principles to which all other aspects of social order are
subordinate.” He notes that even a stalwart critic of socialism like Hayek:
explicitly allows for regulations to ensure safe working conditions, and for
a safety net for those unable to provide adequate food, shelter, and health
care for themselves. The Hayek who thought that the smallest tax increase
is but the first step toward the Gulag exists only in the imaginations of
uncharitable critics and simple-minded admirers.248
But carefully crafted economic policies by themselves are not enough to
bring about authentic human fulfillment. Pope Leo insists that the only way
to “restore” a fallen civilization is the “correction of morals”—transforming
hearts and minds according to human and Christian virtue whose source is
the life of God: grace. The pontiffs who have weighed in on—and against—
socialism and Communism have tirelessly proclaimed that rejecting
socialism is only part of the solution. The other part, as Pope Leo put it:
The instruments which [the Church] employs are given to her by Jesus
Christ himself for the very purpose of reaching the hearts of men, and
drive their efficiency from God. They alone can reach the innermost heart
and conscience, and bring men to act from a motive of duty, to control
their passions and appetites, to love God and their fellow men with a love
that is outstanding and of the highest degree and to break down
courageously every barrier which blocks the way to virtue (Rerum
Novarum 26).
There is no magic bullet. There is no quick fix—be it a bloody or
unbloody revolution, or a set of policy platforms, or an accumulation of
regulatory laws, that can make the world perfectly good. There is always
the cross, and the task of evangelization that is ever the job of Christians.
Though this is, properly speaking, apolitical, that doesn’t mean the Church
has no role guiding men and nations to the principles of right order—
correcting and admonishing when, for instance, wicked solutions are
proposed.
But the Church’s mission to souls means that it fully exercises her role by
lifting up and offering the food that never perishes, the food that leaves you
never hungry again, the food that no political order can offer but is
necessary for happiness in the order of this life, and more importantly, in
the order of the life to come.

It’s important to remember . . .

• As a check against capitalism’s potential to promote vices like consumerism and disordered desires,
we must individually cultivate the virtue of temperance and corporately build a strong moral order.

• Even though wealth and free markets can be good things, as with all good things we need to fast
from them periodically in order to keep our priorities
in perspective.

• Our first identity is not that of laborer, producer, or consumer but disciple of Jesus Christ, working
out our salvation through his Church.
245 “Across these experiments, the main variable that we find that consistently explains this differential pattern of giving and
helping and generosity among the upper and lower class is feelings of sensitivity and care for the welfare of other people and,
essentially, the emotion that we call compassion. So it’s really compassionate feelings that exist among the lower class that’s
seen to provoke these higher levels of altruism and generosity toward other people.” “Study: Poor Are More Charitable than
the Wealthy,” National Public Radio (August 8, 2010), https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129068241.
246 Norman Lamm, The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2000), 142.
247 “Take the most advanced case: Mondragon. It’s worker owned, it’s not worker managed, although the management does come
from the workforce often, but it’s in a market system and they still exploit workers in South America, and they do things that
are harmful to the society as a whole and they have no choice. If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to
survive, you’re compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.” Laura Flanders, “Talking with Chomsky,”
Counterpunch (April 30, 2012), https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/30/talking-with-chomsky/
248 Edward Feser, “Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism,” The Claremont Review of Books (Spring 2019), 88.
 APPENDIX: WHAT ABOUT DISTRIBUTISM?

In our chapter on democratic socialism, we showed that in G.K. Chesterton

and George Bernard Shaw’s debate over socialism, Chesterton argued that
socialism didn’t really achieve its own goals. Socialists believed that wealth
and property should be evenly distributed to all people, but Chesterton
astutely pointed out:
It is easy enough to say Property should be distributed, but who is, as it
were, the subject of the verb? Who or what is to distribute? Now it is
based on the idea that the central power which condescends to distribute
will be permanently just, wise, sane, and representative of the conscience
of the community which has created it. That is what we doubt.249
Chesterton believed that socialism kept property in the hands of a few
government officials who then decided which people ought to receive it,
and he saw such a system as inefficient at best and tyrannical at worst.
However, Chesterton was just as critical of capitalism, which to him kept
“productive property” (such as land and factory machinery) in the hands of
a few business owners who lived in luxury while their employees endured
crushing poverty. Chesterton did not want government to own capitalist
property but instead to redistribute it to a greater number of people, so
everyone else could benefit from it. He once quipped, “Too much
capitalism does not mean too many capitalists but too few capitalists.”
Chesterton, along with his friend and fellow Catholic author Hilaire
Belloc and some other like-minded thinkers, wanted to resolve the debate
between capitalism and socialism through a “third way” called distributism
(also called distributivism). Instead of only a few businessmen or
government officials owning productive property, they wanted as many
people as possible to own this kind of property. Distributed widely enough
throughout society, this property would then allow individuals and families
to be self-sufficient and live without a capitalist paycheck or a socialist
handout.
Did they hit upon a true “Catholic” economic system? After all,
Chesterton and Belloc were both brilliant and beloved—even prophetic—
Catholic lights of the last century who have many devoted followers today.
 A complete assessment of distributism would require a book-length
treatment, but here we will focus on three questions: 1) What is
distributism? 2) Must Catholics be distributists? 3) Should Catholics be
distributists?
WHAT IS DISTRIBUTISM?
Chesterton once summarized distributism this way: “three acres and a cow.”
The phrase had already been popular with British land reformers for
decades, but in the first half of the twentieth century, distributists revived it
to reinforce the idea that government should make sure all people have
access to means that would make them self-sufficient. Belloc wrote, “A
family possessed of the means of production—the simplest form of which is
the possession of land and of the implements and capital for working the
land—cannot be controlled by others.”250
Belloc acknowledges that the members of such a family could still
experience economic hardship if no one buys their goods, but since they at
least have the means to be self-sufficient, they would never experience
complete destitution. And distributists, then and now, admit that not
everyone will turn to farming and make a living selling surplus food to
others. Under distributism, some people would specialize their labor and
produce other kinds of goods and services. But distributists believe that
government should intervene in the market in order to prevent these
economic actors from growing into large firms that crowd out smaller
businesses and consequently concentrate ownership of the means of
production into the hands of a few.
So, for example, instead a town having a shoe factory that sells thousands
of shoes to customers near and far away, it should instead have only a few
small shoemaker shops. Under such a scenario, prices for shoes would be
high enough that a shoemaker would be guaranteed a livelihood he may not
have received from his wage as a shoe factory employee.
Upon its creation in the 1920s, Chesterton’s Distributist League argued for
economic reforms along these lines, such as:251
• restraint of unjust competition;
• redistribution of property;
• creation of conditions favoring small ownership (such as by heavily taxing
the sale of small companies to larger ones);
• extended ownership of industries that necessitated large-scale production;
• laws to protect distributed property;
• a return to the land; and
• encouragement of distributist principles by individuals.
One contemporary defense of distributism contrasts it with capitalism in
this way: “Capitalism is that economic system where the private ownership
of productive capital is separated from the work on that capital.
Distributism is that economic system where the private ownership of
productive capital is joined to the work on that capital.”252
Distributists admit that capitalism does not prohibit the existence of small
businesses (indeed, almost all large businesses start out small). But they
believe that government should prevent businesses from growing to a size
where the majority of workers are no longer owners of the company.
Distributists offer a variety of proposals to achieve this scenario, including
resurrecting the concept of guilds to limit the number of people who could
legally enter a trade. Restricting the number of people with specialized
skills would keep their wages higher. Distributists also support laws aimed
at making businesses “answerable to the local community they serve” by
requiring local residency in order to operate a business in an area (which
would put national and especially international corporations out of
business).253 David Cooney, the author of Distributism Basics, summarizes
their goal in this way:
All of this is based on the idea that a great multitude of small, privately
owned businesses is better for society, and results in greater economic
independence and freedom for the average citizen, than having large
multi-national corporations employing tens of thousands of non-owner
workers.254
MUST CATHOLICS BE DISTRIBUTISTS?
Some distributists describe their system as “Catholic economics” and even
go so far as to say that Catholics have a moral duty to abandon capitalism
and endorse distributism. But, as we showed earlier in this book, the Church
has never said that capitalism is intrinsically evil, and Pope St. John Paul II
even said, “The Church’s social doctrine is not a ‘third way’ between liberal
capitalism and Marxist collectivism.” 255 He also wrote in Centesimus
Annus:
The Church has no models to present; models that are real and truly
effective can only arise within the framework of different historical
situations, through the efforts of all those who responsibly confront
concrete problems in all their social, economic, political and cultural
aspects, as these interact with one another. For such a task the Church
offers her social teaching as an indispensable and ideal orientation, a
teaching which, as already mentioned, recognizes the positive value of the
market and of enterprise, but which at the same time points out that these
need to be oriented toward the common good.256
Some distributists cite exhortations in the Leonine papal encyclicals that
call on society to make fundamental changes so that anyone can make a
“family wage” capable of providing for even a large family. But these
exhortations do not require Catholics to accept distributist proposals to
achieve these goals over other ones aimed at the same goals, such as
promoting job training for high-wage positions or efficient business
practices that drive down the cost of goods in order to increase the
purchasing power of a family’s income.
Even defenders of distributism admit that their system is not exclusively
Catholic in nature. Cooney says, “The philosophical basis for many
distributist positions predates Christianity . . . its positions are an attempt to
apply philosophical positions on economic and social structures in ways
that are specifically compatible with the Catholic faith.”257
Now, there is nothing wrong with taking older philosophies and making
them applicable to the Faith (St. Thomas Aquinas did just that with his
synthesis of the writings of Aristotle). But it’s incorrect to say that
distributism is the only system of economic thought that is compatible with
Catholicism.
As we noted earlier, “Catholic economics” is akin to “Catholic medicine.”
The deposit of faith does contain moral truths that tell us when a certain
practice of either medicine or economics is evil. It also contains general
truths that show us how to live in a way that is conducive to good health
and in a way that is conducive to economic security. But just as our faith
does not include systematic principles that tell us how to generate health
and reduce illness (the science of medicine), it does not include systematic
principles that tell us how to generate wealth and reduce poverty (the
science of economics). To investigate and discover those principles in both
cases, we have to turn (while still being guided by Catholic principles) to
the empirical sciences.
Distributists, however, don’t usually consider economics to be a science
that studies the effects of allocating goods in order to satisfy demand.
Cooney even criticizes capitalists for holding the view “that economics is a
‘natural’ science like chemistry or physics to which things like ethics and
justice don’t necessarily apply.”258 Fellow distributist John Medaille says,
“Money—and economics—is not a ‘neutral’ science; bad ethics equals bad
economics; bad morals equal bad money.” Cooney even calls economics a
“sub-field” of ethics and defines economics as being “about how people
should [emphasis added] behave toward one another when engaged in
transactions, no matter how trivial, to provide for their needs and wants.”259
Since economics studies people, as a science it is more like the sciences of
sociology or psychology than a “hard science” such as chemistry. Also,
economists routinely study how ethical decisions affect economic
transactions, but they would deny the distributist claim that the goal of
economics is to create a normative philosophy to guide people’s lives
instead of a descriptive science that explains economic behaviors and
outcomes.
Ethics is an important part of economics, and distributists should be
commended for encouraging its inclusion in economic discussions. But
economics and ethics belong to different, interdependent spheres; or as
Pope Pius XI put it, “Economics and moral science each employs its own
principles in its own sphere.”260 And distributists make the same error as
socialists when they propose an economic system that relies on human
beings always “being their best” (which rarely happens). Indeed, one of the
benefits of capitalism is that it produces overall beneficial outcomes while
assuming that people will act primarily out of their own self-interest.
Distributism’s goals are laudable, but its methods contradict what we’ve
learned from more than a century of economic studies. Although Catholics
are free to embrace any distributist principles that don’t contradict what the
Church teaches, whether it is prudent for them to do that is a different
question.
SHOULD CATHOLICS BE DISTRIBUTISTS?
We find there are many elements in distributist literature that are
commendable, especially when it exposes excesses and deficiencies in
capitalist economies. For example, monopolies that form when government
provides preferential support to one company or hinders its competition can
lead to economic exploitation and inefficient economies (this is often called
“crony capitalism”). We also commend those who voluntarily choose to live
a simpler lifestyle and seek an economic arrangement that allows them to
achieve self-sufficiency apart from working for an established company.
But we believe that distributism, in spite of the good elements it does
possess, is not a viable model for modern economies.
Almost all professional economists (including Catholic ones) reject
distributism as a complete economic model. In fact, among the twelve
authors in a recent anthology in defense of distributism, not one is listed as
holding advanced degrees in economics or is even identified as an
economist.261 This doesn’t mean that distributism is wrong, but it does place
upon defenders of distributism the burden of showing why their proposals
are better than conventional economic models.
We believe that they have not met this burden, for a number reasons.
First, distributists fail to understand that their dramatic proposals have
severe tradeoffs. Government cannot simply order by fiat that all companies
remain small, pay a family wage, not lay off workers, and keep the price of
goods low. Some of these goals end up conflicting with each other.
Theologian David Deavel notes:
Many distributists react to this information not by calculating the costs
and benefits of such a predictable outcome, but instead by railing against
“injustice.” An “unjust” wage, for instance, is any salary that’s insufficient
to support a family—even a large one. So they wish to outlaw “unjust”
wages. How would employers respond to such a move? Economics gives
us the answer: they would either fire workers whose labor was not
productive enough to justify such a wage, or else they would jack up
 prices to cover the extra cost. Who would pay those new, inflated prices?
Ordinary workers, whose cost of living would soar—thus forcing another
government-mandated rise in the “living wage.” And so on, ad
infinitum.262
Distributist policies would also drive up the price of goods and services so
that “self-sufficient” families would struggle to afford many things they
could once buy when they were employed. One of capitalism’s benefits, in
contrast, is that it has raised wages over time and helped make goods
cheaper to produce. For example, in the year 1900, low wages and
expensive goods meant the average family spent nearly half its income on
food; but a century later, families were spending only 13 percent of their
income on food.263
Second, when it comes to employment, security is not an absolute value.
A slave has total “job security” (in a perverted sense of the term), yet hardly
anyone would choose to be a fed, clothed, and housed slave than an
unemployed free person. The fact is, nothing is secure in this world—
including the distributist proposal for self-sufficiency.
Any number of things can ruin a small-scale farm, for example, and 20
percent of small businesses fail in their first year of operation (half fail in
their first five years).264 A recent study showed that only 19 percent of these
businesses fail because other companies (both small and large ones)
outcompeted them in the market. The most common reasons are a lack of
demand for the service or product (42 percent), running out of money (29
percent), and mismanagement (23 percent).265 Even the ideal distributist
model cannot guarantee that such problems won’t afflict the multitudinous
small businesses that need to thrive under the distributist system.
Most modern people are also willing to trade the stress that comes with
running their own company or farm for the stability that comes from
working for an employer. Economist Thomas Woods says that the only
thing preventing people from adopting the distributist proposal in their own
lives is the difficulty of actually living out the proposal:
Practically anyone in the United States today who possesses the requisite
knowledge and modest capital can acquire farmland and pursue the kind
of self-sufficiency advocated by Belloc. Producing their own necessities
 and in possession of the means of production, such a family would be
independent of employers or anyone else. They would probably also enjoy
a standard of living so depressed and intolerable as to throw the rationality
of the entire enterprise into question.266
A third reason distributism doesn’t work is that the vast majority of the
productive capital that exists today can’t be distributed. Modern means of
producing wealth are not tied to land or even machinery. For many people,
the greatest piece of productive capital they own is their minds (Catholic
philosopher Michael Novak once pointed out that the root of “capitalism” is
caput or head). Some of the staunchest defenders of distributism can make a
living with just a computer and a microphone because they are brilliant, and
other people are willing to pay to hear their speeches and read their books.
But you can’t “distribute” the intellectual capital in their brains to those
whose comparative lack of talent leads them to struggle.
Even when it comes to physical property that can be redistributed, doing
so would quickly prevent companies from growing large enough to create
such property in the first place. Why bother investing in equipment for a
second factory if the government will just force you to make it a separate
company co-owned by a small group of employees? Distributism’s policy
of redistributing property once companies become “too large” would be just
as destructive as socialism’s policy to redistribute earnings once a company
becomes “too wealthy.”
In addition, capitalism provides a way for people who aren’t good at
creating physical or intellectual property to offer their labor for a business
venture and consequently give them a means not just to survive but even to
flourish. There are millions of people who have worked for others,
practiced thrift and modest living, and managed to save a small fortune to
pass down to their heirs. A 2019 study from the National Bureau of
Economic Research provides strong evidence that such a process of capital
accumulation is still happening in the United States economy.267
No wonder that this is the means of economic mobility recommended by
Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum. The poor didn’t need land or property
(or machines or tools). What they needed were jobs and the ability to keep
and save what they earned. What ends up hurting people who lack the will
or the skill to start their own businesses are government restrictions that
prevent or hinder the natural growth of a business and keep it from
answering the needs of prospective employees who want to sell their labor
in exchange for a relatively steady paycheck.
THREE “GIGS” AND A CAR?
The single biggest “distributive” experiment in modern history has been the
cluster of innovation related to the so-called “gig economy.” People are able
to own and profit from their own means of production with everything from
skilled freelance work to ride- and home-sharing although millions earn a
living in that way, tens of millions more prefer the stability and
predictability of salaried work.
The genius of modern enterprise is that it allows people with varied
capacities and talents to combine their efforts into a productive venture that
is bigger than the sum of their individual capital (be it physical or
intellectual). Most people are better off in such collaborative enterprises
than they would be if they were making direct use of their own resources
through a self-owned business.
And this remains the biggest challenge for distributists: all capital isn’t
equally productive—and no capital is productive at all if it’s not paired with
the right persons and firms. Capitalism allows those who would thrive as
entrepreneurs to do so, but distributism punishes those who would thrive
working for entrepreneurs instead of being one.
These objections are not meant to be an exhaustive critique of
distributism. We haven’t addressed, for example, the difficulty in
distributists’ need for a paternalistic government to ensure that economies
are “just.” But even if that were possible (and we contend that it isn’t), the
Church urges instead that economies respect the principle of subsidiarity
and local initiative. It highlights the subjective genius of the person over
physical capital and has consistently praised the value of an economy in
which old-fashioned labor, savings, and thrift provide hope and opportunity
for the poor and working classes.
249 “Do We Agree? A Debate Between G. K. Chesterton And Bernard Shaw,” http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/debate.txt.
250 Hilaire Belloc, Economics for Helen (London: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1924), 125. Cited in Thomas Woods, The Church and the
Market (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). Kindle edition.
251 Russell Sparkes “Chesterton as Economist,” The Hounds of Distributism ed. Richard Aleman (Charlotte, NC: The American
Chesterton Society, 2015), kindle edition.
252 David W. Cooney. Distributism Basics: An Explanation (Self Published, 2016). Kindle edition.
253 Ibid.
254 Ibid.
255 Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 41.
256 Centesimus Annus, 43.
257 David W. Cooney, Distributism Basics: An Explanation (Self Published, 2016). Kindle edition.
258 Ibid.
259 John Medaille, “A Distributist Banking System,” The Hound of Distributism ed. Richard Aleman (Charlotte, NC: The
American Chesterton Society, 2015), kindle edition.
260 Quadragesimo Anno, 42.
261 The Hounds of Distributism ed. Richard Aleman (Charlotte, NC: The American Chesterton Society, 2015).
262 David Deavel, “What’s Wrong with Distributism?” Intercollegiate Studies Institute (August 5, 2013)
263 Derek Thompson, “How America Spends Money: 100 Years in the Life of the Family Budget,” The Atlantic (April 5, 2012),
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-america-spends-money-100-years-in-the-life-of-the-family-
budget/255475/
264 Chad Otar, “What Percentage Of Small Businesses Fail—And How Can You Avoid Being One Of Them?,” Forbes (October
25, 2018), https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/2018/10/25/what-percentage-of-small-businesses-fail-and-how-
can-you-avoid-being-one-of-them/#2d444c4143b5.
265 “The Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail,” CB Insights Research Briefs (November 6, 2019),
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/
266 Thomas Woods, The Church and the Market (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). Kindle edition.
267 “Education, Skills, and Technical Change: Implications for Future U.S. GDP Growth,” (2019),
https://www.nber.org/books/hult-12.
 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

After his conversion to the Catholic faith, Trent Horn earned master’s
degrees in the fields of theology, philosophy, and bioethics. He serves as a
staff apologist for Catholic Answers, where he specializes in teaching
Catholics to graciously and persuasively engage those who disagree with
them. Trent models that approach each week on the radio program Catholic
Answers Live and on his own podcast, The Counsel of Trent. He has also
been invited to debate at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford
University. Trent is an adjunct professor of apologetics at Holy Apostles
College, has written for The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, and is
the author of nine books, including Answering Atheism, The Case for
Catholicism, and Why We’re Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, and
Love.
Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, Ph.D, is assistant professor at the Busch School
of Business at The Catholic University of America. She specializes in the
economics of education and religion, family studies and demography,
Catholic social thought, and political economy. Pakaluk earned her
doctorate at Harvard University in 2010 where she studied under 2016
Nobel-laureate Oliver Hart. She has authored and co-authored highly cited
articles in journals including Economic Inquiry, Journal of Markets and
Morality, Demography, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Pakaluk is a widely admired writer and sought-after speaker on matters of
culture, gender, social science, the vocation of women, and the work of
Edith Stein. She lives in Maryland with her husband, philosopher Michael
Pakaluk, and eight children.