Wednesday, April 15, 2009
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St. Thomas Aquinas, universal doctor of the Church
"If the citizens themselves devote their life to matters of trade, the way will be opened to many vices. Since the foremost tendency of tradesmen is to make money, greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade. The result is that everything in the city will become venal; good faith will be destroyed and the way opened to all kinds of trickery; each one will work only for his own profit, despising the public good; the cultivation of virtue will fail since honor, virtue's reward, will be bestowed upon the rich. Thus, in such a city, civic life will necessarily be corrupted." -De Regno, bk II:3
Pope Leo XIII
"If working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the consequence will be that the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over, and the respective classes will be brought nearer to one another."
Pope Pius XI
"Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel."
G.K. Chesterton
"Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work."
Fr. Vincent McNabb
"By liberty our acts are our own; by property our goods are our own. Free will is the psychological condition of property; and property is the material condition of freedom. 'A man by his will possesses (owns) things."
Hilaire Belloc
"It has been found in practice that economic freedom thus somewhat limited satisfies the nature of man, and at the basis of it is the control of the means of production by the family unit. For though the family exchange its surplus, or even all its production, for the surplus of others, yet it retains its freedom, so long as the social structure, made up of families similarly free, exercises its effect through customs and laws consonant to its spirit."
Dorothy Day
"Are our children being taught not only to work for what they need, not what they want, and also to work for others, so that they will always have a surplus to give away? Are they taught to tithe themselves to give even one-tenth of what they are going to earn, to the poor?"
George Maxwell
"Mass-production is the prostitution of the man to economic or other material motives and is spiritually contraceptive. To eliminate the person and say it does not greatly matter what the work may be is degrading and absurd, and provides an opening for all manner of injustice and oppression."
J.R.R. Tolkien
"I am not a 'democrat' if only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power --and then we get and are getting slavery" -The Letters
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