I have a feeling someone stamped me as Socialist over my statement that Carlos Ugo didn't become a Communist by endorsing "self managing socialism" as in Yugoslavia. Note, I don't say it was introduced correctly all over Yugoslavia, in Croatia and Slovenia there were unjust confiscations of nobiliary land. But the form itself was Distributist, not Communist. Tito, unlike Stalin, didn't abolish the NEP. He didn't confiscate lands from small farmers. And today, successor states like Serbia and Croatia have more farmers per capita than France. I think each has more farmers for obviously a lesser population. In other words, Tito was rather better than Mitterrand. This is not a Communist statement, it's a Ruralist statement.
Why Christians Can't be Socialists
The Counsel of Trent | 17 Aug 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWk-98DH988
My below comments have disappeared. At least that was the case yesterday, from here I cannot go to youtube (unless using Microsoft, which I boycott since 2009).
Ah, Pius XI.
You know he was what some US could call "socialist" ... Quadragesimo Anno supported the idea of corporazioni, which were also adapted in Austro-Fascism.
Franco, well within the pale of Pius XI and Pius XII, was sponsoring cheap rental flats, and I mean cheap. To some, that's "welfare state" and this "socialist" ...
0:31 Sweden is decently border corporativist in economics.
In education, Church/State, Family/State, freedom of speech (de facto, not just on the paper), Sweden is unfortunately very socialist. Culturally Marxist, one could say.
2:16 setting wages and prices was in fact within Fascism and Austro-Fascism, so not what Pius XI condemned.
If the government tells the owner of Fiat: you must give your workers so much per hour, that's not socialism.
But if the government told the owner of Fiat: move out, I'm running your business and taking the gains, that is socialism. And condemned.
6:09 Ah, just as Quadragesimo Anno is the favourite Fascist work I've read, Rerum Novarum is the favourite Distributist work I've read after Chesterton and the favourite Syndicalist work I've read. Along with Chesterton's The Return of Don Quixote.
6:38 Private property that creates wealth should belong to as many as possible, so that as few as possible need to survive as customers and wage-earners or as customers and dole-receivers.
As many as possible obviously involves without violating the rights of already existent owners. Distributism 101. Rerum Novarum, Vincent McNabb OP, Belloc and Chesterton.
7:27 Mutatis mutandis, for what I earn when holding a cardboard with the URL for one or more of the blogs I've worked to enrich with more texts.
Thank you, Pope Leo (XIII !) for defending my rights. (Wonder if an antipope also called by the name will make as ample a defense of my rights, so far quite a lot of his clergy haven't).
8:03 Such as texts that could be printed and commercially distributed with some good will.
A thing currently lacking.
Economically, I and Catholic Answers have exactly the same right to get texts into print (diverse opportunities for doing it at own cost, though), and morally, I think I have a right superior to people reporting that "Cardinal Baronius in the Galileo controversy" or even in the 1615 letter to Grand Duchess Christina said a thing he is probably not ever documented as saying and certainly documented as not saying in 1615, as he died in 1607.
And if you, Trent Horn, some year ago, took to that because Jimmy Akin believed it, as he stated it again the other day, you should recall Our Lord saying not to call anyone sensei.
9:44 Franco basically had a housing guarantee.
And Mamdani didn't say "let's abolish private property" but "whether you call it private property" ...
Now, such guaranteed housing has its own challenges and are not the way out for everyone on the street (in Paris, a socially acquired housing, where the "bail" [rental agreement] was payed by social services, would deny me the right to house a publishing house in my appartment).
But it doesn't equate to taking away property.
Just as Mussolini could tell the owner of Fiat, perfectly licitly, "you must pay your workers so and so" and this was OK, because the owner of Fiat still got the brut revenue from car sales to do so, and it wasn't the state that did it, so a mayor of Berlin can say "if you have a second apartment empty, you need to rent it if we need it for someone we want to house" ... since it's still the person owning the apartment that gets the rent. Not sure of the details, but that's along the lines I heard. If the second apartment were confiscated so its owner didn't get the rent, that would obviously be socialism.
9:59 Abolishing the distinction between employers and employees can be done in more than one way.
If you confiscate the property of the employer and hand it over to a collective of employees, that's socialist and illicit.
If a factory of grissini is going bad, the employer wants to sell and close it and a collective of employees buys it, as in Buenos Aires, that's within the respect of the former employees rights, since he chose not to run it any more, and therefore perfectly licit.
Companies can also be started with "shareholding coworkers" in cooperatives. This is not uncommon in Sweden.
And while running a business personally may be less frustrating than running it with coworkers, not running it and just being an employer may be even more frustrating.
Even worse if the employee is partly paid by a government programme and is therefore a social case the actual owners may find faults with ... I've been there. The work was OK, but the social environment frustrating, one of the co owners was one lady whose son I had previously tried to punish while being a school teacher, and getting all my lessons disrupted. Him being one culprit. She hadn't forgot it. Neither have I, I'm taking James 3:1 with other than intended literality (as "noli conformari huic saeculi" is not directly meant to encourage historical reenactment, but I do it anyway).
And yet another way is a small business worked by only owner and close family of the owner. The distributist solution number 1. Also not socialist, perfectly licit.
10:07 No, you can't take Quadragesimo Anno 55 as forbidding the preference for mom and pop shops or cooperatives.
The point he is making is, no owner who's running a business should be deprived of doing so and of getting the necessary disposal over the company's resources to do so, just because he isn't doing the manual work.
He is not in any way, shape or form forbidding a company to run by having all workers as coowners or only the owner and his close kin as workers.
Also, he is defending the rights of employers, not specifically of shareholders or other investors. There are licit ways to invest, and I think the ideal one was that you have a right to the gains if you share the risks. This does not mean you have a right to a previously fixed interest if you had a theoretical risk of losing prior to repayment, but it does mean you have a right to get 120 % back if the company is 120 % better off, if and only if you take the risk of getting 80 % back if it's only 80 % as well off, as when you handed the loan.
Share holding is that deal, but the company serially bribing the lenders to postpone the demand for repayment. And begs the question how many times the capital you have the right to get repaid without ever acknowledging you are getting your money back.
And therefore, to the harassed workers there have come "intellectuals," as they are called, setting up in opposition to a fictitious law the equally fictitious moral principle that all products and profits, save only enough to repair and renew capital, belong by very right to the workers. This error, much more specious than that of certain of the Socialists who hold that whatever serves to produce goods ought to be transferred to the State, or, as they say "socialized," is consequently all the more dangerous and the more apt to deceive the unwary. It is an alluring poison which many have eagerly drunk whom open Socialism had not been able to deceive.
Obviously, a factory owner should be able to earn enough as owner to retire to a farm or a vineyard, I agree with the Pope.
This doesn't mean he should pay more to shareholders than to himself. So that they can buy up more housing, more land, more factories under even fewer hands.
10:38 To take your example.
Yes, such a requirement would be highly immoral. However, starting out with three other men on equal or quasi equal footing, each investing and all taking together a smaller loan, and then you four splitting according to your financial or work hour or both input is definitely not immoral that way.
That's the cooperative. It kind of relates to a one man owner and other employee situation like both in a marriage having incomes relates to one income and one housewife. Obviously, in the case of the marriage, unless husband and wife earn at the same place (as when husband is owner or coowner), the one income if feasible is preferrable, both are licit scenarios. The Church does not forbid a man from marrying a woman just because she has to keep working in order for the bills to be paid and the future children to be fed (the Church would however consider the husband's employer as unjust). Similarily, no moral theologian forbids you to seek out three other men, equally good at baking pizza and equally willing to invest, reducing the risk and amount of money loaned.
The Church has also not forbidden the idea that an employer needing to pay interest on the loan (above what a mons pietatis would charge, see Lateran V, and no, the Church has not stated that lending money can be a business to itself, a mons pietatis is a kind of social work to small business) involves undue amounts going to a financier taking so to speak a private tax on the company.
11:02 You are probably motivating the unequal reward a bit wrongly.
Yes, you have a right to it. But it comes from the fact that a contract of salary is kind of a limited contract of servitude.
These three men are under that contract within business hours of their presence, working as your tools, certainly human tools, but still tools in your hand.
Given they give up freedoms (in working hours) for your work to prosper and doing so remain fully human, you have duties to them, but not quite symmetric with their duties to you.
If however the three had been coinvestors and coowners, this would not have been the case.
Using "the risk" as a motivation for what one charges more sounds a bit like the twisted logic of taking interest. I hold to the plain meaning of Vix pervenit. In 1830, this was not overturned, just suspended when penitents were acting otherwise and felt no guilt about it, provided they were willing to change if papacy should reinforce Vix pervenit to the full.
11:47 Is the success story of Pizza Hut a full moral hit?
If the company owns each shop, I would say not. If each shop has a real owner, where Pizza Hut is a franchise they cooperate with, that's different.
Because the expansion of Pizza Hut would in the first scenario be depriving many pizzaiolos of being full owners of their own small shop, but in the second scenario, they are kind of a security around many small owners. Not totally unlike the guilds that I obviously approve of.
But even a franchise has some problems. It doesn't only earn money from each small franchise partner paying an annual fee, it also involves companies that provide for the franchise, like a meat company for Mc Donald's in each country and so on, which makes the provision for independents more of a venture.
I've seen in Paris bakeries get deliveries from a provision company that's not tied to a franchise. Meaning small bakers have equal opportunities to provide raw materials as cheaply as each other for putting tuna in the sandwich. As independent bars get beverages via Tafanel. Oh, and some brew their own. Seems preferrable.
12:43 I'm obviously against wealth taxes as well as inheritance duty.
I got really angry at Bush Jr over reading the news that:
- he had proposed to abolish inheritance duty
- he had refrained due to an intervention by "Responsible Rich"
- which intervention was motivated by "it's not good to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth" ...
The hypocricy. Any child of any billionaire in "Responsible Rich" would very certainly be born with a silver spoon, perhaps withheld partly from the mouth, but certainly there if needed, even with high levels if inheritance duty. But for the heirs of a small shop, this duty could make the difference between continuing and having to sell to the first high bidder in order to pay the duty, and then have to provide as employees instead of as business owners.
That and when his motivation to invade Afghanistan exactly mirrored that of Francis Joseph declaring war on Serbia, while he was making no excuses to Austria for WW-I or the peace treaties of Trianon and Saint-Germain en Laye. I'm obviously biassed, since born in Vienna.
13:35 And what that man of twitter hopefully meant was he wanted to do his work as an artist.
If he's doing decent art that looks good, I certainly don't mind. A certain man would have done very well to remain in that lane of business.
And, as far as I know, that man didn't quit because he was unsuccessful, he quit to join a war in a uniform which was not the passport he was born too (one reason why he was exiled from there up to 1938).
13:59 I'm not the least proposing economic security to those unwilling to work.
However, given how many business growths have happened at the expense of first opportunities for small business owners and then even employment, I'm also not pretending the idea is totally out of bounds.
I am however proposing a man should have a free choice between economic security as provided by the government, and being unwilling to take a job, with the risks that means. I've taken that risk. And while I have not taken a work, I certainly have worked and in research on the Galileo affair, somewhat better than you have done recently.
Not least Jimmy Akin who seems to propose Cardinal Baronius died in 1607 (if he recalls that), went undead to write a letter to Grand Duchess Christina in 1615 and then somehow managed to get Galileo as a front for that letter, while asking to be anonymised. I think it's more reasonable that Galileo anonymised a still living higher clergyman. Who'd have more reasons to ask for it than a man who had already died and presumably gone to Heaven either immediately or within minutes.
[See however: Marginal Note by Galileo?]
14:05 You have noted St. Paul spoke of "working" and not of "taking employment"?
Anyone who has given me anything has been offered to take a photo of or memorise an URL for a blog and so has free reading after that, and freedom to support me from time to time in accordance with his satisfaction.
No one has been required to give in order to get the reading, just as a street singer doesn't require all who listen to put mponey in his hat or guitar box and just as an albergue de peregrinos does not require everyone to donate for the night (but in that case, as beds are limited, it's obviously their discretion if they take the pilgrim with no money or not and with how much or little reduction). Neither albergueros like Ave Fenix nor street singers necessarily go broke by this and no sane man pretends they refuse to work in the sense of St. Paul. Obviously, Calvinists, or culturally Calvinist Catholics are not sane ...
15:33 And the Plymouth colony went from communal to ... capitalist? Free market and freedom to expand, like Pizza Hut? No, to Distributism.
Each man owning roughly equal farming lots. Men could sell and buy produce, but no one was supposed to sell his farm or buy up that of a neighbour either.
It may be noted that Plymouth colonists didn't have the charity to work communally back then and their descendants have now not the justice to protect the unborn. They were the founders of Massachusetts.
15:59 The problem wasn't communal farming in Ukraine.
The problem was communal farming in the Volga valley.
When Lenin was still a revolutionary in opposition, the Volga valley had a famine too.
Farming in the Volga valley was neglected in favour of industrialism. The Revolution didn't change that.
To hide this fact, the revolutionaries, based in the Volga valley plundered Ukraine and nearby Kuban.
That the means was a pretense of communalising farming doesn't mean that communalising was the core problem. Ukraine's and Kuban's harvests kept being good, but were just displaced to Volga valley where they weren't always good under collective ownership and hadn't been always good under boyar ownership either.
Precisely as Capitalism caused the potato famine insofar as each tenant dying for lack of potatoes could equally have been kept alive by presence of wheat, except the landlords wanted the wheat to do business as usual in Belfast or Bristol or Edinburgh.
Hence Rerum Novarum stating that if someone worked for you, you owe him a livelihood, pretty obviously as opposed for instance to literal contractual recompense even if that for some reason is inadequate for livelihood.
17:42 Wait, Mamdani wants to use tax dollars to invest in five shops with discounts?
Presumably, the shops are privately owned by the NYC government, right?
What's exactly socialist about that?
And before you say that the 30 % discount would make them outcompete other, totally privately owned shops, do you even know what underpricing was in Capitalist success stories like Vanderbildt, Rockefeller and John Pierpont Morgan Sr. and their rise to power?
17:49 You actually did mention underpricing!
Even if the discount is only 30 % and the shops are only five.
Tell me, how does a normal supermarket survive the competition of Lidl and Aldi?
Somehow they do ... and the man who was so much about Capitalism deserves bc of risk taking is upset because 5 shops with 30 % discount are a risk ...
17:56 What exactly did Pius IX mean by "harvest of misery"?
The condition of things at present proclaims, and proclaims vehemently, that there is need for a union of brave minds with all the resources they can command. The harvest of misery is before our eyes, and the dreadful projects of the most disastrous national upheavals are threatening us from the growing power of the socialistic movement. They have insidiously worked their way into the very heart of the community, and in the darkness of their secret gatherings, and in the open light of day, in their writings and-their harangues, they are urging the masses onward to sedition; they fling aside religious discipline; they scorn duties; they clamor only for rights; they are working incessantly on the multitudes of the needy which daily grow greater, and which, because of their poverty are easily deluded and led into error. It is equally the concern of the State and of religion, and all good men should deem it a sacred duty to preserve and guard both in the honor which is their due.
Graves de communi was by Leo XIII.
In other words, he was talking of civil war, not of economic ill success.
18:05 People buying discounted items and reselling is a problem that can be solved by policing.
So, probably not the greatest risk with Mamdani.
[Given the hostile architecture in London, which also has a Muslim mayor, I googled "Mamdani, hostile architecture" and found this: ‘Hostile Architecture’: How Public Spaces Keep the Public Out. However, the article doesn't actually feature Mamdani and is from 2019, when the probable suspect was Bill de Blasio, also Democrat, but not Muslim.]
18:30 Come on, on Cuba, unlike Mamdani's NYC, there was a ban on private productive economy.
Fidel Castro (or Infidel C if you prefer) did think the discipline of food rations was good for people, like some people think working as employee is inherently beneficial to character, in their judgement of those wanting to make it otherwise.
19:59 Finally a good point.
A very good point.
When economically or just culturally socialist officials decide what apologists deserve, we tend to get somewhat short.
Never did I say otherwise.
[It might be added, some culturally socialist ones may be tip top Capitalistic by now ...]
