@Sunstone
Thank you for your challenging critique of St. Chrysostom's 'thesis'. I can always count upon you to deliver the "
money note" (pun intended!), which is to say, a notably insightful contribution to my thread.
In response, I would firstly direct you to my prior conversation with Penguin, where I concurred with his very precise (Adam Smith-influenced) identification of the superfluous wealth of the 'unjust' rich (in my OP phraseology) as consisting largely of the rental income of so-called "
rentier capitalists", who unfortunately dominate the highest echelons of our present day global economic system (much to the detriment of the rest of us, from whom they exact their unearned rental income - hence the "
theft" of the public wealth/good aspect of this).
Most of our billionaires, in addition to any actual value-producing income they might have garnered from their creation of desirable/useful products or service that actually give consumers tangible benefit for their expenditure, also happen (and I'm going to argue
not-coincidentally) to be unproductive "rentiers" of a much vaster unearned income (and some, like real estate magnets, are
entirely purveyors of unproductive assets and are basically
just rentiers). Why might this be the case?
What is it about our culture/political system/economy that leads otherwise "productive" and (in theory) responsible private enterprisers to become absentee landlords / remote shareholders, who subsequently lobby sovereign parliaments and governments to have legislation passed that enables them to further extend their rent-seeking behaviour via shady tax loopholes and in opposition to efforts that seek to regulate mergers, clamp down on anti-competitive practices, introduce rules on financial misbehaviour, environment and labour markets that would actually benefit the wider population?
Consider the infamous "Hobbit Law" in New Zealand, by which huge American entertainment companies bullied the government of a sovereign state into barring Kiwi film workers from unionizing (by categorising them as independent contractors rather than employees) so that Warner Bros. could benefit from tax breaks and poor workers rights protections, with the threat of pulling out and ruining an important sector of the state's economy if they refused to comply.
Could one honestly argue that New Line / Warner Bros were
not acting as leeches against the interests of the Kiwi people?
I purposefully didn't define the terms "
rich" and "
unjust" in my OP so as to leave the discussion as open as possible. But I've been pushed by your and Penguin's excellent posts into laying my cards on the table and defining the terms of what I'm really getting at here, and which I believe St. Chrysostom was getting at in his own day and age as well.
Concerning the material circumstances of the Roman Empire in which St. Chrysostom lived:
"The surplus wealth of the [Roman] empire, after the subsistence of the workers had been met, was, with the primitive methods of production in use, not large. Out of this surplus had to be maintained a large rentier class, ranging from senators to decurions"
(Journal of Roman Studies vol.37-39, p.150)
"They had always been essentially a rentier class, overseeing the labour of their peasants rather than engaging in the primary work of agricultural production [...] idling on their own town councils, now idling in the offices of the central Roman state...The late Roman landowning elite, like their forbears, would alternate between their urban houses and their country estates"
(Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire p.118)
In our own day, the Congressional Research Service made reference in a 2012 study to the “increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution” suggesting that the divide between the wealthy and the poor in America is larger today than it was in the roaring twenties. This societal concentration of wealth extends to the corridors of power in light of a net wealth analysis of Congress, published in January 2014, which revealed that the majority of politicians were millionaires with a mean net worth of at or above a million dollars.
The executive director of the centre noted that to run for American elections, candidates had to be capable of “financially viable campaigns” with the more efficient campaigners already mingling in the “circles” of the well-to-do. Furthermore in terms of electioneering itself, it is apparent that a prospective senatorial candidate, as former National Republican committee spokesperson Doug Heye explained, would have to devote an “extraordinary amount of time”, from between six months to upwards of a year campaigning, something practically impossible for an individual with low to medium income, who works full time and has a family to support. Without private wealth, the party apparatus would have to invest in a poorer individual which, by default, provides them with an “incentive to recruit wealthy candidates”.
The similarity of this to the 'rentier class' of the Roman Republic and Empire, which had hierarchical gradations within the citizenry in the context of an “unabashed plutocracy” where the colossal expense of “electioneering and office-holding” guaranteed that the foremost positions in the executive were occupied by affluent incumbents despite the fact that the official name for, ‘The Senate and the People of Rome’ stressed a “partnership” between the civic populace and the governing body via popular assemblies, is overt.
Does this not mean that modern democracy in America rests once again on the availability of “leisure” time provided by superfluous unearned income, as it did for the Greeks and Romans, albeit nowadays funded not through slave labour and agricultural peasant serfs but rather by the “the ever-growing and all-invading power of big business” (to quote Pope Pius XII,
Address (Questa Grande Vostra Adunata) 21st October, 1945)?
This raises the disturbing question of whether the reality of a small and wealthy segment of the population holding the reins of power and monopolizing those institutions by means of a financial advantage and a private wealth necessary for successful political campaigns, compromises contemporary democracy with plutocracy.
The dichotomy of the "bad unproductive" rentier (
who extracts unearned value from the economy with his/her monopoly rents or speculative assets etc.)
vs the good productive enterpriser (
who organises a business venture and assumes the risk in return for a profit for his labours) is theoretically sound and true. But the problem is that we find ourselves right now in a situation where the "super-rich" are at once both the rentiers
and productive enterprisers. And increasingly the latter appears almost like a smokescreen for the former source of income.
In breathing your heart and soul into your inspired poetry Phil, in return for a richly deserved profit in return for this labour, you are "productive" and most definitely not a rentier. And yet, you are operating in a system which is increasingly infected with rentier malpractice and arguably we are all suffering as a result of this.
In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes opined that “
the rentier aspect of capitalism is a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work.” He firmly believed that “
the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain.”
But was he right about that?
At the same time, in 1931 during the Great Depression, Pope Pius XI came to a quite different conclusion about the 'rentier' class: he characterised it as less a transitional aberration from ;good, productive capitalist competition' and more a logical and regular by-product of it; an intrinsic flaw within the system itself, which rendered the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of a few privileged rentiers an inevitability that could not be avoided but through some pretty major reshuffling of the economic order. He labelled it the dictatorship of "
the international imperialism of money”:
Quadragesimo Anno (May 15, 1931) | PIUS XI
"The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life: 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. To these are to be added the grave evils that have resulted from an intermingling and shameful confusion of the functions and duties of public authority with those of the economic sphere - such as, one of the worst, the virtual degradation of the majesty of the State, which although it ought to sit on high like a queen and supreme arbitress, free from all partiality and intent upon the one common good and justice, is become a slave, surrendered and delivered to the passions and greed of men. And as to international relations, two different streams have issued from the one fountain-head: On the one hand, economic nationalism or even economic imperialism; on the other, a no less deadly and accursed internationalism of finance or international imperialism whose country is where profit is…
Restraint enforced vigorously by governmental authority could have banished these enormous evils and even forestalled them; this restraint, however, has too often been sadly lacking. There quickly developed a body of economic teaching far removed from the true moral law, and, as a result, completely free rein was given to human passions...
Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching.
Destroying through forgetfulness or ignorance the social and moral character of economic life, it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect.
But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life - a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. This function is one that the economic dictatorship which has recently displaced free competition can still less perform, since it is a headstrong power and a violent energy that, to benefit people, needs to be strongly curbed and wisely ruled. But it cannot curb and rule itself. Loftier and nobler principles - social justice and social charity - must, therefore, be sought whereby this dictatorship may be governed firmly and fully.
There are needs and common goods that cannot be satisfied by the market system. It is the task of the state and of all society to defend them."
(Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (“After Forty Years”), 1931 #40)
