Any system, if planned and performed by properly formed Catholics, can work to good and the glory of God. Any system. Communism or Capitalism, if effectuated by properly formed Catholics, can both serve to benefit society and the glory of God. Classical Liberalism or Authoritarianism, same deal. Properly understanding the world requires accepting this point. A shovel can be used to dig a hole to plant a tree, or a shovel can be used to bludgeon someone to death. A shovel is not inherently good or evil, but it’s uses can be good or evil. Likewise these complex systems.
The reason this point is important is because it explains why these different ideologies and systems can be so popular. Call it idealism: if performed perfectly, it would work great. The differences and problems come when our fallen human nature is factored in. Disagreements about how human nature behaves, exactly, lead to disagreements in ideology and differences in outcomes between comparable yet independent systems.
The thing that got me thinking about this is the idea of poverty around the world. There will always be a class of people who have less than the class of people who have more; it is also possible for the baseline of poverty to rise over time. Access to basic human necessities like food and water, access to clothing and shelter, access to sources of income. These are basic necessities and over time their scarcity can be mitigated.
The causes of this poverty are manifold. Poverty may happen regardless, but it’s important to make sure we (both individually and as a society) do not contribute materially to making it worse. We would prefer to make the situation better, but we can settle for at least not making it worse. So one cause that I had in mind was Corporate Imperialism. Substantively, this is just another brand name for Globalism, but the latter has become political jargon and so is an ideological shibboleth, therefore is meaningless; the former is colored by historical imperialism and colonialism and so shocks the senses by linking two seemingly disparate concepts.
When I talk about Corporate Imperialism, what I mean is the ability for individual corporations to negotiate with governments for favorable treatment, to receive that favorable treatment, and to operate in that nation as long as favorable treatment persists, operating just above the average standard of living. The theory is that the presence of a given corporation is better than their absence, it provides work to people and allows money to flow into the country for infrastructure investment and increases the standard of living. This is true! Good things can and do happen when Corporations operate in low-cost nations. However: I believe much of this impact is incidental and not deliberate. A good amount of Corporate Altruism is engaged in the service of the Bottom Line. A firm might invest in roads because they want to ship their goods faster and in better condition. A de minimis benefit of having good roads is an improvement in the quality of life for everyone else who can use those roads. It is better to have an incidental benefit than no benefit, but it is better still to make a deliberate benefit.
If we imagine a world in which every nation were perfectly isolationist, their economies would grow organically and achieve the size and scale supported by their culture, their available technology, their government/society, and their resources. A culture that does not value entrepreneurship will not creatively exploit their available resources and so will have a lower economic maximum than if that same culture did value entrepreneurship. This is not to say entrepreneurship is a virtue as such, just that entrepreneurship is the means by which value is generated by creative problem solving.
Cultures cannot change except on the timescale of centuries, and can only change if there is an internal will to change. Cultures cannot be changed through external means, because if an unwanted change is imposed upon a culture they will rebel against it given enough time. Governments and Society are derivative of culture, they are emergent systems that reflect and reinforce the culture in which they emerged. Technology can be given to a society, but a society must find a use for it or else it will not be widely adopted. Resources can be added to a society but likewise with technology, that society must find a use for it. Resources can be taken away from a society, and that will guarantee they cannot be used by that society, and so will not be to their benefit.
The approach to the relief of poverty so far seems to be adding the resource of money to a given society, but typically this is in exchange for the exfiltration of resources, which is why this is a task generally performed by Corporations. The addition of money in exchange for the subtraction of resources is not an equal exchange, because money cannot be used the same way or drive the same creative insight as some raw material. Money has the additional property of being highly liquid, which encourages corruption. A corrupt individual would rather have money than a barrel of oil, for example. Throwing money at poverty serves to increase corruption and so poisons society; exchanging money for resources serves to reduce the availability of resources and so deplete that society of economic fuel.
This explains why poverty is such an intractable problem: What is being done right now isn’t effective, what ought to be done isn’t easy. Cultural change can be facilitated by a third party but cannot be done by a third party. This involves finding out what exactly people need and working with them to identify solutions, and creating systems and structures to help them resolve their own needs. As the cliche goes, if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day, if you teach a man to fish he will be fed for a lifetime. If you teach a man that he won’t need to fish if he makes fishing rods and teach him to teach his peers, then you create a system that has added fishing rods to society without airlifting a pallet of fishing rods to them. There is no profit in this model, and there is no temporal reward in this model. But the effects are compounding and long lasting.
True poverty alleviation begins with the hyper-personal. Find one person and find out how to help them help themselves. Then tell them to show someone, while you find another person. Devise a system such that it is self perpetuating and works towards growth, and let it run for a century, and see what happens.
Corporate Imperialism can’t do this because Corporations don’t operate on a personal level: they deal in forecasts and models. This doesn’t mean Corporate Imperialism should stop outright–something is better than nothing–but if there was a way to incentivize the hyper-personal approach to encourage creative problem solving, then Corporations would be able to magnify whatever efforts they are already undertaking.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 