The Remnant On The "Bailout Bill"

Brian McCall, who writes for The Remnant - the oldest Traditional Catholic magazine in America - pens a powerful essay on Catholic Social Teaching and the current economic crisis. You may read his essay HERE.

The second paragraph alone deserves special mention:

"St. Thomas Aquinas predicted such a collapse of an economic system like the one under which we have been toiling. In Lecture IX on the Ethics of Aristotle, he commented that eventually all exchange transactions will cease in a society which continually violates the principles of commutative justice in economic exchange transactions."

To put it in simpler terms:

If you eat too many fatty foods, you'll clog up your arteries and die of a heart attack.

If you hear too many rock songs at full volume, you'll damage your eardrums and risk going deaf.

If you stare at the sun for even a short time, you'll damage your retinas and risk going blind.

If you pour sugar into the gasoline tank of your car, it will gum up your engine and your car won't run anymore.

So if you continually break God's laws regarding running a nation's economy - allowing usury for loans, fractional reserve banking, speculation, fiat currency and so on - you'll damage your economy and run your nation into the ground. McCall goes into greater detail on this, especially relating to the current housing crisis that led to this series of fiascoes in Washington DC and elsewhere worldwide.

In Distributism, such things as usury, fractional reserve banking and so on are rejected from the outset. For it is based on the sound foundations of Divine Law and common sense.

Or put another way, if you want to keep an economy robust and alive, don't do the things that will make it sick or kill it. Don't base your national currency on just the say-so of the government. Don't allow loaning on unproductive loans. Don't build your national economy on a mostly service industry basis. Don't concentrate economic and political power into the hands of a self-proclaimed "elite few".

Read and ponder Mr. McCall's essay. Break it down into a way your neighbors can understand and talk with them about it. Work with them in your neighborhood and region to change any law defending such economic crimes.

You will then help your society become more Distributist and, thus, saner and healthier.