I Private Property In a Cultural Civilization

Extract

The importance of private property as one of the fundamental institutions of a Christian State is the central idea of all Catholic thought on social reconstruction, and the widest possible extension of property among the community is regarded as an essential requirement of social justice. It is, however, too readily assumed by many that a diffusion of private ownership of productive property, whether it be in the form of land or the possession of any craft or business, would of itself provide a solution to most of the problems that now afflict us. But a more detailed survey of the economy of modern civilized society will reveal the fact that few, if any, of its members can be entirely self-supporting, and that an interchange of goods and services is a daily requirement. However widespread individual ownership may become, this necessity for a constant series of exchanges on the part of the owners is the dominating feature of any civilized community. This aspect of the question of the reconstruction of our social order has not so far received the consideration that it deserves, but the importance of its bearing on social justice can be gauged by a brief examination of the peculiar nature of property in our economic system.

Whenever Catholics speak of private property as being natural to man, and, having regard to his condition of susceptibility to the effects of original sin, as the arrangement most conducive to social harmony, and argue from this that ownership implies the right of the possessor to the unlimited return or profit accruing from its use, it is seldom remembered that property as possessed in the majority of cases to-day depends €or its value on the functioning of a highly complex and interdependent series of economic operations.