What's Troubling America and the World today !

But first the Challenge!

"The society had fallen, much as our society has today, into a tangle wherein the bulk of men were disappointed and angry and seeking for a solution to the whole group of social strains. There was indebtedness everywhere; the power of money and consequent usury. There was slavery everywhere. Society reposed upon it, as ours reposes upon wage slavery today. There was weariness and discontent with theological debate, which, for all its intensity, had grown out of touch with the masses. There lay upon the freemen, already tortured with debt, a heavy burden of imperial taxation; and there was the irritant of existing central government interfering with men's lives; there was the tyranny of the lawyers and their charges." -- Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, 1938

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“The root cause of present injustices is not to be attributed to division of goods, nor the inequalities of the division, [Health Care or Bail-Outs] but rather to the fact that the mass of people are practically bereft of ownership. Some means must be devised to admit the proletariats within the proprietory system. Widely distributed property makes for social stability. Any alternative offered lacks the moral discipline of responsibility and ownership. Perhaps the best summary argument for private property is the impossibility of finding any better general system to take its place.”
--McDonald, The Social Value of Property According to Saint Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1939) pp. 185 paragraph 8.

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"In the past, the ownership of business enterprise, the only form of property with which we are here concerned, has always at least in theory, involved two attributed, first the risking of previously collected wealth in profit-seeking enterprise (past savings). But in the modern corporation, these two attributes of ownership no longer attach to the same individual or group. The stockholder has surrendered control over his wealth. He has become a supplier of capital, a risk-taker pure and simple, while ultimate responsibility and authority are exercised by directors and 'control.' One traditional attribute of ownership is attached to stock ownership; the other attribute is attached to corporate control. Must we not, therefore, recognize that we are no longer dealing with property in the old sense?"
-- Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1937, p287

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Produced by Guy C. Stevenson