Evangelii Gaudium: Second Impressions | National Catholic Reporter

Evangelii Gaudium: Second Impressions | National Catholic Reporter by MSW.  MGB: We must not only reach out to the poor in the streets and those who are chronically poor - we must also encounter the working poor in our midst.  They and their children have as much right to a decent standard of living as we do.  There are three ways we can pursue this.  The first is to simply excommunicate Catholic business owners and shareholders who don't provide a living wage.  The second is for the Church to provide an example and pay a living wage to its employees - giving them $12,000 for every child and every additional child.  Because the free market cannot provide such a wage, we need to seek a refundable tax credit divided between the state and federal governments to provide $1000 per month per child against either the employee's taxes or the taxes of the employer if we shift from income to consumption taxes.  Such taxes are no burden to the poor with the $12,000 a year tax cut.

The real cause of homelessness is the libertarian judicial and legislative decisions in the 1970s that emptield the asylums, giving people the right to refuse much needed treatment and cutting the number of available beds.  A way out of this is to enact a consumption tax on business and either adequately fund governmental services or provide a tax credit for either providing these services to employees and their families or allowing workers to choose who provides those services in society.  The same approach can be undergone to expand Catholic education - but with adequate fudning tht does not decrease the public education system.    It can also be used to get the Church into the business of adult education and vocational education - ending the biaas in Catholic education toward sending peole to college - although if poor peoplse are found who can pursue such studies that should, of course be encouraged.  Part of encountering the poor is moving the Church to take over for the state - but with adequate funding.  This is another form of libertarianism - libertarian socialism.

As for abortion, the libertarian conviction that the Church would regulate it badly is still true - just as it could never successfully ban smoking or re-enact the prohibition of alcohol - or stand in the way of efforts to finally medicalize the drug war and end the fixation with marijuana.  The golden calf symbolism is correct, however.  In ancient times, children were sacrificed to Baal for the well being of the community.  Abortion is such a sacrifice - although the way to stop it is to fight poverty among the working poor and makde teenage parenthood something to bcelebrated rather than a danger to the future of a young woman.

A final topic is the problem of worker empowerment in capitalism itself.  The solution is not to tame capitalism, it is to abolish it.  We need to shift to mutalism, aka libertarian socialism (like we have in American farm cooperatives and the Basque have in Mondragon and the Italians in Emelio Romanga.  There are a few ways to get there.  One is to increase the taxes on capital gains when selling shares to anyone but an Employee Stock Ownership Plan.  Two is to reform Social Security so that employee contributions are funded by a Net Business Receipts Tax (a subtraction VAT), with contributions being equal to each worker, regardless of wage and with the ability to divert these contributions to purchasing employer voting stock.  The third is to allow union pension funds to reduce diversification and invest 67% in the employing company, rather than the 10% currently allowed - while considering franchisees as arms of the base company so that they can be unionized more easily with retirement savings added to the union pension fund, which would be voted for the benefit of workers as workers (becoming a form of employee democrachy), rather than investing for simply the financial interest of the employees (which may lead to lay offs to maximize short term profit).