After a brief hiccup of about a century or so

…caused by things like the Christian tradition’s insistence on rights for the worker, the universal destination of goods for the purpose of the common good, and other such ideas threatening to the basic capitalist ideology of concentrating more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands, Mammon and Caesar have put aside their quarrel and are laboring (with help of an increasingly pagan and anti-Christian culture) to continue the project of reducing the population of a servile state to slavery while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few.

Consider—in 1979 “Wal-Mart employed 21,000 workers”, “General Motors employed 618,000”, and “the average CEO…was paid 35.2 times what an average worker was paid”. Flash forward to 2008 (and draw your own conclusions): “Wal-Mart employed 1.4 million”, “General Motors employed 92,053”, and “the average CEO…was paid 275.4 times what an average worker was paid…”

What’s brilliant about it is that the alliance of state, corporation and media (which everybody sees is at perpetual war with the family and the Church when they are selling you porn or shoving abortion and gay marriage and perpetual war down your throats) is staunchly defended by conservative Catholics the moment the subject turns to the growing disparity noted above. Any suggestion that this is unhealthy or unjust is waved away as socialism or Marxism, even when G.K. Chesterton or Pope Leo XIII are pointing out the problem. For those who might be inclined to no longer live this insane contradiction, may I suggest the Distributist Review? Here’s an interesting place to start. There are Catholic alternatives to the present madness that is about to implode.