Honoring our Troops Means More Than Soft-Focus Pictures of Flags

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure* for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man; he does not resist you. (Jas 5:1–6).

45. Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice. – Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum

And before anybody feigns confusion at the very possibility of even knowing what a living wage is:

A living wage fulfills four criteria:

1. Families in general seem to be living at a standard of decency appropriate to their society;
2. They do so without working undue hours;
3. They do so without wives being forced to work outside the home or children forced to work inappropriate hours or under inappropriate conditions (if they choose to do so, that’s another story);
4. They do so without undue reliance on government support or consumer credit.

But that’s so un-Republican!

Didn’t used to be:

“We stand for a living wage.

Wages are subnormal ifthey fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations.

The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include:

enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living–

a standard high enough to make morality possible,

to provide for education and recreation,

to care for immature members of the family,

to maintain the family during periods of sickness,

and to permit of reasonable saving for old age.”

All this is both common sense and the magisterial teaching of the Church.  It is therefore adamantly and routinely opposed by American Movement Conservatism as it hides behind the unborn and makes war on his mother and father–even when mother and father have risked body and soul on the battlefield.  It is a disgusting scandal, a sin and a crime that any vet is so rewarded by the country he served.

#fightfor15