Catholic and Enjoying It!
To be plain, what she wants is wage slavery.
The teaching of the Church is plain and commonsensical; people should be paid enough so they can live, provide for a family, contribute to the community, and lead a reasonable and humane life:
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. In these and similar questions, however – such as, for example, the hours of labor in different trades, the sanitary precautions to be observed in factories and workshops, etc. – in order to supersede undue interference on the part of the State, especially as circumstances, times, and localities differ so widely, it is advisable that recourse be had to societies or boards such as We shall mention presently, or to some other mode of safeguarding the interests of the wage-earners; the State being appealed to, should circumstances require, for its sanction and protection.
46. If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.
The insane asylum of the Party of Trump opposes all that because, in its heart of heart, it envies every penny the poor have and regards all wages as an intrusion on the profits of the employer. If she could, she would amend her stand to oppose, not merely a livable wage, but any wage. The insane logic of the Libertarian always holds that it is “violence” and “theft” for the state to prevent the rich and powerful from robbing raping the poor and weak. Libertarian ideology is all about protecting the powerful from the weak.
Or, to put it in the only terms the monomania Anti-Abortion-but-Not-Prolife Right might still conceivably grasp, this will cause more abortions, because poor people who get pregnant and cannot afford to support a family are under enormous economic pressure to solve the problem by safe, legal, and radically unrare means.
The stupid genius of the monomaniac Christian Right is that its whole focus is on ending the supply for abortion while passionate supporting policies that increase demand. Indeed, ignoring Jesus warning that anybody who causes one of his little ones to sin fashioned a millstone necktie for themselves, they put enormous pressure on the poor to abort and then exult in blaming them for doing it.
With conservative Paul Ryan Catholics, the hypocrisy reaches epic levels. They preach the Church’s teaching on the sinfulness of contraception while adamantly rejecting the Church’s teaching on a living wage and a social safety net for the poor. The result is a bastardized parody of the gospel in which “prolife” Catholics tell the poor, “You must be open to life! You must never use artificial contraception under pain of mortal sin–and we will punish you and your parasitic brats when that results in you having ‘too many’ children.”
God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of this.
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