Consumers Rather Than Producers
By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
In the April 6 edition of First Teachers we featured a letter from a reader who contended there was a “need to combat the socialist bias that exists in many of our schools, including our Catholic schools.” He called upon educators to inform their students of how “the private property rights found in capitalism guarantee the individual the ability to survive economically without government ‘connections’ to the political party in power.”
Our correspondent went on to write favorably of the careers of several of the pioneers of American capitalism, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
Some of our readers disagree. They call upon us to be more critical in our analysis of modern capitalism. J.M. of Arizona, for example, writes that it can be argued that our schools already reflect the capitalist emphasis on the “bottom line,” turning our students “into consumers rather than producers.” J.M. sees the practice of admitting foreign workers into the country through H-1B visa programs, a practice favored by business leaders, as central to the problem.
He writes, “One would assume that a country with a population of over 325 million that spends well over a trillion dollars annually on education, would have the ‘people resources’ to cover the basic personnel needs for medical, technological, and scientific fields. Yet one-quarter of our physicians and one in six healthcare workers are foreign born. This situation has wrought havoc among American workers.
“As Michelle Malkin reports, even the University of California, San Francisco, a taxpayer-funded enterprise, has booted 49 IT workers to be replaced by H-1B visa holding foreign workers from HCL Technologies, Ltd., the transnational conglomerate. All this is being done to save money in the California University system!”
J.M. points to the numbers:
“The State Department can issue 65,000 H-1B visas every year. This may not seem like a lot, but to put it in perspective, the class of 2014-2015 produced only 59,581 graduates in computer and information science and an equally dismal 30,038 graduates in physical sciences and scientific technology. It is interesting to contrast these numbers with graduation numbers for psychology (117,557) and the visual and performing arts (95,832).”
He continues:
“This means that we are subsidizing the outsourcing of our scientific and technical base for short-term gain. At the same time, the loss of the technical knowledge and expertise is much more damaging than the loss of actual factories and facilities. Since the beginning of the 21st century the United States has lost well over 40 percent of workers and jobs in the semiconductor industry. This kind of expertise is costly to acquire and is essential for supporting our defense and for our commercial viability.”
What makes this even worse, says J.M., “at the other end of the spectrum illegal immigrants are doing the ‘jobs that Americans won’t do’ in America’s fields and orchards. Again, innovation and productivity is being stifled by an abundance of low-cost labor. The middle class doesn’t escape the neglect of our human infrastructure when production jobs are moved outside the country. Welders, machinists, assemblers, mechanics, fabricators, etc., are the backbone of wealth creation.”
J.M. sees these “shortsighted policies” as a reflection of “an aim to make money rather than create wealth, part of a ‘me-today policy’ that doesn’t invest in our human infrastructure, but instead leaves an enormous and unsustainable debt ($20 trillion and rising) for our children and grandchildren. Try to find an American-made computer, cell phone, small gasoline engine, well pump, or television set.
“Likewise, try to find a high school that trains young people to fill the many jobs that are available but require training in the necessary skills. America is losing the capability to sustain its own economic viability and more important, it is losing the people and corporate knowledge necessary to recover it.”
Another correspondent, D.S., sees things similarly. He contends it is a mistake to use our schools, especially our Catholic schools, as apologists for capitalism. He writes, “When going through a Catholic high school I always wondered: Just because socialism is bad, does that make capitalism automatically good?”
He agrees with the importance of private property, as argued by our correspondent in the April 6 edition of First Teachers, but asks us to consider the work of Catholic writers such as G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Fr. Heinrich Pesch, SJ, who argued that capitalism as it is practiced in our time leads to a reduction in the number of private property owners and a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of corporate bosses.
He warns that American Catholics may want to believe that capitalism reflects the Church’s social teachings, but that we should be “aware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
Rather than stress the merits of capitalism, D.S. suggests Catholic schools assign “[Jesuit] Fr. Heinrich Pesch’s Ethics and the National Economy, Chesterton’s Utopia of Usurers, and Belloc’s An Essay on the Restoration of Property. The Distributist Review website is also a very good source.”
D.S. points out, “What G.K. Chesterton called distributism was an economic system that led to widespread property ownership, while what we call capitalism leads to fewer and fewer ‘capitalists,’ as a result of corporate ‘buyouts’ and ‘hostile takeovers.’ History has proven this true and it’s occurring right before our noses in the United States, but no one wants to call a spade a spade.
“Distributism represents a balance between the other two economic theories. The Catholic Church has always tried to maintain this balance in the papal social encyclicals. The key is that capitalism focuses too much on the individual while socialism focuses too much on the community — or more accurately, the state. Only Distributism focuses on the family, which the Catholic Church teaches is the foundation of society, the cornerstone.”
D.S. recommends the EWTN program The Apostle of Common Sense, which is devoted to the work of G.K. Chesterton, and also calls upon us to take advantage of the Internet to read the papal social encyclicals.
“Catholics cannot serve two masters,” he writes. “It is my conclusion that capitalism leads to serving money as our master, while socialism is serving the state as master. I sometimes wonder if modern Catholics put too much faith in political systems. When Jesus returns, will He find us living the faith, or acting as moneychangers?”
One final thing: A reader has recommended to us Schola, a one-week Summer Program of Great Books & Leisure for students who have completed two years of high school by the summer of 1917. It will be held July 16-23, 2017 at Belmont Abbey College, located minutes outside of Charlotte, N.C.
More information is available from the program director, Stephen Shivone, email address: stephenshivone@bac.edu. Visit http://belmontabbeycollege.edu/Schola/.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.