Poverty's Causes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 3: The Meaning of the Landmark

"Selfishness," says a modern writer, referring to a similar but shorter passage in Isa. v. 8-10, "is the great sin in all ages and peoples. As soon as national institutions have awakened the sense of personality and the feeling of self-respect, the desire of accumulating wealth grows with them. And in no form is it more liable to abuse than in connection with possession of land. Men desire, by an almost universal instinct, to possess property in land. … Yet, since the land cannot be increased in quantity, its possession by one man is the exclusion of another, and the Hebrew laws endeavor to meet this difficulty by special provisions, the breach or evasion of which the prophet now denounces in His first 'woe' on the selfish landowner. He who can join house to house, and lay field to field, when he knows, and long has known, face to face, the very man, wife and child whom he has dispossessed, and can drive out by his own simple act his fellow-men to be desolate in their poverty, in order that he may be alone in his riches, may expect a punishment proportioned to his crime. Such men were the nobles of Judah and Israel throughout the land; and the prophet heard ringing in his ears, the declaration of Jehovah, the King of the land, that the great and fair palaces should become as desolate as the peasants' and yeomen's cottages which had made place for them: — the vineyard of ten acres shall yield but eight gallons of wine, and the cornfield shall give back but a tenth part of the seed sown in it." ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — 4: The Year of Jubilee: Land and Liberty

§4. In our "Diamond Jubilee" procession, on 22nd June 1897, the visible embodyments of Samuel's forecast were paraded before the eyes of an admiring public; a procession of rent-eaters and tax-eaters, titled and other, along a lane of forty thousand fighting men. The then Prince of Wales fathered a "Jubilee" fund for postponing the public support and control of the public hospitals. His gracious consort started another fund for giving one square meal for once in a while to some of the beggars and outcasts who people the slums. But a real Jubilee on Old Testament lines would, if carried into practice in Bible-reading England, render five-sixths of the hospitals unnecessary by remedying the social injustices which breed avoidable sickness and cause premature death; and, by establishing equity as the basis of social relations, would abolish the slums, and impose starvation as a penalty only upon wilful and obstinate idlers. To the Hebrews, the Jubilee meant a year's holiday. The Victorian equivalent for this was a day's holiday by Royal proclamation — a holiday for which many workmen had to pay by the loss of a day's wages — and even this (so incurably are we given over to the worship of Mammon) was announced, not as a national holiday, or as a religious holy-day, but as a "Bank" holiday. This was entirely worthy of a nation of shopkeepers, who exploited even a revel of "loyalty" in the interests of Diamond Jubilee Syndicates, gathering unearned increment along the line of route at an "expected," but not always realised, "profit" to the shareholders of thousands per cent.

In England, with its immense wealth and its chronic poverty, with its Empire upon which the sun never sets and its slums where the sun never rises, there is nothing more greatly to be desired than a real Jubilee. Once in every generation the Hebrew people were called to a National rejoicing: not because the courtiers' prayer, "O King, live for ever" had sounded in royal ears for half a century, but because the reign of social justice was being re-established; because the erstwhile disinherited was once more a free man and a citizen. If the principles of the Hebrew land laws were applied under our constitutional monarchy, we could with the greater heartiness "sing with heart and voice, God save the King," because we should no longer fear that a crowd of hungry men might send back, as a sort of dismal echo, the dreary chorus, "We've got no work to do." ...

§ 6. It is plain that, under such a Law, the growth of a wealthy landlord class with large estates on the one hand, and of a landless pauper class on the other, were rendered alike impossible. Although there might be, and naturally would be, inequalities arising from varying degrees of industry, there would be no such extremes of poverty and riches as we are familiar with. The two idle classes — the wealthy idlers of the West end and the starving idlers of the East — which disgrace our modern "civilisation," could not coexist with the equality of opportunity secured by the Hebrew Law. The prayer of Agur, the son of Jakeh, perhaps represents the ideal of such a society. "Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me; lest I be full and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain." "The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep. There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt." A writer in the Book of Proverbs tells us that "much food is in the tilled land of the poor; but there is that is destroyed by reason of injustice," while Isaiah drives the lesson home by his description of the barrenness of the land under monopoly. "There is that withholdeth what is justly due, but it tendeth only to want. ... He that withholdeth corn [and, may we not add, he that withholdeth the land on which alone the corn can be grown], the people shall curse him" "As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool." For "better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice."

146 Le but principal de cette institution etait de maintenir autant de possible l'egalite primitive du partage des terres, de reparer les perturbations arrivees dans le courant de quarante-neuf ans, et de prevenir ainsi le complet et durable apprauvissement de certaines familles plus malheureuses que d'autres (Dict. Encycl. de la Theol. Catholique, s.v., Jubile). "With the consistent administration of this 1aw, a class wholly without property would have been impossible in Israel" (Oehler, Theol. of the O.T.,i. 348). Jahn (Biblical Archaeology) well describes the Jubilee as "a regulation which prevented the rich from coming into possession [by "free trade in land"] of large tracts of land, and then leasing them out in small parcels to the poor; a practice which anciently prevailed, and does to this day, in the East." [Heinrich Hein writes: Moses endeavored to bring property into harmony with morality, with the true law of reason, and this he accomplished by the introduction of the Year of Jubilee, in which alienated land that was inherited . . . fell back to the original owner, regardless of the manner in which it had been disposed of. This institution forms the most decided contrast to that "outlawry" with the Romans, where after the lapse of a certain time the actual possessor of a property could not be compelled by the legitimate owner to return the property, if he could not bring evidence to show that he had demanded restitution in due legal form. This last condition left the field open to every possible fraud, especially in a state where despotism and jurisprudence were in bloom, and where the lawful possessor had in his power all the means of intimidation, especially when confronted by the poor man who could not afford the expenses which a contest involved. The Roman was soldier and lawyer at the same time, and he knew how to defend with his glib tongue the property taken from others, often with the sword. --S.].

... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) —Chapter 5: Land, Labor and Learning

§ 5. The seventh year was also called the year of release, "partly because the land was "released" from cultivation, and partly because there was then a general remittance of all debts due from one Hebrew to another, and a manumission of all Hebrew bondservants. The war-cries of monopolists against reform in modern times would have been treated with scanty respect by Moses and the prophets. They recognised neither the right of the landlord to "do what he liked with his own," nor the "sacredness of (private) contract" made against public policy, nor the inalienable right of every (white) man to "whop his own nigger," or to sweat his own wage-slave. The Law aimed at making involuntary and undeserved poverty, as nearly as might be, impossible. When and where, through the vices or frailty of human nature, it crept in, temporarily and in spite of the Law, the most careful provision was made for mitigating its evils. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Appendix

A. The Encroachments of Injustice

The setting up of a privileged class —

"He (the King) will take your fields, and your vineyards and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And He will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give them to his officers,309 and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men,310 and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep, and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king, which ye shall have chosen you" (1 Sam. 8:14-18; cp. Ezek. 46:16-18; Jer. 22:13-17, on which see above, Chap. 7 § 3).

"Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth gifts [i.e. bribes], and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless, neither does the cause of the widow come unto them. Therefore saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts, the mighty One of Israel, Ah, I will ease Me of Mine adversaries, and avenge Me of Mine enemies" (Isa. 1:23, 24).

— leads to land monopoly —

"The Lord standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge the people. The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of His people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat My people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts"(Isa. 3:13-15).

"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the earth!" (Isa. 5:8 [R.V.]; cp. Mic. 2, 3, on which see above, Chap. 3. § 10).

"Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of My people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless" (Isa. 10: 1, 2).

— and extremes of riches and poverty.

"Thus saith the Lord; For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes; that pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and turn aside the way of the meek: … and they lay themselves down upon clothes laid to pledge every altar, and they drink the wine of the condemned in the house of their god" (Amos 2:6-8).

"For among My people are found wicked men; they watch, as fowlers lie in wait; they set a trap, they catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit; therefore they are become great, and waxen rich. They are waxen fat, they shine: yea, they overpass in deeds of wickedness: they plead not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, that they should prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge. Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord: shall not My soul be avenged on such a nation as this?" (Jer. 5:6-29 [R.V.]).

B. The Effects of Land Monopoly

The denial of equal rights in land drives drives men to the least productive soil — produces poverty — hunger in the midst of plenty — homelessness — misery in overcrowded cities — crime — and black despair.

"There are that remove the landmarks;
They violently take away flocks and feed them.
They drive away the ass of the fatherless,
They take the widow's ox for a pledge.
They turn the needy out of the way:
The poor of the earth hide themselves together.
Behold, as wild asses in the desert
They go forth to their work, seeking diligently for meat;
The wilderness yieldeth them food for their children.
They cut their provender in the field;
And they glean the vintage of the wicked.
They lie all night naked without clothing,
And have no covering in the cold.
They are wet with the showers of the mountains,
And embrace the rock for want of a shelter.
There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast,
And [R.V.m.] take in pledge that which is on the poor:
So that they go about naked without clothing,
And being an-hungred they carry the sheaves;
They make oil within the walls of these men;
They tread their wine-presses, and suffer thirst.
From out of the populous city men groan,
And the soul of the wounded crieth out:
Yet God imputeth it not for folly.
These are of them that rebel against the light
They know not the ways thereof.
Nor abide in the paths thereof.
The murderer riseth with the light, he killeth the poor and needy;
And in the night he is as a thief.
The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight,
Saying, No eye shall see me:
And he disguiseth his face.
In the dark they dig through houses:
[R.V.m.] Which they had marked for themselves in the daytime;
They know not the light.
For the morning is to all of them as the shadow of death;
For they know the terrors of the shadow of death.
(Job 24:2-17 [RV.]). ... Read the whole appendix, including footnotes

1. Land: The Hope of the Oppressed on Every Continent

At the start of the 1990s, while the Berlin Wall and the authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe toppled, Latin American communities and clergy who were operating under the banner of liberation theology began throwing off the yoke of oppression.

The uprising of subjected peoples around the world lends immediacy to the search for genuine liberation. While many emphasize political matters, equally critical are the ethical and economic underpinnings of liberation. To ignore these will likely result in a tragic disillusionment for the people who have made the enormous sacrifices to chart new courses.

In How the Other Half Dies, Susan George wrote that "The most pressing cause of the abject poverty which millions of people in this world endure is that a mere 2.5% of landowners with more than 100 hectares control nearly three quarters of all the land in the world - with the top 0.23% controlling half." To recognize this social plague for what it is, and to avert a backlash of despair, requires a clear understanding of two great themes: the Promised Land and the Wasteland.

The Promised Land is the hope of the landless, literally, land, the gateway to opportunity. Abraham in Mesopotamia and the Israelites in bondage in Egypt so wished for their own land that they left homes and familiar surroundings and risked death to seek the distant place God had promised, a land rich in milk and honey, where a day's labor would put food on the table and allow their children to grow into adulthood. This exodus pattern has been repeated over and over, from the migrations of prehistory to the boat people of our day. For centuries, immigrants have poured into the Americas, looking for the inheritance denied to them in the Old World — their portion of land.

But the Promised Land is not so much a geographic place as it is a hope and a vision of a just social order. Modern society has many wondrous features, but it certainly is not the Promised Land in its full glory. Indeed, we are "modern captives" who sense the Promised Land as a primitive instinct, as a deep longing, and as a cry from the depths of our captivity that the world should be different.

All of us, no less than the Hebrews in Egypt, are captives of structures imposed upon us. To enslave people, today as three thousand years ago, is to rob them of the value of their labor. Millions of working people living in severe poverty are robbed of the fruits of their labor. Through various forms of exploitation, especially the monopolization of land rights, large segments of humanity are oppressed, dehumanized, held in bondage. One factor enabling governments to legalize land theft and lend respectability to exploitative landlordism is the general silence of religious and intellectual leaders about humanity's common rights to land.

We begin to penetrate and overcome this silence when we realize that the Wasteland is wasted land, unfulfilled potential, producing no "milk and honey." Speculators in both urban and rural areas hoard land on which the hungry, the homeless, and the jobless could feed, shelter, and employ themselves. Keeping valuable lands idle causes artificial shortages that drive up rents which poor people must pay for poor land. Land hoarding deserves much of the blame for creating the Wasteland: it forces people into the "desert." There, people find the oases controlled by more land monopolists who must be paid a ransom for access to nature's life-sustaining water. And as we will see, the primary focus of Biblical economic laws was the prevention of precisely this sort of usurpation of God's gifts to all creatures.

The midbar, the biblical Wasteland, is only part desert. It has towns and pastures, but it lacks the "fullness of life." This anomaly is mirrored in the modern Wasteland, crowded with factories, skyscrapers and mansions — along with ugly blight and squalid slums.

The point of departure of liberation theology is the recognition of the awful fact that millions lead subhuman lives. The rural landless seek refuge in cities, often becoming squatters in barrios or favelas with open sewage and no safe water supply. They may earn fifteen dollars a month if they find work at all. Children live in the streets and go to bed hungry. Illness and drought, and even complaining of their lot, may lead to premature death. And they can see the Mercedes behind the iron gates of walled mansions. (Ironically, mercedes is also a Spanish legal term denoting title to a large grant of land.) Like poor Lazarus in the parable of Jesus (Luke 16:19-31), they survive on the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. When judgement comes to the rich man, he receives no mercy because he had shown none. ...

6. Suffering in the Wasteland: Independence — or In Dependency?

The Wasteland is a disturbing transition zone between Egypt and the Promised Land, between bondage and liberation. So Latin American today, in its second century after independence, finds itself in a wilderness between colonial subjugation and genuine self-determination.

Liberation theologians point to institutional evil, rather than individual evil, as the major factor keeping the poor trapped in the Wasteland. They shift the critical focus from problems caused by evil leaders to the oppression caused by large impersonal forces. And they further point out that these forces are not to be found solely in developing nations. (For example, in most societies, even developed ones, male-dominated social structures dehumanize women.) They remind us how a military-industrial complex, multinational corporations, government bureaucracies, giant banking centers, or other powerful institutions or organizations may depersonalize citizens, depriving them of effective control over their own lives.

The 1950s was an optimistic decade of developmentalism. But by 1967, Pope Paul VI questioned this optimism in his encyclical, Populorum Progressio. He saw rich nations developing quickly while poor nations developed slowly. He saw discord between people and nations arising from glaring worldwide inequalities of power and possessions. These conflicts arose in part, the Pope said, from too narrowly conceiving development as limited to economic growth. He called for broadening the goal to promote the good of every person, with emphasis on the whole person.

While in parts vague and offering no radical solutions, the Pope's encyclical nevertheless dramatized how poor nations may be held captive by economic dependence on rich ones, and served to correct a popular belief that economic growth alone is sufficient for progress.

Four years later, Gustavo Gutierrez raised a more substantive critique of developmentalism in his epochal work, A Theology of Liberation. As he saw it, underdevelopment, instead of being a step on the way to progress, is really the historical end-product of the economic expansion of the great capitalist countries. The amount of fat of wealthy nations is directly related to the amount of hunger of poor nations. Thus the first step toward liberation must be to sever the bondage of dependence. Gutierrez did not purport to be stating anything original, but simply advanced, in a theological context, ideas drawn from Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and other secular Latin American social scientists who had produced various systems of dependency theory, based, in some cases, on Lenin's doctrine of imperialism.

It would be fatuous to deny that some of Latin America's poverty is traceable historically to the operations of First World companies and to the intervention of First World governments, as dependency theory holds. Due to the influence of Gutierrez and later Boff and others, dependency theory became a cardinal tenet of liberation theology. However, the theory is now recognized by Boff and Gutierrez as being of questionable value as a key to the solution or even diagnosis. Gutierrez now writes that the theory "does not take sufficient account of the internal dynamics of each country or of the vast dimensions of the world of the poor."

The existence of dependence does not automatically justify the charge that it stems from exploitation. This charge assumes a zero-sum situation where one region can increase its wealth only at the expense of other regions, which is to overlook the evidence that the world's wealth is not static but constantly being magnified by human enterprise. Economically, Canada is heavily dependent upon U.S. trade and investment, yet its standard of living is among the highest on earth — due, in no small measure, to precisely that trade and investment. Albania, by contrast, was until recently the least dependent of all nations; under Enver Hoxha it followed a policy of almost total isolation, and neither traded nor maintained diplomatic relations even with other Marxist states. Yet its standard of living was the lowest in Europe — due, in no small measure, to precisely that policy.

Insofar as dependency theory is (in a limited sense) analytically correct, the social ills to which it calls attention could be substantially dispelled by the proper allocation to the public of land and land value, or rent. Instead, most of the land rent is misappropriated by foreign corporations or domestic land-owning oligarchies. We will return to this very important point in Chapter 8. ...

8. Power in the Wasteland: Understanding Essential Relationships

Many liberation theologists ignore the role of land ownership and do not even include land in the indexes of their books. Yet none would deny that land hoarding and land access are fundamental issues of justice and economic development.

The following two passages by Henry George, the economist who made the most definitive statements on land's role in political economy, illustrate the fundamental characteristics of land that are missed or ignored by modern economic analysts of the left and the right:

Does the passenger who enters a railroad car obtain the right to scatter his baggage over all the seats and compel the passengers who come in after him to stand up? ... We arrive and we depart... passengers from station to station, on an orb that whirls through space — our rights to take and possess cannot be exclusive; they must be bounded everywhere by the equal rights of others. Just as the passenger in a railroad car may spread himself and his baggage over as many seats as he pleases, until other passengers come in, so may a settler take as much land as he chooses, until it is needed by others — a fact which is shown by the land acquiring a value....

On the land we are born, from it we live, to it we return again — children of the soil as truly as is the blade of grass or the flower of the field. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and he is but a disembodied spirit. Material progress cannot rid us of our dependence upon land.

Beneath all ideologies, there are basic factors and relationships that underlie economic behavior. To understand the (otherwise inexplicable) omission of attention to land's economic importance, it is useful to go back to these basics.

• The term "Land" refers to the whole material universe, exclusive of people and their products. Not the creation of human labor, yet essential to labor, it is the raw material from which all wealth is fashioned. It includes not only soil and minerals, but water, air, natural vegetation and wildlife, and all natural opportunities — even those yet to be discovered. It is a passive factor of production, yielding wealth only when labor is applied to it.
• Labor includes all human powers, mental and physical, used directly or indirectly to produce goods or to render service in exchange. Labor is often thought of as work that is done for hire, at fixed wages, mainly excluded from the risk-taking and decision-making that is normally classed under the heading of "entrepreneurship". Yet labor, properly understood, includes all human exertion in production — including mental exertion. The payment to labor is called Wages. And it is important to remember that the payment, or return, to labor does not include any returns that are the result of monopoly.
• Capital is the economic term that is most profoundly misunderstood and confused. For the term to make sense in any systematic analysis of wealth distribution, we must define capital in its classical sense as "wealth which is used to aid in further production, instead of being directly consumed." Since production is not completed until the product is in the hands of the consumer, products on their way to market, or "wealth in the course of exchange," are also considered capital.

Now, the objective of all economic behavior is the satisfaction of human desires. Human beings always seek to satisfy their desires with the least exertion: this self-evident proposition lies at the heart of our concepts of economic value and exchange. The primary thing needed for satisfaction is, of course, the tangible things, made from natural resources, that satisfy human desires and have exchange value. Things that meet these four fundamental criteria are termed "wealth". But money, bonds, and mortgages are but claims upon and measures of this value; they are not the wealth they symbolize.

A clear understanding of these basic definitions points immediately to the primacy of land as an economic factor. Human beings have inescapable material needs of food, clothing and shelter. Regardless of how long a chain of exchanges they may pass through in a modern economy, these things ultimately have their source in the land; they can come from nowhere else. Human beings need land in order to live. But if we must pay rent to a private land "owner" for access to the gifts of nature, it amounts to being charged a fee for our very right to live.

Land's value goes up when population increases and technological and economic development make labor more productive. Those who "own" land often withhold it from use, expecting to capture its increased value in the future — thus, the possession of land enables people to take an income that they did nothing to produce.

Speculative withholding of land has disastrous consequences. Peasants who seek land on which to survive are pushed out to poorer and poorer lands. These "sub-marginal" lands become their alternative place for self-employment. With such a poor alternative, they have no choice but to accept very low wages. Rent — the payment to landowners — absorbs more of the wealth produced on all sites.

Land speculation also prevents development near the center of cities, pushing it to the outskirts while the center decays from neglect and slums increase. The "sprawl" engulfs farms and forests, even as it raises the price of land, making use and development more costly.

Rapid destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil dramatizes how the unnatural phenomenon of sprawl has an ominous worldwide impact on the environment. In Brazil, ten per cent of the landowners own 80 percent of the land, while one million peasants are forced off the land each year. And a mere one per cent controls 48 percent of the cultivable land. The only place in Brazil where there is land for the taking is in the Amazon rain forest. The destruction of the rain forest is caused by a system that perpetuates artificial land shortages. Nearly four-fifths of Brazil's arable land is covered by sprawling latifundios, most of which are held by speculators who produce nothing.

Here is the root cause of poverty. When laborers are faced with the choice of either bare subsistence wages or land that can barely maintain life, labor itself is marginalized and cannot effectively bargain on its own behalf. Wages, generally, on all land, are driven down toward the point of bare subsistence. Returns to capital are also depressed for the same reason, deterring investment. When this is carried to an extreme — when people can no longer afford the goods being produced and when there is little profit in applying capital — the economy collapses. The inflated land market, on which the speculative frenzy has fed, collapses too.

Since the Great Depression, such total ruin has been minimized in more developed nations through Keynesian measures: monetary expansion, massive public works and welfare programs. In Third World countries, such Keynesian expedients, which support high speculative rent levels, work only if demand for exports is strong. When that demand weakens, the weight of external debt becomes so crushing as to defy redemption.

The Third World debt crisis is taken by many as the clearest sign of the correctness of dependency theory. It is asserted that Western moneylenders have extended loans to corrupt regimes, knowing that the nations' peoples would have to sacrifice to bear ever-increasing burdens. But when we recognize the land problem as the basic cause of the kind of economic collapse that has led to the "foreign debt crisis", it becomes clear that Western financial interests did not create those maladies but rather exploited the hapless economic policies of developing nations for their own gain.

Some defenders of the status quo admit that all land titles may be traced either to acts of force or fraud (or to the more respectable-sounding "priority of occupation"). But, they add, we cannot start over; society has for centuries given legal sanction to private landed property. Innumerable contracts have been executed on the basis of this sanction, and these include the good faith purchase of land. For society to withdraw this sanction, they claim, would be a breach of trust.

The passage of time, however, cannot turn a wrong into a right. Kings and popes and governments never had the moral right to vest in perpetual ownership what God intended for the benefit of all. If the acquisition of a benefit under the law were to establish such a vested right, no law could ever be amended, since it would invariably work to someone's disadvantage.

Obviously, change that further rends the fabric of society is usually self-defeating. And the vast majority of beneficiaries of unjust structures — the beleaguered middle classes — are not intentional wrongdoers but passive recipients of unearned wealth from a flawed system they did not create. The dismantling of these structures, therefore, should, whenever possible, be done in ways that avoid excessive hardship for them. But it must be done.

... Read the whole synopsis