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Is there a Catholic model for economics? If so, what is it? If not, what contribution can the Catholic Faith make to economic theory and practice?
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome again to Catholic Answers Focus. Actually, before we start Trent, Jon Sorensen says that you’re really good at promoting your podcast at the beginning and he tells me that I’m really bad at it, and I have to get better at it. So, could you tell me what you do at the beginning of your podcasts, and then I’ll try it and you tell me if I’m doing a good job?
Trent Horn:
I’m happy to do that Cy. At the beginning of my podcasts, I like to thank the people who make my podcast possible. So, those are our patrons at TrentHornpodcasts.com. So, I always make sure to thank them. I’m thankful for our patrons at trenthornpodcast.com. You all make the podcast possible and because of that, you get access to bonus content, sneak peeks of upcoming episodes, the ability to submit questions online for the podcast episodes.
If anyone listening would like to have access to those bonus items, they can become a subscriber for as little as $5 a month. They get access to great content and they continue to help the Counsel of Trent podcasts grow and expand. All of that and more, be sure to check it out at Trent Horn podcast.com. So, I love to thank people and invite more into our podcast community.
CK:
Okay, I’m going to try it.
TH:
Go right ahead.
CK:
For Catholic Answers Focus.
TH:
All right, so let’s hear it.
CK:
Hello and welcome again to Catholic Answers Focus. I’m Cy Kellett, your host and before we get started, I’d like to just thank all those who support us by going to givecatholic.com and supporting this podcast. Trent Horn gives away a lot of bonus content if you’re a supporter, we don’t have any bonus content. We’re going to work on that, but we feel like you still should support us at givecatholic.com or wherever you subscribe, if you would give us a positive review and a five star rating, then that will help to grow this podcast. Thank you so much for your support.
All right, now let’s get started. Hello and welcome again to Catholic Answers Focus. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Great guest today, my friend Trent Horn, who I always speak highly of whenever we are on the air together, I’ve never said anything negative about him as far as anybody knows. He’s got a brand new book, an excellent book, I hope that you will get it, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? This provides us with an opportunity to ask Trent, maybe the followup question to can a Catholic be a socialist, because the answer is no.
With his co-author, Cathleen Pakaluk, he does a great job of explaining why a Catholic cannot be a socialist. But then of course, the next question is, well what can a Catholic be? And what’s kind of a Catholic approach to economics? Trent Horn, thank you so much for being with us this time.
TH:
Thank you for having me Cy, looking forward to being here.
CK:
Did I get Cathleen’s name right?
TH:
Catherine Pakaluk.
CK:
Catherine. Oh, sorry about that.
TH:
Catherine R. Pakaluk, PhD in economics, currently associate professor of economics at the Catholic University of America. It was a real treat to co-author the book with her. I liked the topic we’ll talk about today, to keep it broad, about the intersection between Catholicism and economics, because a lot of people, when they think about where Catholicism intersects with daily life, they usually think about life issues, issues related to human sexuality. But really, a lot of times interacting with the world, it’s more frequent we have economic questions that arise. You stop at a stoplight and panhandlers asking for change. You’re an employer trying to decide what wages you ought to pay your employees or what benefits. Those are all moral questions that involve issues that have been brought up previously in Catholic social teaching. While our book is primarily a critique of socialism, showing why Catholics can’t be socialists, we also do cover issues related to economics, capitalism and other debates Catholics have had about what a Catholic should do and consider when it comes to economic questions.
CK:
I get the strong impression, if you follow, I don’t know, Catholic media and maybe the preaching that we hear at Sunday mass, that Jesus taught and spoke a great deal about human sexuality and said almost nothing about money. Would that be a correct appraisal of Jesus teaching?
TH:
No, certainly not. He did say a great deal about human sexuality. So, sometimes people invert the message and they’ll say that Jesus never mentioned sexuality, but only had a message about economic justice and justice for his workers. Sometimes they invert it and forget in Matthew 5:27 to 28, when Jesus talks about how even lust is adultery in the heart, Matthew 19, when Jesus condemned remarriage after divorce as being a sign of adultery.
So, that is important and should not be minimized. Now when it comes to economic questions though, Jesus was very firm during his time echoing what the prophets had said before, like Amos and Isaiah about the need to have concern for the poor, to not exploit the poor and he had many harsh words for the rich of his time. He said that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Now that doesn’t mean that Jesus taught a universal teaching that wealth is intrinsically evil. When you look at the teachings of the apostles, Saint Paul said in first Timothy 6:10, that it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, not necessarily possessing money itself.
One of my favorite examples of this is the tax collector Zacchaeus. You remember Zacchaeus is the diminutive little guy who wanted to see Jesus and I love the detail in the story, he’s too short to see people because of the crowd and I imagined him jumping up and trying to see everybody. So, he climbs a tree to see Jesus and Jesus is just impressed at the distance this guy’s willing to go to glimpse him. He says, Zacchaeus, get down from there. I’ve got to dine with you in your house. Zacchaeus, this interaction with Christ moves him. He was a tax collector and tax collectors were rich and they became rich by exploiting people. They took more money than was owed in the taxes for them to make their living. So, he said, I will repay everyone that I’ve defrauded and I will give away half my wealth. And Jesus said, salvation has now come to this house. Here’s the thing, for many people in our day and age, if you gave away half your wealth, you could still be quite wealthy, especially among the people who are rich today.
So, Jesus did not condemn the possession of wealth, he condemned the ways that wealth was used. We also have to take into account, I’m sure we’ll get into this in our discussion, the nature of economics and how it has changed over the course of 2000 years. But you’re right, Jesus had very strong words for those who would exploit others and reap harm to them in the realm of economics.
CK:
So, your book has the word socialism in the title. We’re of course familiar with the word capitalism. There are all these other kind of isms, Catholics from around the turn of the 20th century had this idea of distributism. Is there an ism that matches with the teaching of Christ on money?
TH:
Well, when we look at isms like economic theories, the church doesn’t offer us a particular theory of economics, what we might call an ism. What we have, there’s lots of different isms that have been put forward and Catholic teaching gives us principles on economics. But in John Paul IIs encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis, he actually says this, he says the churchs social doctrine is not a third way between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism. So, John Paul II also said, that when it comes to economics, in Centesimus annus, the church has no models to present. He says the only economic models that are real and truly effective can only arise within the framework of different historical situations through the efforts of all those who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic, political, and cultural aspects. He says for such a task, this is in Centesimus annus 43, the church offers her social teaching as an indispensable and ideal orientation.
So, I guess I would make this analogy, there is no Catholic system of economics, just as there is no Catholic system of medicine. So, you look at the deposit of faith, you can’t get a medical textbook out of the deposit of faith. Christ did not teach us all the means to make people healthy. Now, the church does give us principles Catholic medicine ought to follow. Don’t kill innocent human beings, don’t exploit people, make sure you have informed consent from patients, don’t do evil so good may come. So, you have those principles, but you can disagree about the best way to make people healthy. That’s an empirical question. Much the same way there’s no Catholic principles that tell us how to generate wealth. That would be an economic question. But there are Catholic principles that tell us how to do it in just an unjust ways and we have to apply those to any model we come up with.
CK:
Okay. So, I want to ask you about what are some of those principles then? If these principles are present and in what ways those principles might challenge us, because it seems to me that there’s no perfect system. Even if we say, well, I’m very comfortable with the free market. Well, even in a free market, there’s going to need to be reforms and corrections. So, what I’m getting at is, I’d like from you, what are some of those principles that you’re referring to and how might they suggest areas that we need to correct nowadays?
TH:
Right and so when we look at these principles, we have to make a distinction between legal principles and moral principles. So, many people see when they read papal encyclicals and other Catholic social teaching, they may derive from that, that we are given a moral duty, but it doesn’t follow that the state should compel us in that particular moral duty. So, for example, it’s very clear that we have a moral duty to use our excess income to care for the poor. If you do not care for the poor, you will go to hell. There’s no other way to put it. Look what happened to the rich man and Lazarus. If you choose to not help the poor, turn a blind eye to them, you don’t have a place in the kingdom of God.
However, Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum talks about how the requirements to give alms to the poor for example, falls under Christian charity. It’s not a principle of justice to be mandated to the state. So it’s not the state’s proper role to tell us where all of our excess income ought to go. Leo is very clear here for these principles that we have a right to own private property. The state can regulate private property for the benefit of the common good, but it can’t, as he says, absorb it all together, to essentially make the state or the community at large, be the institution that divides up income, assets, [inaudible 00:11:05] property, things like that. So, when it comes to these principles, I’ll go through some of them, one is having, when it comes to legal principles, a strong [inaudible 00:11:12] framework for free market activities. Pope John Paul II says this in Centesimus Annus in section 42.
He says capitalism, okay, if you mean an economic system that recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business in the means of production and free human creativity. But he says you can’t support a capitalism that is not circumscribed within a strong [inaudible 00:11:38] framework, which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality. So, having legal recourse to protect workers, make sure that they are paid the wages that they are promised, that they work under safe working conditions. You go the way back to Leo XIII Rerum novarum, employers have a duty to see their employees not merely as commodities. So, there are roles for the state to legally require this and also roles for the employer to exert a moral duty, to treat his employees, not merely as commodities, but as persons. I love what Leo says in Rerum novarum.
He says the following duties bind the wealthy owner and the employer. He talks about how that justice demands in dealing with the working man, the religion good of his soul must be kept in mind. So, making accommodations for people to be able to work, be able to keep the Sabbath. The employer is bound [inaudible 00:12:34] time for his religious duties, he not be led away to neglect his home and family. The employer must never taxes work people beyond their strength, or employee them in work unsuited to their sex and age, as great and principled duty is to give everyone what is just. So, employers have a duty to provide their employees a just compensation or recompense for their work. Employees have a duty to faithfully carry out their duties for their employer and to not steal from their employer, either overtly or even covertly by just choosing to do shoddy work, for example, and still get paid.
Then consumers have obligations to use their income not to support a consumerist culture, but to spend wisely, to build up the kingdom of God and to not fall into materialism. So, there’s a lot of different principles that would fall under that. But you could sort of divide it up into employers and employees, employees, employers, that relationship, and then the relationship between consumers and producers. I guess you could look at it that way Cy, there’s a relationship between employers and employees and producers and consumers to always act in accord with the natural law.
CK:
So, what is sometimes given as a moral principle of the marketplace is that the duty of a corporation, say a publicly traded corporation is to maximize the profits of the shareholders. That strikes me as unacceptable, given what you just said.
TH:
Well, it would depend how you articulate it. If it is an overarching duty that trumps all other duties, then I believe that could be a morally invalid principle. In fact, Pope Saint John Paul II says that profit has a role in a business, but it is not the only determining factor he says, in the businesses operations. So, I could see how certain kinds of economic views that say that the only duty a company has is to maximize its shareholders profits. Yeah, I would say that’s not in conform with Catholic social teaching because an employer also has a duty to provide a safe working environment for employees, a dignified working environment. It also has a duty to others, for example, it has a duty to the community. So, if a corporation were polluting a communal area, in its goal to maximize profits for shareholders, I would say that would not be a morally valid approach.
So, now the alternative is when some people, they say things Cy like we should value people over profits. They treat profit as if it is a bad thing. Like profit is just a bunch of workers, a bunch of owners just stealing a bunch of money and swimming around in it, like Scrooge McDuck or something. That’d be like saying we should value people over heartbeats. Profit is kind of I guess like a heartbeat almost. If a company is not operating at a profit, they can’t be sustained, unless they receive other kinds of income, unless they’re sustained like the government essentially props them up to operate. But for most companies, if you’re not operating at a profit, you will eventually go out of business. You can’t cover your costs. So, profit is something that is important to focus on to make sure that a company is sustainable, and also so that it can grow and hire more workers because Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimoanno talks about, it’s a moral duty of employers to make sure that access to productive work is made available to as many people as possible.
So, in order to hire more people, you have to get more income coming in, so you can pay these other people. But you’re right that if it’s just a focus merely on increasing profits for shareholders in a company, to the detriment of workers or the community, then that could run a foul of Catholic social teaching.
CK:
Okay. So, there’s a kind of business as a communal good that has a lot of different participants. The consumer is part of the participant in that business, the owners, the employees. So, there is an aspect of this that has to do with the common good in a way, I suppose, that we don’t always talk about in economics. For example, Facebook, very successful company. It’s not irrelevant to ask questions about, how is it contributing to the common good, and how is it detracting from the common good? That’s not an irrelevant question.
TH:
No, it’s not at all. So, I think that people can hold companies to task and they can also vote, in a sense, as to whether they’re going to support a company through their wallets. Boycotts have a long standing history in civil rights movements and other human labor movements to show that if a company is bad for society and for the common good, we’re not going to support it. So, there can be voluntary actions among people to hold companies to task. Look what happened with SeaWorld. People said that they valued the treatment of orcas at SeaWorld, more than the entertainment they would get at SeaWorld. [inaudible 00:17:52] I haven’t been to SeaWorld in a long time. It just doesn’t have like that Disney magic, it’s a lot dirtier.
CK:
Oh man, we are opposites on this. I love SeaWorld and I believe they should keep whales in captivity.
TH:
Really?
CK:
I think it’s good for the whales, it’s good for people. Yes, I’m a total supporter of SeaWorld.
TH:
Well, and you know what, you’re free to make that support known. But many people, after the Blackfish documentary, they didn’t want to support SeaWorld in what it was doing. So, that’s an example where people can voluntarily hold companies to task for behaviors that they engage in. That’s within their right to do. In other cases, you may bring in government action to make sure that a company is upholding the common good and isn’t detrimental to it. So, capitalism of course is a term that was developed by Marxists, it’s not a term that free market enterprise developed, Marx came up with the term. But Adam Smith, the founding father of modern economics, he spoke about the perils of the free market. He talked about how that the free market helps to restrain our selfish nature.
So, it directs our selfish natures towards particular goods. There’s that famous passage where he says, it is not out of the butchers benevolence that you get your meat, it’s out of an interaction, a trade or exchange with him. That the butcher may very well want to sell you rotten meat for a hundred dollars, but he can’t if he has to voluntarily make that exchange. So, when we’re looking at this with the free market, what Smith says is, there are these elements that are involved that can be nefarious. He says that owners, merchants can conspire together to artificially keep prices high. He said that merchants would love for the King, for governors, for the government to come in to protect them so that they can artificially keep prices high. So, there’s a role for government in antitrust laws to make sure that someone does not have an unfair domination over the market.
Though I will be honest, Cy, most monopolies only exist because through government legislation, they prevent other people from entering into the marketplace. The prime example of that would be the medallion system in New York City, for taxi cabs. That the state says, in order to be a taxi in this city, you have to have one of these medallions and because there’s a limited supply of them, they were essentially the taxi drivers retirement schemes. You would buy a medallion from someone and you would be paying it off like a mortgage and it was supposed to be worth like millions of dollars and once you had your medallion, you’d be paying for it your whole life, but you could sell it to the next guy and you would be set because there are only a limited number of taxi drivers you could have. Well, along came Uber and Lyft, and the medallions value completely crashed because that monopoly was no longer allowed to exist.
So, there are these finer elements that come into play. But I believe though that when you do allow people to have access to private property, like Pope Leo XIII and Pius XI teach about the wider access to that prevents these kinds of monopolies from forming unnecessarily and do benefit the common good. But of course, Catholics can disagree. When it comes to Catholic economics, Catholics of good faith can reasonably disagree about the application of certain economic principles. What they can’t disagree on are the major principles like the need to provide, adjust wage, the right to own private property, the moral duty we have to support the poor. So, there are the major principles, but then people could reasonably disagree about how they’re applied.
CK:
Well, let me ask you about the spirit of competition then, because we in the United States celebrate this spirit of competition. But it tends to dehumanize a society, this hyper competition for jobs, for resources. There are many people for whom the competition is really not something that they’re capable of. Then there’s many, many people who can do a job, but they can’t function in a society where everyone’s constantly competing against them. So, this meritocracy, I suppose, that we are so in love with, this idea that competition breeds excellence and that every country is in competition constantly with every other country and every person is in competition with every other person, this seems to me that there’s an element that is profoundly unchristian in this and does not account for the varieties of types of persons and personalities and talents. It means extreme gain for some and it means a lifetime of real bitter struggle for many others.
TH:
Well, I think it would depend, Cy, on what you mean by competition. The idea that people will work towards finite goods and some people will be able to merit more goods than others. I don’t think that competition in and of itself is anything that’s inhuman. In fact, the fact that we have rational abilities that we can apply towards various gains, that in itself is very human because the alternative is, if people are simply given equal proportions of things, regardless of how they apply their talents and abilities, I would actually say that that is inhuman, and people revolt against that. In my book, I talk about how the pilgrims did communal farming. So, no matter how hard you farmed, you always got the same rations. So, people just stopped, they stopped trying very hard because no matter how hard they worked, they always had the same place in life.
Now, I do think that this element of competition, it relates to this principle of equality and inequality that Leo speaks about in Rerum Novarum. So, Leo does talk about this. He says, such inequality as far from being disadvantageous, either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts, and each man as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition. So, what happens, I guess, it is always sad if someone starts a business and then the business fails because other businesses do better and are able to meet people’s needs. But at the same time, we have to look, I think, at a larger picture, how do we as a society meet people’s needs and promote that common good.
It is sad that the milkman lost his job or the horse and buggy driver doesn’t have a job anymore, but it is quite nice for the common good that we have refrigerators and we have taxis that don’t poop all over the streets. So, I think that there are elements where we allow people to freely interact and some will succeed and others will not succeed. We just have to make sure that those who don’t succeed, that they don’t fall into destitution. So, that’s why people who believe in free markets, even people like Frederick Hayek, for example, who’s a very staunch critic of socialism, thought it was perfectly acceptable, in fact necessary for the state to provide a social safety net, to make sure that people who, like you said, are not able to meet the needs of the market in certain ways, that they’re not destitute because of it. Does that make sense?
CK:
It does make sense, but it strikes me that there’s something about, even in the decades since Hayak, there’s a way in which the economy has become so hyper specialized that a person who has skills at a keyboard has access to almost unlimited wealth in many ways. Whereas the person who has skills that were perfectly adequate to make a good living a hundred years ago is pressed against and pushed against, the wage decreasing because of the hyper specialization in the economy. That just simply saying, well, some people make it, some people don’t, this kind of Darwinian attitude about economics is unchristian.
TH:
I would agree with you if the idea is that you look at people who are able to freely offer their talents and gifts to others in economic exchanges. If you have the mindset of, if nobody wants to buy what you’re selling, then tough, that’s just what you’re going to have to deal with. That’s why I think that the role for the community as a whole, and that’s what Leo says in Rerum Novarum, he talks about how man precedes the state. So, the state is not necessary when it comes to the first principle of the family. The family should be able to support itself. But he does recognize that there’ll be cases of individuals and families who are not able to support themselves. Even in his time, it’s like everybody maybe had similar skills, like everybody was a farmer, some farms would flourish, other farms would be hit with a blight.
So, sometimes things are just out of your control and some farms grow because of that and others would have failed. He recognized the role of the state to come in and the community to provide for those in extreme need a destitution. But I would disagree though, about where we as an economy in specialization, I think that has been good for human wellbeing, as an economy, to grow and change so that there is a wider variety of jobs and businesses people can take part in. If you look at employment statistics a hundred years ago, I think it’s something like service industry or information technology made up something like 3% of all occupations. If you wanted to get a job, it was usually mining, agriculture or construction or manufacturing.
It was like one of those four, which could often be very back-breaking, dangerous and not necessarily conducive for human wellbeing. But now, we go a hundred years later, that one sector that only made up 3 or 4%, what you would call service, back then it might’ve been you had some doctors and lawyers basically. That would be like nurses, things like that, government officials, but that was a very small sector of the economy. Now it’s the largest sector, service industry, hospitality, people can set up all kinds of niche shops and industry. Like you said, you have a keyboard and people want to hear from you, they can hear a lot. So, I think that the benefit of widening the scope is better overall. I think your right Cy, that in any kind of economic decision we make or model we make, there are going to be trade offs.
I think that’s something we can’t lose sight of. That any model we choose, whether it’s the Nordic model, well the Nordic model is actually quite free market. The Nordic model with a large welfare state, other models with a more reduced welfare state that are more efficient, that may allow for more economic mobility. There’s certain models, like let’s take socialism. That’s just one that’s off the table because it violates Catholic principles.
But then there are these other models, what we choose to do with the economy, there’s always going to be trade offs. We just have to make sure that the decision we make is not an intrinsic evil, and it’s not one that’s detrimental to the common good overall. But at the same time, it is hard when we see these jobs lost over here and we consider that bad or sometimes even an injustice. But then we don’t think about all the other jobs that were made in other places.
This comes up in the globalization debate that happens a lot in economics and with Catholics. Should we be supporting globalization? People will say, this is depressing wages for laborers in America. That’s debatable. One argument is, it lowers wages for laborers. The other argument is that it allows goods to be purchased with less money, so your wages have more purchasing power. But the trade off there is, you look at the domestic workers whose wages may be depressed or jobs are lost.
What about the other workers on the other side of the world who were previously laboring in a sugar cane field, or were engaged in prostitution or in smuggling or in other occupations that are extremely dangerous, that providing them with jobs that are less than ideal, but far better than what they have now. We have to look at all of the trade offs and always remember the principle, we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good. There’s no system we’re going to implement that makes things perfect but we have to always look at a trajectory to improve wellbeing and to promote the gospel.
CK:
Yeah. One of the most dangerous things you can do is try to perfect the world. You’re going to get in trouble every time. But let me ask you this then, before we have to go today. So what would be the distinctive marks of the Christian person doing business or just living their economic life today? If I’m going to say, yeah, that’s not so much a systematic question, but a personal question. What are the marks of the person who is living at least closer to the gospel than the one who’s living without concern for the gospel?
TH:
Right. I think that’ll go back to the mark of that concern will be what Jesus said. He said, you can’t serve God and mammon. So, the mark there will be, the Christian when it comes to economics, is the person who serves God, they don’t serve mammon or money. They are not obsessed with just simply creating wealth for the sake of having wealth or for spending wealth on their own preferences. The Christian is someone who will serve God first, not money first. However, that does not follow that the Christian is someone who won’t acquire wealth.
For example, you look in scripture, there are many wealthy people who faithfully served God. Abraham had many flocks of sheep. You look at Job. He was a very wealthy man. It was taken away from him, then God gave it back to him two fold at the end of his life, after his sufferings. Joseph of Arimathea was so wealthy he could afford a rock tomb. Normally, Jesus as a commoner would not have been buried in a specialized tomb like that. It’s only because Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man that he was able to acquire such a tomb for Jesus to be buried in.
So, I think that’s principle there to follow. We love God more than money. We love God. We don’t love money in and of itself, but we love what we can use money to do for us. In Deuteronomy 6:5, we have the command, the Shema, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might, or strength. The word might in Hebrew is [foreign language 00:33:01]. [foreign language 00:33:03] in Hebrew, Love the Lord with all your strength, what does that mean? One of its primary meanings is material wealth. Love the Lord with all your material wealth, because if you think, love the Lord with all your strength, we think of it as like, I’m going to do it, I’m going to love God.
CK:
I’m going to make a muscle for Jesus.
TH:
Well, yeah. It’s not like we’re going to love him with all our bench pressing ability or like we think of, all your strength, as just like this 21st century idea of, you can do it. We almost think of love the Lord with all your strength as if it means love the Lord with all your attitude, which would be kind of a 21st century anachronistic way of looking at it.
That rather with your heart and soul, heart and soul are constitutive parts of your being. The heart is the center of the person. The soul is the life giving principle that keeps you alive. Your strength, your [foreign language 00:33:54] is that what you have to be strong in the world. What made a Jew in ancient Israel strong was if he had lots of money. If you have flocks, you have servants, love the Lord with all of that. If you own a large productive business, love the Lord with that and treat your laborers, not merely as commodities, but as persons and always try to do right by them. There’s many ways that employers can do that. There are employee profit sharing programs that employees can be brought into, into companies.
When you look at Chick-fil-A, for example, Chick-fil-A makes sure their employees always have Sunday off, they don’t even work. Business is not even open on Sunday, even though to be open on Sunday would increase their profits for their shareholders. I have no doubt about that. On Sundays, I’m sure that would increase their sales by 20% since most people like to go out to eat on weekends. I always think with Chick-fil-A, I always want Chick-fil-A on a Sunday. I’m driving, I’m like, I should get some Chick-fil-A. Ah, it’s Sunday. So, I feel like that would increase their profits, but they have chosen not to do that, in order to provide a particular good for their employees, and for the community as a whole too. So, I think that that is the principle, to look upon others as people made in the image and likeness of God, and to love the Lord with all your strength and to serve him and to just not serve money [inaudible 00:35:11] of itself.
CK:
Thank you, Trent. I really appreciate that. I really liked that reading of the Hebrew text. That’s very, very helpful. I’d never thought of it. And the whole thing. The book is called, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist. It’s by Trent Horn and Catherine Pakaluk. You can get it at shop.catholic.com or pretty much anywhere where good Catholic books are sold. Thank you, Trent. We’ll do this again with you sometime soon?
TH:
Sounds great.
CK:
All right. Thank you for listening. We appreciate you listening to Catholic Answers Focus. If you want us to support Trents podcast, go to TrendHornpodcast.com, give him some money and he’ll give you bonus stuff. If you want to support us, go to givecatholic.com and we’re not going to give you any bonus stuff. We’re going to work on that though because now that I’ve learned that, we’ve got to start giving out bonus content. That’s the way to do it. See you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.