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In this episode Trent offers three reasons why Christians cannot be socialists.
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Transcript:
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Openly socialist political candidates are winning elections. And they claim Christians should support their agenda. But in today’s episode, I’ll share three reasons why Christians cannot do that. Because, as Pope Pius C11 said, religious socialism, Christian socialism are contradictory terms. No one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.
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Notice the Pope said, a true socialist. When a lot of people say they support socialism, they aren’t talking about actual socialism. They usually refer to countries in Scandinavia that have universal health care, free college and massive welfare programs funded by high taxes. But this isn’t true socialism. Sweden, for example, has more billionaires per capita than the United States.
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All that Ikea money has to go somewhere, right? And here’s the Prime Minister of Denmark saying the following.
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I know that some people in in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens.
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But it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.
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Socialism is not about what government does per se, because these European countries are not socialist and they have large welfare states. True socialism is about what government lets us as individuals do. The Dictionary of Economics says socialism refers to a society where the major part of the means of production of goods and services is in some sense socially owned and operated.
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Let me repeat. Socialism is not about what government gives to individuals. It is about what the government does or does not take away from individuals. When government prevents individuals from creating businesses that can grow through the exchange of reasonably priced goods and services, and says the state must control this part of society, then this is socialism. That was the common denominator in truly socialist countries like the Soviet Union, where most industries were run by the government, which set wages and prices not in accord with market forces, but in accord with their own central economic planning, which often cause shortages and infamous bread lines.
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Though back in 1985, socialists like Bernie Sanders tried to pitch this as a good thing while defending the communists running Nicaragua.
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except during the same period, other poor countries with freer markets like Costa Rica and Honduras did not have to ration food, and the Sandinistas policies discourage farmers from producing adequate food supplies. The same thing happened in Venezuela, where businesses and farmland could be by the government for virtually any reason and resulted in less food being produced.
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Yo, Desarrollo. I developed all of this using my own intelligence and my own labor. And now that everything is going well, the government comes along and steals it from me, strips me of my land and my ideas.
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The situation got so bad that Venezuela forced people to work in farms to produce food, but there were still rampant shortages, which caused millions of people to flee the country. This is probably why socialist politicians in the US prefer to call themselves democratic socialists, and they promote policies that don’t resemble full fledged socialism, but they do have many socialist elements embedded within them, as we’ll see.
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But before I show that, I need to make two things clear. First, the Council of Trent is not funded through socialist tax dollars. It exists because of voluntary gifts from viewers like you. So if you get head over to Trenton Podcast and consider supporting us for as little as $5 a month, I would greatly appreciate it. And number two, a lot of people say that Christians in the Bible practice socialism.
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So there’s nothing wrong with socialism, but that’s false. The Council of Trent exists because of voluntary financial gifts from our social community, but that doesn’t make us socialist. Likewise, the early Christian community existed because of the generosity of its social community. But that wasn’t socialism either. Socialism is when the government mandates that everyone renounce their private property, so that all means of creating wealth are owned by society, which usually ends up being government bureaucrats.
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Even in the New Testament, the apostles never mandated a tithe, and Saint Paul said this was because each one must do as he is made up in his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
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Acts chapter two does describe common life among Christians who have been expelled from the synagogues, but does not say all Christians, much less all people, are required to live this way. Pope Benedict XVI said this
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as the church grew, this radical form of material communion could not in fact be preserved.
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But it’s essential core remained within the community of believers. There can never be room for a poverty that denies anyone what is needed for a dignified life.
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But just because a communal way of living might work for a family or a monastery, that doesn’t mean it would work for a country. A family can survive if all of its food is kept in one place in the kitchen that people can freely access. But a city would starve if all its food were kept in one building that everyone could freely access.
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And that’s where socialism fails. In fact, Christians cannot be socialists for three reasons. First, socialism approves the sin of theft.
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The seventh commandment says thou shalt not steal. But Karl Marx said the goal of communism was abolishing private property and non-Marxist. George Menard Shaw said that he worked for the extinction of private property. If an economic system is based on stealing what rightfully belongs to someone else, then obviously Christians cannot support it. Even though the Bible doesn’t forbid by name and economic system developed thousands of years later, the living teaching authority of Christ’s Church is able to apply its moral teachings to new and novel problems.
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That’s why in the 19th century, Pope Leo X
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spoke of the inviolability of private property and said the main tenet of socialism the community of goods must be utterly rejected.
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In response, socialists will say that they don’t want to take away anyone’s personal property like your favorite cowboy boots. However, if you own something that creates wealth like a cowboy boot factory, even if you saved and reinvested money to create it, then you don’t have a right to this private property. Instead, private property that creates wealth should belong to everyone, so that prices for its items and wages for its workers are set fairly.
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For socialists, the government taking this is not stealing. It’s preventing capitalists from stealing profits that belong to workers. In argument, the church is always rejected. In the 19th century, private wealth creating property for the average person often took the form of land, and socialists believed the land should be communally owned, so no one was disadvantaged. But Pope Leo said this was a form of theft because a person can rightfully own productive property by transforming it through his own labor.
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The Pope wrote the following.
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Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money and for greater security, invests his savings in land. The land in such case is only his wages under another form, and consequently a working man’s little estate thus purchased should be as completely at his full disposal as are the wages he receives for his labor. But it is precisely in such power of disposal that ownership obtains whether the property consists of land or chattels.
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Socialists. Therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources, and of bettering his condition in life.
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while land may not be popular private property today, the same principle applies to anything a person might invest in to generate more income beyond just what he needs to live for the day, such as business or real estate investments. Leo also said of private property
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that the state may not absorb it altogether, and the state would therefore be unjust and cruel if, under the name of taxation, it were to deprive the private owner of more than his fair.
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If human beings were unable to keep and spend their excess income beyond what was needed to survive each day, then their lives would resemble
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animals in a zoo who wait for their keepers to bring them meals, and not as free creatures who can plan our lives and take care of ourselves. Christians
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cannot be socialists because socialism promotes the sin of theft and debase as a man’s ability to provide for himself and his family in a way that is fitting for a rational creature.
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That’s why socialists have long wanted to abolish inheritances to children. But Pope Leo said it
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was a sacred law of nature for a father to perpetually provide for his children. And that quote, in no other way can a father affect this except by the ownership of productive property, which he can transmit to his children by inheritance.
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Now at this point, modern socialists may say it’s not the 19th century, and they don’t want government running everything or to abolish private property. Well, unless they say the quiet part out loud, as now New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani did in a podcast interview where he floated the idea of the state controlling all housing by abolishing private ownership of it.
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if there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.
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But most socialists put forward more modest proposals. The economist Richard Wolf says that he just wants employees to own businesses, not individuals or shareholders. He says an enterprise only qualifies as socialist. Once the distinction between employers and employees within it has been abolished.
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But papaya C11 said the claim that all profits must be given to workers and that owners have no claim to any profits, is an alluring poison which many have eagerly drunk, whom open socialism had not been able to deceive.
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If an employer wants to give away his wealth to his employees in this way, that’s fine. But legally forcing him to do that is another example of the sin of theft. Consider this scenario. Imagine I save tens of thousands of dollars and take the risk of opening a small pizzeria, including the risk of loans to fund the store that I may be unable to pay back.
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The government then requires me to split the profits equally with the three other employees I hire to run the store and make them have equal say in the stores operations.
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But this violates the principle of treating equals equally and unequally among the four of us at the store. Our level of risk in this endeavor is unequal. Only I, the owner, have risk start up capital that I could lose and take it on loans they may not be able to repay. Given this unequal risk, I am justified in receiving an unequal reward or greater profits and at the store becomes successful.
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How is it unjust if my profits continue to expand and this isn’t a fanciful scenario? In 1958. Dan and Frank Carney started Pizza Hut with a $600 loan from their mother. They were so poor they had to use a second hand sign that could only hold eight letters, so they just put the word hut after pizza. 20 years later, they grew the chain to 4000 stores and sold it for $300 million.
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Free markets allow people to become rich not by stealing money from other people, but by enriching other people. It allows entrepreneurs to take risks that generate wealth. In contrast, socialism is desire to avoid. Inequalities like this ends up making everyone equally miserable. Which leads to the second reason that Christians can’t be socialists.
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Socialism contradicts human nature, and so it harms human flourishing.
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George Bernard Shaw said socialism, translated into concrete terms, means equal division of the national income among all the inhabitants of the country.
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as Pope Leo noted, while human beings are equal in dignity, they are unequal in talents, passions and abilities. When workers are free to choose their occupations and how they spend their money, this will always result in economic inequalities, even though all human work is equally dignified.
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The Pope also said that if the state confiscated private property in order to end
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inequality, then, quote, the sources of wealth would run dry. The Pope declared it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in
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You can see this error in socialist today who promote wealth taxes, that tax not earned income, but the mere possession of wealth. Many governments that have done this, like France, end up repealing the wealth tax because wealthy people just leave to avoid paying it, thus causing the sources of wealth to run dry.
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Socialism also fails to understand human nature, because many socialist criticisms of capitalism are really just complaints about having to live in reality.
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Consider this post on X. Genuinely, I do not like the concept of capitalism. I don’t want to work my job every day. I want to make art. I want to be in my garden. I want to feel something.
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Well, I got news for you. What this person doesn’t like is not capitalism. He doesn’t like the life of a human organism that needs food and shelter to live. In order to have such a life, you must either work to obtain those things. Be the recipient of someone giving those things to you like a child, or you must force other people to work and provide it for you.
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And this guy’s attitude would require the third option. Now, you might think that’s one crank opinion, but in 2019, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed the Green New Deal, the original FAQ sheet for the legislation said the legislation would provide, quote, economic security to all those who are unable or unwilling to work. And while AOC had this retracted, other activists have defended the idea.
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But this contradicts Second Thessalonians 310, which says if anyone will not work, i.e. refuses to work, let him not eat. Socialism creates a world where the fruits of many people’s labor is stolen and given to those who are envious of their fruits. But what ends up happening is that the fruit isn’t produced at all, and everyone suffers as a result.
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A perfect example of this can be found in early Plymouth colonists. During the spring of 1621, they were in danger of starving to death, not from harsh weather, as you might have been told in elementary school, but from their policy of communal farming that nearly led to their ruin. The governor of the colony, William Bradford, said the pilgrims thought the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God
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However, the pilgrims then complained about having to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. Wives viewed forced work for other husbands and families as a kind of slavery. Even the older residents who couldn’t work and thus actually had more to eat than they otherwise would have thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. People were mad that because no matter how hard they worked, their situation in life could never improve.
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And they resented neighbors who barely worked but still got the same food rations that they did. The communal farming system could tolerate a few lazy people as long as everyone else worked hard, but once enough people only had incentive to do the bare minimum, then it would only take some bad luck or uncooperative weather to ruin their meager food supplies.
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Fortunately, Governor Bradford recognized that because
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all men have this corruption in them, God and his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.
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The governor responded to the crisis by assigning each family its own parcel of land and letting them keep the food they produced, Bradford recalled. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious.
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so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.
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But time and time again, socialists fail to learn this lesson about communal farming. When the Soviet Union instituted communal farming in Ukraine, about 4 million people died in a famine called the Holodomor, which means murder by starvation. There was plenty of food to feed people.
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The Soviet government simply deemed it unnecessary to distribute it to the Ukrainian farmers. Likewise, between 1959 and 1961, Chinese communist mandated communal farming and food hoarding that resulted in the worst famine in human history, killing over 30 million people. One Chinese historian said, no matter how loud the peasants laments of starvation, those in the top leadership regarded them as the cries of opposition to socialism.
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And in both cases, Western liberals who supported socialism covered up these crimes. The feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said in 1958 that life in China today is exceptionally pleasant. An American journalist, Hans Koenig, writing 1966, said that China was almost as painstakingly careful about human lives as New Zealand when it comes to the Holodomor. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Durante wrote in The New York Times that any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.
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For more on this, see my previous episode on The times that liberals were on the wrong side of history.
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Finally, in many cases, socialism causes harm beyond the unintended consequences of its bad policies. Well, Pope Pius the Ninth called a harvest of misery. Christians must oppose this, but they also must oppose the inevitably necessary authoritarian policies that socialism needs to keep the system running. Which leads to the third and final reason Christians must oppose socialism.
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It’s inevitable. Anti-Human authoritarianism
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it comes to socialist. New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani policies his plan to create government run grocery stores that sell goods at a 30% discount most closely resembles classic socialism. Mamdani isn’t banning private alternatives, but private stores could never survive competitors that have such low prices propped up by tax dollars. This can lead to food shortages and the harvest of misery I discussed earlier.
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Since these low prices will create abnormal demand, and so the stores will have to ration items because people could just make money if they bought these discounted items and then resold them. And if the rationing doesn’t work, then the city may have to ban selling regular food items and will create a black market. The same thing happened in Cuba, where citizens are given ration stamps called libretto for food.
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But because of constant shortages, citizens turn to the black market. But in order for the government to maintain its socialist economic planning, people who sell things like chicken or eggs on the black market can go to prison for up to 15 years. And for those who don’t want to live under this system, many have made the dangerous trek across the ocean to find freedom in America.
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And this is also a common theme in socialist worker paradises, whether it’s Cuba or East and West Germany or North and South Korea, you always find the same thing. The socialist country installs a heavily guarded border not to keep foreigners from illegally entering, but to keep their own citizens from illegally escaping the totalitarian nightmare they’ve created. The Catechism states the church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modern times with communism or socialism.
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But socialist governments always end up totalitarian, regardless of their ideologies, because they have to abolish the free market. In fact, Pope John the 23rd condemned even moderate socialism because it, quote, places two severe restraint on human liberty.
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Even modern democratic socialism would use the mob to enforce its rule. Richard Wolffe says that workers would be democratically and collectively assigned a specific production task, and the Democratic Socialists of America’s website says unappealing tasks will be spread among as many people as possible, maybe not through the KGB, but through an equally menacing committee of Karens who vote on what they think everybody else should be doing for work.
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I wonder also how a group like Catholic Answers or the Council of Trent would fare if it were up to a socialist government and not private individuals like yourself to decide how much funding we deserve. Indeed, this dependance on government violates the catechism teaching that everyone has the right of economic initiative and not just those entities approved by the government.
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This is why Catholicism has opposed socialism through the application of the principle of subsidiarity. This is the belief that a more central authority should sit back or subside, and intervene only when lower local authorities cannot address a problem. Popeye
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C11 said this principle cannot be set aside or changed, and that it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative in industry and give it to the community.
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Pope
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Leo went further, saying there is no need to bring in the state. Man precedes the state and possesses, prior to the formation of any state, the right of providing for the substance of his body. The Pope said the state should help families that have become destitute, but it should not replace the family. In contrast, the Communist Manifesto called for the abolition of the family, and modern communists echo that same sentiment.
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Even so-called democratic socialism leads to the nationalization of industries like healthcare that place lower entities like Catholic hospitals at the mercy of higher entities like the federal government, which could compel them to cooperate with evils like assisted suicide and abortion. That’s why Pope Benedict XVI said subsidiarity is the most effective antidote against any form of all encompassing welfare state.
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So those are three reasons Christians cannot be socialists. And if you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, see mine in Catherine bucolic book. Can a Catholic be a socialist? The answer is no. Here’s why. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.