Third Way Economics

I've recently had occasion to explain that profit itself is morally neutral. It may be justly pursued as a means to receiving value for value--that is, just compensation for the value provided by your labors. A just wage, therefore, ought to include just compensation for value added as well as sufficient to cover the basic necessities of life. Provide more value, you desire more pay. Provide value at the rate of a Thomas Edison or Dagny Taggart, and you deserve a ton of wealth. However, in the course of providing this explanation, I think I may have neglected to emphasize that profit is not the proper end of economic activity. Indeed, homo economicus is an insufficient understanding of the nature of the human person. Therefore, the ultimate conflict of ideology cannot be that between capitalism and communism, since both have the same presumption at their root--that the whole of life is economic relations. Rather, the ultimate conflict of ideology shall always take place on the grand battlefield of disputes over human nature, metaphysics, the nature of truth, and teleology. So we have yet to find a truly human economics, though some have done great work along the way. A sampling:

Most of us have grown up taking for granted a dichotomy of two essential views of mankind: capitalism and communism. These two worldviews exist as the basic premises upon which any idea of society is based. You view man either as a prime mover in the action of his own life, individual par excellence, or as a very small piece of a much larger mechanism designed for the happiness and prosperity of all. The problem with these two views is that they both reduce man to a mere economic unit. Thus, one can rightly see them as two sides of the same coin -- which has not to this point been proven the only coin in the realm. Allan C. Carlson, working closely with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and aided by a grant from the Earhart Foundation in Ann Arbor, sets out to examine social ideas and ideologies of the 20th century that eschewed both capitalism and communism. The result, Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies -- and Why They Disappeared, is a fascinating examination of the will of citizens to self-govern... Carlson's essential idea in Third Ways consists of the primacy of the family and how the family has fallen under the boot heel of what Belloc termed the "servile state." With the majority of property, as well as the means of production, being held by a scarcer minority than ever before, the mass of people in Western society are forced to eke out a living as wage slaves. While Carlson paints a rather bleak portrait of modern life, he finds hope in the examples of the past, and offers this study as a relic of what might have been, and what very possibly might yet come to pass.

There needs to rise up a serious challenge to the existing left/right dichotomy, inherited from the Cold War and still skewing the entire economic debate. A third party with a family-centered, unusual economic stance would be a blessing right now. And in the same review, the source for Scott Hahn's discussion of the trustee family:

The well-known Irish proverb, "It is in the shelter of each other that the people live," has been cited for generations, but it was just decades ago that Carle C. Zimmerman put the shifting shelters of family, tribe, and government through rigorous research and analysis. His renowned study, Family and Civilization, was originally published in 1947. Zim­merman, a former Harvard sociologist, sorted families into three categories -- trustee families, domestic families, and atomistic families -- each with distinctive characteristics. His lavish sweep through history examined these family systems in ancient Greece and Rome; during the rise of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; and through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and both World Wars... Zimmerman hoped that the identification of historic family trends through scholarship and teaching would protect and expand domestic families. But the book's new edition includes essays by Bryce Christensen and James Kurth that dim such hope. Christensen's comments recount the normalization and celebration of today's atomistic social ills by entertainers, academics, journalists, and politicians hostile to traditional families. He claims that "only new St. Pauls and St. Augustines can break the family-destroying spell of progressive utopianism and fortify intellectuals and the general populace with the integrity necessary to resist the gravitation of the burgeoning secular state." Kurth offers an unsettling discussion of postmodernism's denigration of religion and abandonment of Christianity in favor of an amoral multiculturalism: "The political, intellectual, and cultural elites of the West for the most part no longer believe in the values and principles that used to be ascribed to Western civilization, particularly those which were held by two of the traditions which shaped the West, the classical culture and the Christian religion." Kurth's final sentence offers little comfort: "The true answer to the question of what is to be done about reviving the Western family and Western civilization is that God only knows." This distinguished book is full of discouraging words about recurring historical trends that destroy domestic families -- no matter their country, class, or creed. Sunnier souls might discount the impact of increasing numbers of atomistic families around us, but optimists and pessimists alike will be shaken by the scholarly projections in this account.

If anyone can see their way towards forming a third party based around the insights drawn from these two books, it might be well worth all of our time to support it.