Profit Cannot Be the Primary Economic Motive
Discussion
Donald P. Goodman III, expressing the social doctrine of the Catholic Church:
"Another conclusion we can draw from our traditional principles on the nature of the state is also very important: free competition is not the only sensible, or even the best, way to organize an economic system. Capitalists, a species of individualists, have long argued that free competition of individuals is the only reasonable way to run an economy. However, the organic nature of the state as a single entity tending toward a single end makes that position untenable:
- Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching.
Catholic social teaching, aware of the true nature of the state, has long taught that although free competition is “justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, [it] clearly cannot direct economic life.”38 While an “economic dictatorship”39 is clearly not the answer, a social order permeated with “social justice and social charity” must be in place to direct all parts of the body politic to the body’s end.
Another conclusion hateful to economic individualism which we can draw from our knowledge of the true nature of that state is that the profit motive is not a good primary director of economic action. Capitalism holds that men should pursue their own personal profits, because acting in this way—to maximize their own profits and minimize their own losses—will end up benefiting society. In other words, being greedy for one’s own gain will benefit everyone else, too.
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Catholic social teaching holds that “men must consider in this matter not only their own advantage but also the common good.” In fact, man has duties beyond his own profit to consider when using his property; and “[t]o define these duties in detail when necessity requires and the natural law has not done so, is the function of those in charge of the State.”46 Men must act economically just as they must act politically: for the common good, not for their own personal gain. Arguing that greed is really charity in disguise simply misses the point. Profit should not be man’s primary motive in economic life; the common good should be. And since the end of the state is to promote virtue and discourage vice in its members, in pursuit of the common good, the state which encourages greed in the hope of getting public benefit, even if that hope is correct, is fundamentally failing in its duty.
Clearly, a proper understanding of the state, its origins, and its ends drastically alters which economic positions are credible and which are not. Yet the nature of the state and its ends are perfectly clear when Catholic social teaching is consulted and submitted to."
(http://distributistreview.com/mag/2010/07/individualism-and-the-state-part-ii/)