Some time after, those with the muscle grabbed most bits of the earth that were worth having, fenced them off, and then allowed their fellow humans onto "their land" only when they had paid the rent they could wring out of them.
The same people then took control of the political system, entrenched their position (literally so) and fixed the laws so the robbery was concealed in a cloak of respectable legality. In reality, it was nothing more than a polite form of chattel slavery.
Over the centuries, this theft led to accumulations of money in the pockets of landowners, who, when the industrial revolution came, were the only ones able to take on the role of suppliers of capital, thereby enriching themselves still further.
And it still goes on under a veneer of civilisation, with sufficient being conceded in welfare handouts - state charity - to stave off revolution.
In the 107 years of Catholic Social Teaching, this fundamental evil has scarcely been spoken of. But a new Social Teaching encyclical is due out later this year. Might it be that this Holy Father will remedy the omission?
I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
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