5. Go Cards!
4. When Fred Noltie blogs, the people benefit. All too brief and infrequent, my friend! I shall pray that other mindless toils are destroyed, as God wills.
3. We're observing a Feast of St. Louis IX, King of France. If I were half as good as King Louis, everyone I know would be better off.
2. Pope Leo XIII=Awesome.
1. New pick-up line: "I read Rerum Novarum, and it changed my life." No, seriously.
4. When Fred Noltie blogs, the people benefit. All too brief and infrequent, my friend! I shall pray that other mindless toils are destroyed, as God wills.
3. We're observing a Feast of St. Louis IX, King of France. If I were half as good as King Louis, everyone I know would be better off.
2. Pope Leo XIII=Awesome.
1. New pick-up line: "I read Rerum Novarum, and it changed my life." No, seriously.
Comments
One of Leo's inspirations on the social question was Leon Harmel, an entrepreneur/industrialist in a rural area of northern France. He had a complex pay scale. He paid based on the type of work done, the time worked, and the quality of the worker's output. Then he would add additional pay in the form of a stipend for fathers in order that the mothers did not have to work. As a result, most of the wives at his factory did not need to work and could care for the children and the household.
That would not work in American today, I am afraid, because I think it is against the law to pay more to a family man than what one would pay to a single man doing the same work. Economically, this tends to exclude the family from the big picture of exchange, for all workers are from the point of view of capital just social atoms! This is reinforced with wages become lower and couples choose to work instead of having children. Then the cost of living rises to capture more of the couple's joint earnings, etc. So it seems to me, as an amateur to the modern economics side of things.
Later encyclicals call for creative ways of fixing economies which do not give a family wage, such as government stipends for mothers.