Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

capital assets also, a broad dissemination of wealth in the capital sector cannot be attained.
Broad strata within the population only conceive of property in terms of consumption; they
lack the insight that capital assets are a particular form of property which should not be converted
into consumption, since they represent one’s own workplace or that of one’s neighbor.
The more broadly ownership is disseminated the more the functional crises of ownership in
modern society can be overcome or mitigated. Personal responsibility will be strengthened,
and the trend towards the welfare state will be checked. The number of the self-employed will
also rise. In the interest of a broad dissemination of economic responsibility, one may support
the demand that large-scale enterprises not be created for tasks that can be mastered in small
and medium-sized enterprises in an economically profitable way, even if it is to be assumed
as a matter of course that, in many realms, the modern economy cannot dispense with largescale
enterprises. Incidentally, one should not pass an exclusively negative judgment on the
separation of ownership functions from entrepreneurial functions as is common in large-scale
enterprises. For since the exercise of entrepreneurial functions is no longer an exclusive right
of owners, the way to leading positions in the economy stands open for a much larger circle of
entrepreneurially gifted people, which may raise the average level of entrepreneurial performance
to the advantage of the whole national economy. Nevertheless, directors and managers
are and remain the deputies and representatives of owners in spite of the separation of functions.
It would be dangerous to embrace an enterprise institutionalism that would see in the
enterprise a structure fully independent of the owners. The objection often raised in this connection
that ownership of enterprises is connected with social power over the employees was
to a large extent justified at the beginning of the industrial development. Today, in the advanced
industrial society, the so-called ‘free labor contract’ is removed from the agreement of
the individual employer with the individual employee and „predetermined as to its contents“
through, for example, legal protection of youth and women, through the prohibition of child
labor, through social security in the case of sickness, disability, unemployment, and old age,
through the assurance of free time and vacation, through the establishment of works councils,
through the guarantee of the right to co-determination, through the establishment of labor
courts, and so on.
Pope John Paul II speaks in this connection of the „indirect employer“ who „substantially
determines one or the other facet of the labor relationship“ and thus conditions „the conduct
of the direct employer when the latter determines in concrete terms the actual work contract
and labor relations.“ 67
CHAPTER THREE: THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE SOCIAL PRODUCT
Preliminary Remarks
l. As the history of economic ethics teaches, the Christian conscience did not occupy itself so
much in earlier centuries with questions about the meaningfulness and the structure of the
economic order, but did protest since the time of the Church Fathers in an often passionate
way against usury, deception, exploitation, and overcharging in the process of economic distribution.
The treatise, On Just Prices, occupies a large space in the economic ethicists of
those centuries.
2. Just as one calls the economically significant earnings, minus expenses, of a natural or juridical
person one’s ‘individual income’ or simply ‘income’, so one designates the economic
67 Laborem Exercens n.17.
118