Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

There was never a golden age such as that which Don Quixote describes in his famous speech
to the goatherds: „O happy age, happy century, to which the ancients added the epithet
‘golden’...because the children of those blissful days did not yet know the two words ‘mine’
and ‘yours’. Everything in that holy age was a common good and no one needed to do more
work for the sustenance of his or her natural life than to raise a hand and to pick it from the
sturdy oak trees which offered it with generous hospitality in its sweet, ripe fruits.“ 2
Man’s normal response to the tension arising from having needs which must be met from a
limited supply of goods is this: he seeks to deal sparingly and economically with scarce
goods, i.e., to conserve them, in order to obtain the greatest possible use from those that are
available.
In the industrial age, people have dealt in an almost prodigal way with many economic goods
such as the sources of energy. In the future, energy sources (coal, crude oil, natural gas, wood,
water power, nuclear fuel) must be used sparingly and prudently. Economic growth must take
place in an ordered and controlled way.
4. Collaboration and Division of Labor.
Since man, left to himself, would be impotent against the forces of nature and could scarcely
cover in the most primitive way his elementary need for vital goods, he banded together with
other people for this purpose from the very beginning. The essential orientation of man to the
interpersonal other and to society reveals itself not least in the realm of the economy. Today,
the common character of economic activity encompasses the whole earth. Through an amazing
co-operation between the different branches of the economy, peoples, and continents, a
co-operation based on the division of labor, people are seeking to exploit the treasures and
forces of the earth ever more completely, so that it has been possible to raise the material
standard of life in a way unimaginable in earlier times. At the beginning of the industrial development
(l776), Adam Smith vividly described to what degree the production of goods is
increased through the division of labor: by himself, an unskilled worker „could scarce, perhaps,
with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty.“
But now „one man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a
fifth grinds it at the top for receiving a head,“ and so on. „I have seen a small manufactory of
this kind where ten men only were employed; they could, when they exerted themselves....make
among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.“ 3
The division of labor and the exchange of goods presuppose the monetary system as an indispensable
means of buying and selling, of measuring value and of credit transactions, which
must be ordered through a monetary policy to the common good in such a way that the stability
of prices, incomes, and occupations remains guaranteed.
§ 2 Consequences for the Material Objective of the Economy
From the foregoing considerations, two consequences follow:
l. „Man is the source, the centre, and the purpose of all socio-economic life“(Gaudium et spes,
63). The meaning of the economy does not lie - speaking purely formally - in mere action
according to rational economic principles, or in technocracy, or in mere profitability, or in the
highest possible material happiness of the greatest possible number of people. It would also
be erroneous to define the economy as the satisfaction of demand through the allocation of a
corresponding supply; for then the construction of a concentration-camp torture chamber
would correspond to the material objective of the economy because a corresponding demand
would be present on the part of an oppressor. The material end of the economy consists rather
in the permanent and secured creation of those material preconditions that render possible a
2 M. de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote (Madrid, 1927) I:326.
3 A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, bk. 1, chap. 1.
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