You are currently logged-out. You can log-in or create an account to save favorites and more. more info

Prof. Goetz Briefs

00:00
00:00
Audio loading...
Serial: 
MS-00451

AI Suggested Keywords:

Summary: 

October-November 1958

AI Summary: 

The talk discusses the evolution of business ethics from the perspectives of ancient philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas, highlighting their emphasis on justice and fairness in economic transactions. It explains the transition towards Baroque ethics during the 16th and 17th centuries, as moral theologians began teaching marginal ethics, adapting to new economic realities brought about by colonialism and the Reformation. The speaker further explores how these changes led to modern capitalist structures influenced by Enlightenment deism and economic liberalism, citing Adam Smith's philosophies as pivotal. The discussion also critiques the modern welfare state's inflationary trends and the erosion of a metaphysically grounded moral framework, advocating for a return to natural law philosophy.

  • St. Thomas Aquinas’ Work: Emphasizes medieval concerns with justice in business, focusing on equitable exchanges and the moral determination of prices based on labor and expenses.
  • Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics: Reflects on foundational ideas of equivalent value in trade and the need to regulate merchants to safeguard communal welfare.
  • Thomas de Mercado’s "Summa de Tratos de Contratos": This 16th-century work marks a shift in thinking about business ethics, specifically addressing the conduct of merchants in non-Christian territories.
  • Adam Smith’s "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "The Wealth of Nations": Establish philosophical underpinnings for economic liberalism, advocating for the pursuit of self-interest as beneficial for societal happiness.
  • Enlightenment Deism and its Influence: Provides a backdrop for Smith's ideas, emphasizing a rational and individualistic approach to economic ethics devoid of traditional religious constraints.
  • Machiavelli’s Influence: Cited as an example of political shifts towards pragmatic ethics, contributing to a perceived decline in moral standards across various sectors.
  • Walter Lippmann: Mentioned as part of a contemporary movement to revive natural law philosophy, underscoring a potential reorientation towards traditional moral frameworks in response to modern challenges.

AI Suggested Title: Evolving Ethics: From Plato to Smith

Is This AI Summary Helpful?
Your vote will be used to help train our summarizer!
Transcript: 

We sang for Bauerung. Oh, yeah. For Bauerung. And what will you talk about, the relation between? Well, matter of fact, I do not know what I'm going to talk about. That's good. And I entirely on the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and second place, our very reverend Father, a prior here, and I think something will come up in my mind. Now, I told Father Cloud this morning a little story which has the privilege of being a true story. I had published some time many years ago, 1921, a little book in Herder Company in Freiburg, and they had discussed the problem. Why is it that a number of acts in the market would appear to us today as utterly bearable, whereas St.

[01:07]

Thomas and Plato and Aristotle would have condemned them outright as endangering the koinonia, as Aristotle and Plato said, the communitas, or St. Thomas the communitas, Now then, I discussed a particular phenomenon which I called a sub-marginal ethos. And I was quite surprised about the... effect of this little chapter in the book. So one day a southern German industrialist, whom I had met while skiing on the Feldberg, dropped in and said to me, look here, I can give you a wonderful example of this sub-marginal ethos out of my own experience.

[02:15]

We are here in the Wiesenthal in southern Germany, 21 years firms producing staple cotton goods. Very strong competition, prices were unremunerative, and nobody could invest any money in this business. But after a number of years, we observed that one of us began to enlarge his plan to buy new machinery and to show all this outward science of growing prosperity. Now, wait a minute. How is this possible? This fellow hasn't married a rich woman. He has still the old woman. This fellow has got no particular bank credits. No one. He hasn't won in the lottery. Where did he get the money? So there was a great deal of guessing around where did this man get the money to invest here?

[03:17]

And how does it come about that he has to move to invest in a business which apparently is just breaking even at best. And they found out the following thing. They found out that this man put 47 times wolf and wolf into the square centimeter of textile product and sold it at the common 48 wolf and wolf. And in this particular industry, there was a standard measure, 48 times wolf and wolf. Such, such, and [...] such, per square centimeter. And this fellow had found the trick to sell 47 times wolf and wolf, you know, as 48 goods. And of course, on thousands and thousands of square yards, the savings of these two sets,

[04:18]

Both wage, you know, brought him a lot of money. Then this industrialist said to me, you know what we did? I said, I'm really curious what you did. He said, we did the same. I said to him, well, of course, after a few years, the market was just where... It had been before. Oh, yes. He said, this fellow was by 46. I said, what did you do? Oh, I went to 46. And so to 46, good as 48, good. And I said, that must have ended somewhere, because after all, there must be some whoop and whoop. And I said, it ended in 44. And then we made a monopoly, joined the class. Now, this is a very nice story illustrating the point I want to bring home. You see, there's a certain virtue which you might call honesty in business.

[05:25]

That is, if you sell a good as such and such quality good, then you expect to have the same effects tied with this. Now, if there's somebody who cuts the margin you know, by leaving one thread out, or by deteriorating the quality a little bit, you know, or reducing the quantity, the package, a little bit, you know. I call him a sub-marginal businessman. There is a businessman whose ethics, his ethos pattern, is sub-marginal. Those who remain in the line of the 48 standard, I call them marginal because they follow the law accepted nuance. And those who do better and give the public a better commodity for the same standard type, you know, I call them intramarginal representatives of intramarginal ethics.

[06:32]

Now, this is the beginning of the story, and I'm sure you will understand when I use the terms, sub-marginal ethics, intramarginal ethics, and marginal ethics, what I mean here. Now, if you look at the whole path from St. Thomas down to from Plato and Aristotle to St. Thomas up to, let's say, the Spanish great scholastics, you find a profound concern with the problem of justice in so-called business life. There's the fact that they all speak of equivalence, that is, datum et acceptum, in exchange must be of the same value. That what is given, that what is taken, must be value equal. And Thomas tries to show that when all is said and done, labo et expense, that is, labor cost and other cost, are determined the justice of a price.

[07:40]

Aristotle will find the same story. And whenever, and now in the relatively simple medieval world, where everybody knew what things cost in the way of labor and expensive, where every shoemaker knew what were his costs and therefore what were the costs of the next shoemaker, and so all along the line, where there was no capital risk involved, you know, because there was practically almost no capital entailed except a few tools. There everybody was perfectly clear what labor expense meant. Labor expense meant work cost, you know, how much work is crystallized in this particular pair of shoes, and the cost of the leather and what have you. Then we observe, and the same, of course, story with Aristotle, where it makes the distinction between the thematistic care, the market values, you know, and the economia, which is simply household management.

[08:55]

Well, from the 16th century on, there comes a change, and we see that people like Thomas de Mercado, the Spanish, called us Dominican, Sevilla, In 1565, published in the book, a summa di trattosi contrattos, that is a summa on contracts and agreements, you know, in stats. And that was the first time that one of the scholastics wrote in vernacular. Why did he do it? He explained that this book is a prima for merchants. A prima for merchants not dealing with Spanish business or inter-Christian business, but dealing with the ethics of merchants, dealing in the pagan world, in the colonial world. That is Thomas de Mercado, one among the many casualties of the time, Baroque ethics, if you like.

[09:58]

He found out that there are certain phenomena in trade and commerce, and merchandising that do not fit into the traditional pattern of ethics in business. And he sits down at the request of merchants from Sevilla and sits down and explains to them how they should behave, how they may behave when they deal with the non-Christian orbit, when they deal with the Indios, you know, in America, Cuba, or East Indians, you know. There's a different pattern of ethics at last, and it doesn't make any sense now to come with love or an expense in overseas trade, dealing with these far-away countries where just Christian ethics have no institutional framework and have no tradition. And where merchants from Holland and merchants from Spain and traders from England fight tooth and nail

[11:06]

to get the better of everybody else. So you're right, this thing. And here's the question now, what has happened here? In the case of Thomas Mercado, who is typical for a whole period, 16th, 17th century, what has happened here? These barocco scholars, moral theologians, begin to define Not the type of life in business which leads to the perfection and sanctity of the businessman himself. But he tried to show the marginal ethics a Christian, merchant, businessman may shoot to without falling into mortal sin. Without falling into... This is the point.

[12:10]

Something had to be done. And we see the slow evolution towards this land already in Buridanus, you know, in Exodus Lesinus, Antonia to a certain extent, you know, 14th, 15th century. And then comes this onrush in the late Spanish moral theology, where there's a profound concern about the soul of the merchant, the businessman, the trader, you know, the investor, how far can he go without losing his soul? Where his formal emphasis had all been, you know, to teach him, you know, the perfectio vitae, you know, mercatoriae, you know, the perfectio vitae mercatoriae. Now they said, how far can you go? just a fine line store in marginal ethics. These moral theologians teach marginal ethics, and they teach even what appears, compared with the prevailing ethos in European Christian orbit countries, it teaches sub-marginal ethos.

[13:24]

You can go to that point without falling into mortal sin. There begins now this great orientation of ethics towards the minor level, also in other spheres, not only economic life, political life, the same story. Since Machiavelli, you see how the thing is gliding down to get into a situation where a sort of an ethos entropy occurs, makes itself felt. Ethos entropy means simply that the ethos patterns the prevailing ethics in business policy levels begins to slide down, have a trend on sliding down, and establish themselves on an ever-lower basis. Now, is that clear? Yeah. Ever-lower basis. And now, of course, the Church, the Moral Theonish Church, observes these things, and does bend it after Christians more.

[14:26]

I mean... I mean, the Latin countries, Spain, Portugal, and to my extent, Italy, were involved in this whole business, you know, and the church had failed there. Something has to be done. It doesn't make any sense. You speak here now of usuria, you know, and of justum praetium, you know. What is the justum praetium? What is usuria under such conditions, you know? And the scholastic, the later scholastic trial now, done with Americans, periculum sorgtis, you know, wukum cessans, done deferred payments, you know, and all these things as explanations of the rate of interest, which is morally allowed. This is the most interesting thing, you know. It's changed. So if you ask me how does the change, what are the external forces that bring the change around? I would like to say a few words about them, because they're so little known about the great, overwhelming fact that occurred since the 16th century.

[15:41]

The European people, the Christian orbit, had been a sort of peninsula. The bigger part of it was north of the Mediterranean, and Then, by 1453, the Levante path was almost lost. North Africa was lost anyway. So the Christian army was shrinking, in particular since 1453. Now, then in 1492, Christopher Colombo discovered a new continent. And then came Vasco before Gassadagama, then this. Spaniards in South America, Mizarro, Cortez. It was an entirely brand-new continent, the northern part of which was practically unsettled. Canada, United States, down to Mexico, Uganda, practically unsettled. South America was heavily overrun. Australia was practically unsettled. That is, as it had happened here, what had never happened, the history of mankind would extensively know about it.

[16:49]

that certainly the small peninsula of Europe acquires two tremendous empty continents. Now, there we are pressed before in Europe. The mainland ratio was continuously declining. The precious middle mainland ratio was declining. That is, what wasn't an uping for Europe was a decline, economic decline. And that The very moment there comes this discovery of the two continents. And the two continents brought gold and silver. They brought products unknown before, coffee and what's much more important, tobacco, you know, and mice and all sorts of things, you know. And suddenly the European men who up to that time had... lived in a man land ratio of 1 to 14, found himself confronted with a man land ratio of 1 to 500 acres.

[17:53]

And to a precious metal man ratio, I don't know exactly what figures that say, but it was 1 to 3 before it was 1 to 15 now. And then comes this tremendous upswing in European business, shipping, transportation. insurance comes up, production increases, prices go up, of course, on account of the silver inflation, and there's suddenly a tremendous change in this whole affair. At the time when the Reformation had broken out, when anyway the transition, the traditional standards of ethics were already on account of the Calvinistic, not the Lutheran, the Calvinistic Reformation in Holland, England, Scotland, and France. And these things came together, and of course there had been the influence of the Renaissance, ensured a total change in the world outlook.

[19:04]

In these colonial lands, those people held the upper hand, who were not burdened and inhibited, by old ethical standards. And the same holds true for the nations that fought for the possession of these colonial lands. So they had begun to develop entirely new political and economic ethical standards in this newly conquered world. The merchants, the businessmen, the financiers, the slave traders, investors, immigrants, everybody began to... adhere to these new standards which had, in a way, a certain parallelism to the libre examen, to the free interpretation of the Bible, after the formation. Now then, that was the situation which the search in Spain, Italy, Portugal, in other Latin countries, or Latin countries, and region.

[20:13]

And that caused what Shulkin has called the rise of Barocco ethics. Barocco ethics, meaning that particular type of ethics which looks out for the just bearable, acceptable minimum standards of ethical behavior in order not to lose the soul of this new arising, merged with the sense of fading class. Now, it had always been a characteristic of the, up to that time, characteristic of the thought, political and economic thought, that you must not allow any policy and any pattern of behavior that is dangerous to the established community, to the koinonia, as the role Plato said, communitas, in terms of Thomas and the scholastics.

[21:16]

And therefore, you find in Aristotle's politia, in Blatt's politia, in the nomor, you find in Aristotle's, of course, politia, you find the same concern always against the merchant, the businessman. Keep him tight, keep him tight. Because this is the danger The birds and the businessmen are treated as dangerous because they deal with money ad maximi ad lucrum tendant. St. Thomas burned it down in a few words. Mercatus maximi ad lucrum tendant. And so, therefore, you must establish firm rules to keep them out. After all, Plato's politia... is only the attempt to show the essence of his period, the corrupt and democratic and business ethic of his essence of his period, the unmodeled city in which the merchant was kept low.

[22:21]

Was kept low. And so low, and the means of keeping low was to have iron money so that the boy cannot buy a lot of money. Now, there was this 2,000 years development. And suddenly it came the unrush of this new behavior pattern. And there we were. That is, that particular sociological shift, which the scholastics as well, as Platon has tried to avoid the shift towards the businessman, towards the trader, that came the great fact in connection, the great outstanding political and economic fact in connection with the discovery of the two brand new continents. Now, let us look at that in this pattern that developed in this newly opened world.

[23:32]

Well, of course, it was a world in where the Traditional standards didn't hold. The pioneers came here of all sorts. The pirates came, the colonizers, the chartered companies. Everybody wanted to get rich quickly. Get out of it, what was it? Therefore, there was no institutional framework that kept the behavior patterns in line. And everybody could go with such a marginal strategy as far as he could. Unless somebody came and shot him. You know, I hang him. You know? What happened to the kitchen? Now, what is now the pattern? The pattern is very clearly the individual operating in this newly conquered land outside of the Christian orbit. It's the type of a self-determining personality. Self-determined personality. He is that, and because he is that,

[24:35]

He's also the one that is self-liable. If he engages in practices which do not bear out as he tried it, you know, the ill luck is his. If he makes 500,000% profits, also is. Nobody else is. That is, he's liable himself for his actions. No guilt, no cooperation picks him up or backs him up When he fails, what else? The third part of the pattern is that he is inspired by a very keen sense of robust self-interest to the extent of selfishness. And the fourth is that he is continuously in conflict with his like who want to do the same thing as his incompetence. This is the pattern that develops in this colonial world.

[25:38]

Individual self-determination, the businessman, self-liability, motivating forces, self-interest, if not selfishness, and competition among all of them. 16th, 17th century, 18th century. Not a thing had no philosophy back of it. No, absolutely no. It just happened. That was all there was thought. In this new environment, these things just happened. But we observe in the 17th century, 18th century in particular, that a number of Dutch businessmen and traders and investors and English businessmen and traders and investors begin to write little pamphlets. And what do they say in the little pamphlets? They say, well, you know, our European policies are all wrong. All wrong. The real thing to do is to let the business world follow its own cause. Let the businessman do what he likes, you know, what he thinks is profitable for him.

[26:40]

Everybody benefits from it, you know. So there comes Thomas Mann in England. There comes, what was his big French, Godard, I think was his name. There comes John Lennar, Josiah Childs. And Jeremy Tucker, a whole bunch of writers who say, why, this is an interesting thing. Why doesn't the government, why doesn't the church allow us to follow our own interests, you know? And it would prove that everybody's better off. But it had no philosophy back of it. And then came Adam Smith, and he said, this thing has a philosophy back of it. The philosophy had has its religious basis in deism. Now, deism, I suppose I have to explain a little bit, is a sort of a pseudo-theology which came up.

[27:40]

A father of which was so-called, was a certain Herbert of Sherbury, who after his long religious wars in the 17th and 17th century said, now every educated man is... Perfectly clear that it cannot go on that we bust each other's head on a kind of religious dogmas and formulas. Let's be plain and simple now. Everybody believes in God. All right? Everybody believes in God. Now, after a second, everybody believes that God made man. Everybody believes in God. All right. He did that to make man happy. Everybody wants man happy. All right. So what? So we are perfectly read. We can do without a church. We can do without sacraments. We can do without dogmas, you know. Perfectly clear. God has great the word as man. He wants man to be happy. So he ordained man, preordained man, a sort of fashion that man following his interest becomes not only happy himself, but makes everybody happy. He saw this.

[28:41]

R.F. Smith and Voltaire, of course, and all the educated people of the 18th century were these, and believe that that is what I said. Martin Smith looked at this thing, and he found in his dazed basis the ground for an economic philosophy, which sums up in a few words, is this. The government and the churches should keep out of economic affairs and of social affairs and, of course, of political affairs too. No business in there. So there should be no ecclesiastical courts concerning justice of prices and jewelry and whatnot. That's number one, a negative standpoint. The positive standpoint is... It should be recognized that nature, Deusiva natura, that God or nature wants man to be happy on earth.

[29:44]

In order to make him happy, he gave himself an interest and impulse and instincts. Following these interests, instincts, and impulses, man makes not only himself happy, everybody's happy. Everybody's happy. I was very much impressed with this, in parenthesis, with this friend of everybody's happy. In my neighborhood in Chiviches, Washington, I lived a very fine gentleman with a very fine woman. And we used to go there, dancing parties and so on and so on. It was very lush and very nice and very charming. Absolutely nothing of him. Two years later, I met him in Philips. Three years later, I'm serious. He said, Mr. So-and-so... What happened to you? Oh, he said, you know, my wife divorced me and married my friend. And I divorced, no, he's my friend, he divorced his wife, and I married his wife. So everybody's happy. So when I hear the fear that everybody's happy, I go, I always try.

[30:56]

Now then, So it's a little bit better. It's not a thing. I've got a lot of people like of natural rights, the natural rights type of enlightenment period, that nature, or the supreme being, as he says, interchangeably, never says God, or the invisible hand, a sort of providential. Mr. Blathast thinks the range is such a passion that if everybody follows his interests, he realizes, without knowing, the best for everybody else. That's the basic philosophy. Therefore, economic liberalism. Now, on that, of course, he was, I would say, he was a humanist enough do not to go to any lengths with this thing. He found certain flaws, and you feel when you read his two books, The Theory of Moral Sentiment of 1759, and his World of Nations of 1776, you feel that this Scotsman, you know, had certain inhibitions.

[32:09]

You know, he was too much of an humanist to draw all the brutal consequences. But his second generation did, and there came up what we call Manchester. Economics, you know, the utter unsophisticated belief that brutal interest is the thing and nature of God, if they exist, at least the other one, you know, has ordained the world in such a fashion that my interest, the rest, doesn't come. Therefore, you get, in the 19th century, these very evil social consequences of this... natural system of economic liberty. And you see where it came from. It was the reverberation of that ethos pattern that had formed itself outside the Christian orbit in the struggle for these two continents.

[33:09]

It began to hit back now on those nations who were most engaged in colonizing and had the freest and the largest freedom from the medieval tradition, Calvinistic country, you know, and they went headlong ahead and built up their colonial empires and got a better part of what could be earned and gained there for 300 years. There is an ethos pattern that originally was formed in this colonial outside of Christian orbit. Landship begins to become the standard pattern of the Christian orbit, too. That occurs in the 19th century. That occurs in the 19th century. Now, what we've got in the 19th century with this ascendancy of this

[34:16]

marginal sub-marginal ethos pattern was the tremendous social evils of the early decades and generations of the economic of capitalism in the 19th century, out of which grew Marxism, which is best thing of today in the form of politics, and out of which drew two great union movements, A lot of other movements. That is, in this Western world, there was still a protest left that came from the medieval tradition and from the classical tradition. In the Western world, there was, we are left, there was left a big idea, if not among the businessmen, and perhaps not among the philosophers, there was, had left among the... a vague idea that there must be justice in the world.

[35:24]

There must be a telos in the world. There must be meaning in the world, or in the world of business. And business must have something to do with the good of all, not always the good of individual. And therefore, there must be also a hierarchy, an order, an order, an hierarchical order perhaps, which puts things into shape. Things cannot be run along the line of individual self-interest and mere competition. And then we see this, the ethics of Justice coming up. Let me take the Taiwan trade union of the Farm Bureau. Business world. What is beg of them, Mr. Klemmer? For just wages, for fair prices and fair profits, for decent prices in agriculture, and so on and so forth.

[36:33]

That is the... Formation of such associations, unions, cartels, trade associations, farm bureaus, means in this world of competition and selfishness, self-interest, there's for us only one way to get our share, get the justice for us. This is organization. And the power, of course, is organization. That is... here breaks through in the so-called pluralism of associative organizations of the kind I mentioned, breaks through the idea of justice. But since they are organized along the line of their own group interest, it is the justice for us, not the justice for the koinonia, for the communitas, the justice for our group. And then comes this, in particular, pluralism of organized forces spreads ever wider, becomes ever more powerful.

[37:43]

There comes the interpretation of justice for us as far as our organized power reaches. That is, it's no longer a concern of a justice defined in terms of the assumed trickery of the equivalence. It's defined in terms of how as far as our organized power can reach. Therefore here, power and justice become equivalent. And this is the grave to tremendous danger in our time. Tremendous danger in our time. That without our knowing it, the original, perfectly justified pressure for justice to be acquired, to be guaranteed by our organization, justice for our group, you know,

[38:58]

That is, on the other hand, fresh changes into justice reached as far as our power reached our powers. Now, if you look now at the picture itself, But a society built up suddenly no longer on individuals, as Smith and Rousseau and these people that meditate in the 19th century, but built up on organizations, farm bureaus, trade associations, work associates, and so on, medical professional organizations. If you look at this world, and you ask yourself, what is the idea, the pattern of ethos? You find out that it's the same pattern. that had developed in the trans-oceanic world. Only applied now to the group.

[39:59]

That is group self-determination, group self-interest, group self-liability, group competition. That's the pattern. I speak of this organized type of society of our time as the secondary phase of liberalism, economic liberalism, because it's just the same behavior pattern. Only now... carried by, developed by the group. Final point is this, that these groups now, following this behavior pattern, see in their government power the surest process, the safest means to put their demands across. So they begin to infiltrate the government and to raise continuous demands against the government. To give you an example, There's a Senator Boxmeyer in Wisconsin who took the seat of Senator McCarthy, I think, and served the last three, four months of McCarthy time.

[41:02]

He's coming up for another election now. I have read, as a matter of fact, a congressman gave me a memoir of his report on the demands on the bills which the Senator Boxmeyer has dropped into the hopper of the congressman. In four months, this Senator Koffer, who's coming up for the election now, has dropped into the hopper of bills to the tune of $24 billion. For workers, farmers, businessmen, all the people around, you know, because buying, trying to buy their vote, you know. You find that in some cases the... Bills coming up are written not by a congressman nor by the government. Bills are written prepared fully, in shape, you know, by an outside organization, farmers, whatever it be. Outside organizations took me to the congressman. The congress often left me to take it.

[42:06]

Well, it's visible here is the fact that democracy has lost its stand. The first time of democracy in Europe was a democracy... of what I call metaphysical foundation. That is, the 1291 democracy in Switzerland began, the constitution in Switzerland began with the name of the most holy trinity. The Irish constitution of 19-something, the name of the most holy trinity. The Dutch, the English constitution, the United States constitution. That is, the democracy already was based on certain fundamentals of a religious nature. Now, of course, The enlightened mind of the 19th century couldn't stand this religious foundation. That's all monkey business. I tried to build up the democratic philosophy, doctrine, on a rationalist basis. Utilitarian and rationalist basis.

[43:08]

The next thing that happened is that democracy today is only put, the foundation is only expediency, a purely instrumentalism, pragmatism. We are in the era of pragmatic, the third phase of democratic evolution, pragmatism. Look at John Dewey about this point, pragmatism. And it's pragmatic democracy of our time that has no foundation in metaphysics, theology, or in rational grounds, you know. becomes a mirror, becomes open for the intro of the pluralistic forces to which our society is built today. And you get this from a true situation which we have. All our governments are, in a way, sick governments. You see the welfare state? Make itself a sort of Santa Claus by giving all powerful groups what they want.

[44:12]

running after them, paying here, paying there, paying there, paying there. But, of course, that goes very well as long as you have an anonymous look that pays the price. The so-called taxpayer pays, and the taxpayer pays in particular through inflation. And then, of course, the taxpayer that pays through inflation is the man that doesn't notice that it's being paid, you know. When you are a foster living, and cars and so go up, you know, because the dollar is being inflated, you know. You do not even know it's robbing you, but of course you are paying taxes in this way by being robbed of your dollar value. There is, in this development we have, there is a trend towards inflation, the so-called secular trend towards inflation. And then secular trend towards inflation there develops the fiscal state to increasing strength. The state, some way or other, has to pay to get the money for fulfilling all these welfare tasks that are burdened on it, and so the fiscal state does.

[45:19]

That is, while the welfare state shows to people the benevolent features of Santa Claus, the fiscal state comes and says, now you pay, you're down, you're down. What the welfare state uses in the way of dignity And sovereignty, the fiscal state gains back. And there lies the great danger for our situation, that we are confronted with a very strong inflationary, secular inflationary trend, which can be stepped, which can be stopped only by ever-increasing power of the fiscal state. Since we cannot allow a nation to run into a perfect chaos in the long run, into a permanent inflation of its monetary units, you know, we have to do something about it.

[46:23]

That is, people have been doing something about it, and we know what they have been doing. You see, and this is my last one, this whole affair, how Originally, this whole problem of justice, of ordo, taxes, as Aristotle calls it, the problem of ordo and justice was slowly put aside. Believe in the free-playing process of economic competition, self-interest, and so on and so forth. How then, in an attempt to bring some more justice to operate and to put things again in shape, we get this Justice for us, which, as this thing develops, becomes a justice for us as far as our power reaches. And then comes the turn towards the pragmatic state, where the justice for us works out in the power of the government on our behalf.

[47:30]

Mr. Consequence, I have mentioned before. I would like to say that we are in a period of transition, in which period it becomes again an urgent need to redefine the line between justice and power, that we have to, in all probability, have to fall back again on the natural law philosophy, as Walter Lippmann has already done, as hundreds of professors of laws are doing today, Catholics and non-Catholics, falling back today, to find again a foot on a safe ground. And unless we find that foot on a safe ground, that type of man whom Jacob Burkhardt called, will come over us and do it for us. Thank you. I think that was so provocative, this thing, that we have to have a little discussion tomorrow.

[48:40]

When? You say all day. No belief, but not because of it. Oh, oh, oh, fine. We'll go back to kindergarten. It's a small class. It's great effect. You can see that. From the garden, it's great effect. Thank you. We have to... Cut the bricks or that? Yeah. There is, there is, there is, there is mass, you see, I mean, tomorrow. I look at all. Rhino clock, perhaps after breakfast. Yeah, but during breakfast and sex. Breakfast and sex, there's a period. Can't you drop to six? I think that if you don't sue the workers, they'd that favor. Yeah, why don't we do that? All right, after breakfast. Yeah, very close.

[49:45]

I see Domino said Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

[49:54]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_88.22