RE: May Day and Social Security

[Ruth Reilly <achren2@aol.com>]

Marin Jabbour stated: <<"Capitalism is the only economic system
compatible with a nation employing a democratically elected republican
government. Communism, Socialism and "mixed-economic" variations
do not suport the ideals of a "free" society.">>
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--No! Historically, this is a barefaced lie, and we should consider
another opinion, that of Achille Ratti who wrote in 1931 two years
after unbridled "capitalism" had robbed millions all over the world
of their life savings and their chance of earning a living:
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"directing Our special attention to the changes which the capitalist
economic system has undergone since ...[1891]...  it is obvious
that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense
power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the
hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and
managers of entrusted funds which they administer according to
their own arbitrary will and pleasure.

"This dictatorship is being exercised most forcibly by those who,
since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit
also and rule the loaning of money.  Hence they regulate the flow,
so to speak, of the lifeblood whereby the entire economic system
lives, and have so firmly in their grasp, the soul as it were, of
economic life, that no one can breathe against their will.

"This concentration of power and might, the characteristic mark,
as it were, of contemporary economic life, is the fruit that the
unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors has of its own
nature produced, and which lets only the strongest survive, which
is the same as saying, those who fight the most violently, those
who give the least heed to their conscience."*

I grew up during the Depression and World War II.  Adults in those
days gave up a lot more than a percent of income to the common
good.  And it was in those days that Americans though Social Security
should be instituted so that later generations would not have to
suffer as they had from unbridled laissez-faire capitalism.  They
had had enough of the "law of the jungle".

* Ratti A. [Pope Pius XI]  "The Fortieth Year", Rome, 1931.