Catholic Economics: Strangled Once Again (by Neo-Catholics)

Kerry Noonan is 50 years old and the father of eight children. He grew up in and around New York City, and then after living in various other places, including Steubenville, where he met his wife, he moved to Grand Haven, a resort town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. His wife grew up there, the daughter of three generations of pharmacists, and Kerry started working for his father-in-law, and then for the firm that bought out his father-in-law’s institutional pharmacy. The job involved a lot of driving, and the driving began to take a toll on Kerry’s hip. The long drives and low pay allowed Kerry to meditate on economic matters.

As a classic ethnic Catholic, Kerry understood the importance of wages in America. As someone who came on the scene on the East Coast during the high noon of decent wages in America, he could remember how people like his father could raise a family in a place like New York on the salary paid by an ordinary job. He could also see that America slipping away day by day, as his children neared college age, under the hammer blows of the pro-Capitalist propaganda that began in earnest in 1979, when the Fed under Paul Volcker, England under Margaret Thatcher and the U.S. presidency of Ronald Reagan, created the perfect Capitalist storm. Usury reared its ugly head; the Fed raised interest rates to 20 percent, killing any incentive for legitimate investment, and Wall Street descended into an orgy of leveraged buy-outs that gutted the manufacturing infra-structure of once great industrial powers like England and the United States, and the legacy of all that was low wage jobs for blue collar Catholics like Kerry Noonan.

To make matters worse, as Kerry drove from town to town in Michigan and Indiana, he could take morbid delectation from the fact that Catholics were not only the main victims of the drive to destroy manufacturing jobs and drive down wages, they were the chief propagandists for this campaign as well. Michael Novak began the trend when he went to work for the Jews who ran the American Enterprise Institute. The fruit of that wicked collaboration was The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, a pro-Capitalist screed that makes Ayn Rand’s rants seem judicious and measured by comparison.  (more...)

Catholic Economics: Strangled Once Again

Been wise to them for a while:

Robert Sirico and the Sins that Cry to Heaven for Vengeance