This essay is taken from Chapter 6 of Helen Alford O.P. and Michael Naughton, Managing as if Faith Mattered: Christian Social Principles within the Modern Organization (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) pp 152-176. The chapter examines the question of ownership embedded within a Christian ethic of property.

 

6

 

Corporate Ownership:

Temperance and Common Use in Finance[1]

 

Michael Naughton

(mjnaughton@stthomas.edu)

 

Helen Alford O.P.

 Alford@pust.urbe.it

 

 

The paramount problem is not how to stop the growth of property, and the building up of wealth; but how to manage it so that every species of property, like a healthful fruit tree, will spread its roots deeply and widely in the soil of a popular proprietorship.  The paramount problem is not how to crush, or hawk at, or hamper the corporation, merely because it is a corporation; but how to make this new form of property ownership a workable agent toward repeopleizing the proprietorship of the country’s industries. [2]

                                                                                                                                 Peter S. Grosscup

                                                                                             Judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals

 

 

 W

ritten in 1905, Judge Grosscup’s comments capture both the free-market system’s strength--its ability to create wealth--and its weakness--its inability to distribute wealth equitably.  The ownership of the corporation, according to Grosscup, lies at the heart of the distribution problem in free market economies.  Since the corporation is the main generator of wealth in a free-market economy, those who own corporations will share more fully in the distribution of that wealth.  For Grosscup, a principal issue for corporations is how to structure ownership so as to distribute more effectively the wealth of society, without sacrificing the corporation’s  wealth-generating ability.

            The problem of wealth disparity that inspired Grosscup’s comments at the beginning of the twentieth century burdens us in a particular way as we enter the twenty-first century.  This is particularly true on a global basis. The United Nations Development Program, for example, concluded in 1996 that 100 countries found themselves worse off than they had been 15 years earlier.  It is estimated that the combined wealth of the 224 richest individuals in the world equals the combined annual incomes of the poorest 47% of the world population, that is, of some 2.5 billion people.[3]  A variety of evidence indicates that even in the U.S., where there has been significant economic growth over the last two decades, the gap between the most affluent Americans and everyone else in the nation is the widest it has been since the end of World War II.[4] Although the average income for households increased 10% between 1979 and 1994, 97% of that growth was claimed by the top 20% of households. This has resulted into widened economic disparity where the net worth of the top 1% is now greater than that of the bottom 90%.[5] And while mutual funds and 401(k) plans have fueled much-celebrated gains in capital participation, one recent study nevertheless showed that 71% of U.S. households hold no stock or hold stock valued at less than $2,000.[6]  

            For the reader who may find these numbers too abstract, Jeff Gates cites the rise of  “Tiffany/K-Mart” marketing strategies.  K-Mart and Tiffany, which represent the low- and high-end retail markets, reported increased earnings in 1997, while midscale chains such as J.C. Penney suffered significant losses.  National retailers are setting up two-tiered, high-low marketing systems, as advertising and investment houses warn of the erosion of traditional, “middle-class” mass-markets.  Retailers “on the ground” see that a shift in income-patterns is polarizing markets to the disadvantage of operations aimed at a shrinking class of middle incomes.[7]

            For some, wealth disparity simply represents a “natural force” we must accept in a free market economy. Paine Webber Inc., for example, simply readjusts its investment flows by advising investors to “‘avoid companies that cater to the ‘middle’ of the consumer market.’”[8]  Others, however, see wealth disparity more in terms of choice than market determination.  William McDonough, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,  insists:

Issues of equity and social cohesion [are] issues that affect the very temperament of the country.  We are forced to face the question of whether we will be able to go forward together as a unified society with a confident outlook or as a society of diverse economic groups suspicious of both the future and each other.[9]

 

For McDonough, unless we take seriously the common good as it relates to wealth distribution, we may find our cultural and political arenas too fragmented to support a healthy free market system.

            Many complex causes account for widening income disparity.  One key cause, particularly in the U.S., has been the interplay among productivity gains, wages and capital.  Since 1974, productivity in manufacturing increased by 68% and the service sector increased by 50%. During this same time period, employee wages stagnated.  The rewards of productivity consequently went to capital. With the richest 25% owning 82% of corporate stock in the US, the clear winners were capital owners, and the consequence was increased income disparity.[10]

 

 

Pockets of Prosperity, Holes of Disparity:

Some Numbers to Ponder[11]

 

·                    The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reported in 1999 that the world’s 200 richest people have more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion.   That’s equal to the combined annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world’s people (2.5 billion).  

·                    The wealth of the top three billionaires now exceeds the combined GDP of all the least developed countries and their 600 million people.  The assets of the 84 richest individuals exceed the GDP of China with its 1.2 billion people.

·                    UNDP reported in 1999 that 80 countries have per capita incomes lower than they were a decade ago.   Sixty countries have been growing steadily poorer since 1980.

·                    In 1960, the income gap between the fifth of the world’s people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 30 to 1.  By 1990, the gap had widened to 60 to 1.  By 1997, it had grown to 74 to 1.

·                    Over the past three decades, the poorest 20 percent of the world’s people saw their share of global income decline from 2.3 percent to 1.3 percent.

·                     In 1996, the Census Bureau reported record levels of inequality, with the top fifth of U.S. households claiming 48.2 percent of national income while the bottom fifth gets by on 3.6 percent.  

·                    The United States leads all OECD nations in the disparity in both wealth and income.  

 

 

 

            The problem, as Grosscup suggests, is not the magnitude of capital owners’ gains, but the system’s tendency to restrict rather than to promote participation in capital ownership. When the power of the ownership of productive capital is highly concentrated in the hands of the few, the non-owning majority’s incomes grow uncertain; when capital is disconnected from labor, its uses are determined without regard for their impact on labor or on society at large.[12]

            As Peter Drucker put it, “a change in property ownership always results in a change in power. We’ve had a change in property with the emergence of institutional investors. That is a change in power.”[13]  Power in this case has gone to depersonalized capital markets, which have no concern for employees or particular communities beyond their ability to increase wealth. The markets’ relentless pressure for maximum investor returns leads corporations to “unleash what the Wall Street Journal characterizes as the ‘four horsemen of the workplace’: (1) downsizing; (2) moving operations to low-wage countries, (3) increased automation and (4) the use of temporary workers.”[14]  Most people—certainly most wage-earners—might concede that firms can use one or more of these expedients legitimately to meet economic crises, but few would describe their combination as legitimate, ordinary business practice.   Nevertheless, they have become staples of “disconnected” capital’s search for ever-increasing returns, regardless of the social effects.

            In order for people to participate most effectively in the market system’s distribution of wealth, they need access to two main sources of income: labor and capital.  Restricting their income effectively to one source--labor--through the concentration of ownership, increases the probability that their access to goods will fall short of their needs.  This effect is intensified in an economy such as our own, where capital income increases faster than labor income.  For many people, wages--even the wages of two earners--are alone no longer adequate to secure a just share of wealth over the long-term.  When John A. Ryan wrote in 1935 that an employee’s rise to ownership “relieves him from complete dependence upon his wages,”[15] he already understood  “relief” to mean relief from bearing an inequitably large share of the market-economy’s risks and an inequitably small share of its rewards. 

            We need, then, a view of capital property that asks the fundamental questions: What is property for? Whom does it serve?  Within our diverse society, answers to these questions will differ significantly.  As we saw in Chapter 2, a prime source of these differences will be the respondents’ views of the purpose of the corporation.  Within the last thirty years in the U.S., two men have played critical roles in addressing these questions, bringing about two important financial trends: mergers and acquisitions on the one hand, and employee ownership on the other.  These two men place property and finance within two different philosophical paradigms, one individualistic and the other communitarian.  Understanding how they answer questions concerning the nature and purpose of corporate property provides a context in which to appreciate a Christian ethic of property and ownership as it bears on the modern corporation.

 

1. Two Conflicting Views of Property: Individualistic and Communitarian

            The first of our two figures is Jerome Kohlberg. The founder of Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts & Co. (KKR), and often considered the father of leveraged buyouts (LBOs),[16] Kohlberg’s main concern was the separation of corporate ownership and control.[17]  As corporations have grown larger, capital holdings have been dispersed among larger numbers of shareholders, reducing shareholders’ ability to control the company.   The largest shareholder at a company such as General Motors may own only 1% of the shares and, most likely, this owner will be a pension fund or some other institutional shareholder.  This dispersed ownership structure diffuses shareholders’ influence, preventing them from taking a decisive hand in maximizing the return on their capital.  Kohlberg’s solution to this problem is acquisition through the leveraged buyout.  By replacing diffuse public shareholders, who exercise little control over the corporation, with a small group of highly motivated investors who exercise considerable control over a small group of highly motivated executives, owners will be in a better position to maximize their wealth (this in part describes why executive bonuses are so high, since there is an alignment between stock price and executive salary).[18]

            In the terms of our discussion in Chapter 2 on the common good, Kohlberg understands property primarily as a private and particular good—a tendency shared by many of us in the western world.  For him, a corporation is an investment that should maximize the particular goods of individual shareholders on the basis of two dimensions: risk and return.  It has no inherent or “natural” common purpose of wealth creation for distribution, let alone of building community or promoting virtue.  Finance serves as a technique to maximize the particular wealth of individual shareholders, who in their private lives can determine what they want to do with it.  Thus, corporate property is reduced to a “financial asset owned for its return/risk characteristics and with a view to its eventual sale.”[19] Underlying Kohlberg’s understanding of corporate property is a philosophical individualism that implies at least two things: a) exclusivity of ownership, or in other words: “this property is mine and not yours”; b) control, that is, “since it’s mine, I alone determine what it is to be used for.”[20]

            Our focus now turns to another man, and to a very different response.  Often considered the father of employee ownership, Louis Kelso viewed property in communitarian terms.  Kelso maintained that Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) would serve as an effective corporate financial technique to distribute wealth in the economy.[21]  Based on his two factor theory (that income derives from one’s labor and/or one’s capital), Kelso wrote in the 1960s and 70s that, owing to increasing use of technology and to international competition, capital would play a greater role in wealth distribution than wages from labor.[22]

            Kelso saw the capital ownership of corporations as the main vehicle for wealth distribution, which for him is a necessary condition of human development (promotion of the common good).  Financing companies is a means to a social end, namely, to build enterprises capable of long-term growth so as to create conditions for a just distribution of wealth.  For Kelso, then, corporate property has an important social purpose: to make capital accessible to all, especially to those without the financial means to ensure access to credit.  An ESOP is one way to finance wider ownership, or in the words of Judge Grosscup, to “repeopleize” corporate property (in Europe cooperatives have been the main means to that end).[23]   As a financing device, an ESOP turns labor workers into capital workers, which in turn links the structures of ownership with social equity.  (The mechanics and problems of ESOPs are examined in greater detail in the last section of this chapter.)

 

 

Kohlberg

Kelso

Definition of

 Problem

Lack of Control

 by the Few

Lack of Participation

by the Many

End of Property

 

Individual Gain

Just Distribution

Means of Finance

 

Leverage (LBOs)

Leverage (ESOPs)

 

            Historically, the lives of Kelso and Kohlberg are entangled, making their different views of property all the more striking.  In the 1960s, Kelso supposedly introduced the technique of leveraging corporations to Kohlberg.  To leverage a company is to buy the company using borrowed money, with the company itself serving as collateral.  Kelso envisioned leveraged financing through an ESOP as an effective means for employees to participate in the ownership of a company, thereby creating the conditions for a more just distribution of wealth.  Since employees would never be able to save enough money to buy shares, they would have to borrow.  Kohlberg adapted Kelso’s technique of leveraged financing, but applied it to a different end, based on his different view of property.  Indifferent to wealth distribution and income disparity, Kohlberg leveraged companies so that outside investors or executive management (that is, his clients) could buy the company and exercise control for the sake of maximizing shareholder wealth.

            Kelso and Kohlberg used the same technique of leveraged financing for two radically different ends based on two different philosophical traditions of property.  As we mentioned in Chapter 3, techniques, such as financial leveraging, become an opportunity for virtue only when they are ordered toward the common good. For Kelso, the technique of leveraged financing can be a powerful means for expanding ownership in the interest of a just distribution of wealth.  For Kohlberg, however, this technique serves the particular, private good of shareholders and nothing more.

            Kohlberg’s use of leveraging infuriated Kelso: “I taught them [Kohlberg and others] the art of the leveraged buyout.  Now they’re just using it for the wrong purposes, to make themselves and a few people richer.”[24]  Kelso saw leveraged financing in the service of concentrating wealth as an abuse.  His case is not unlike that of the researchers who developed the drug methotrexate to fight cancer and save lives, only to see other researchers adapt it to take lives as one of the main ingredients in abortifacients.  Techniques can be used for good or ill.  For Kelso, to make the technique of leveraged financing into the means for private gain only is a perversion, since “instead of making economic power more democratic, they [Kohlberg and others] make it more plutocratic.”[25]  In other words, Kelso’s difficulty with Kohlberg’s use of leverage is that it finances capital for an existing “elite” of owners only. It does nothing to extend the ranks of capital ownership.

            This conflict between Kohlberg and Kelso represents a conflict over answers to the questions, What is property for? Whom does it serve?  Kohlberg represents an individualistic understanding of property that denies an authentic social and spiritual purpose to the corporation. Kelso, however, represents a communitarian vision of corporate property that fits well in the Christian social tradition.  We begin to see in two men the concrete and practical implications of philosophical beliefs concerning property.  It is important now for us to go deeper into the roots of the communitarian understanding of property underlying Kelso’s goals, as it appears in the Christian tradition.  By retrieving this tradition about property, and on employee ownership in particular, we can provide a solid basis for reexamining the ownership and distribution of productive capital.  It is precisely here that an investigation informed by the Christian social tradition can help to answer why a just distribution of income in terms of capital and labor has a great claim on all people.

 

 2. A Christian Property Ethic As It Relates To the Ownership of the Corporation

      It is important to recognize that the idea of ownership is one of the signature-ideas of Western civilization. Most major philosophers and theologians have written about property, and all economists and business people are dependent in one way or another on these philosophical principles.  At root, the way we organize property is a way of organizing social relations, and so has a powerful influence over the goodness—or otherwise—of people’s lives. We can characterize an understanding of property on four levels.

            The Christian understanding of property is, first, theological. It arises out of our belief in a God who created the world “and saw it was very good,” and who, as part of that creation, gave humankind the gift of dominion over the earth. In other words, the basic, core idea that grounds the Christian understanding of property is the reality of gift, that it is a gift from God.

            While we are familiar with the experience of gifts, we tend to see them as private and individual exchanges. This understanding of gift, however, is not universal. When Native Americans encountered Europeans in the gift encounter, they were baffled by their possessiveness over gifts given them. Native Americans expected their white visitors to give back their gifts so as to keep them moving. This idea of setting gifts in motion equally baffled westerners negatively characterizing Native Americans as “Indian givers.”[26] Yet, what Native Americans understood, and what we should take heed of, is that when a gift is not shared, it corrupts the holder.  The one who makes the gift an occasion for selfish hoarding, who fails to put the gift in motion, becomes corrupted by the gift itself.

        In Western culture, we tend, like Kohlberg, to see property as a so-called private matter:  “So long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, I have the right to do whatever I like with what is mine.”  Yet, our “private” interpretation of property, however, should give us pause for thought.  St. Augustine pointed out that the word private comes from “privation,” a certain loss of meaning or substance.[27]  To understand property only in private terms is to refuse to recognize its inherent “giftedness.”

            Since we do not create anything, but rather inherit everything from God and others, human ownership does not consist in absolute dominion over property (absolute dominion belongs to God alone), but in a limited and responsible dominion which should be characterized as stewardship.  A merely private understanding of property, then, asserts a dominion human beings neither do, nor can, exercise.

            If we are to understand property, we must face the universal experience of property, namely, in the end, everything is given back.  The story is told of a rich man’s wake. When someone asked, “How much did he leave?” the simple, conversation-stopping answer came back:  “Everything!”[28]  Property--all wealth--is a gift of which ownership makes us no more than temporary stewards.  We neither arrive in this life with property nor leave with it, and as owners we will be called to a steward’s account for our use of property. 

 

A Christian Property Ethic

            Christian managers and entrepreneurs, if they manage as if faith matters, need to be convinced that their property and their work are not ultimately theirs and that they will be accountable not just to stockholders, but to Him “who knows how to ask questions.” [29] They need to keep in mind that they will be judged, with mercy but also with justice, to seek out whether they have been stewards or exploiters of the property and wealth committed to them.

             If to possess property is ultimately to have received a gift, then ownership inherently involves our taking on board the second level of the Christian property ethic, summarized in the principle of “the universal destination of goods.” This follows since possession is for the sake of use, and the gift of created goods is made to all human beings alike, not only to the brightest or the richest, nor yet to one country rather than another, nor to one generation rather than another.  Inscribed within the very make-up of property, of useful goods, is a “universal destination”: their goodness is for all alike, so that all people can benefit from God’s creation.  To put the matter in the terms we developed in Chapter 2, the fruits of creation must be made available to all human beings at the level of use.   St. Ambrose, with the directness and confidence that marks the Fathers of the Church, declares, “The earth belongs to all, not to the rich.”[30]

            Embedded in God’s gift of creation is, then, the right of all people to the common use of created goods.  To subdue the earth is to command its fruits not only for oneself, but also for others, through increasingly comprehensive spheres of community: for one’s family and for one’s friends; for one’s co-workers, and for one’s fellow-citizens and colleagues in the political enterprise; for one’s fellow-members of the body of Christ, and for one’s neighbor—that is, for anyone in human need. The duty to subdue the earth, then, cannot be realized unless all people can share in the means of dominion (raw material, technology, education, credit, etc.), so as to gain a decent standard of living.[31]  Consequently, any idea of an absolute right to the possession or use of property is alien to Christian social thought, since property is neither the creature of its owner nor destined unqualifiedly for its owner’s use.[32]

      The third level of a Christian ethic of ownership and property asks what conditions foster greater common use of God’s creation. We argued in the first several pages of this chapter that a wider distribution of productive property or capital is a necessary component of greater common use.[33]  Property and capital, in order to serve labor, must be reconnected to labor through ownership. This is why within the Christian tradition, and as the subject of special attention in Catholic social teaching, it is strongly emphasized that employees should participate in the ownership of business organizations.  As John Paul II has stated, while various employee ownership plans may or may not be applicable in specific situations, “it is clear that recognition of the proper position of labor and the worker in the production process demands various adaptations in the sphere of the right to ownership of the means of production.”[34]

            Jeff Gates points out that the more connected (through ownership) capital can be to labor and to the communities which supply labor, the more it can serve the common good (he and others propose not only ESOPs but also CSOPs—Customer Stock Ownership Plans, RESOPs—Related Enterprise Share Ownership Plans, and other stock ownership plans to reconnect capital to the communities that generate it).  Gates aims at an “up-close capitalism” in which those who stand to be affected by the uses of corporate property consider those uses from the perspective of owners, and speak for or against them with the voices of owners.

            Thomas Aquinas made a similar point over 700 years ago.  He explained that private possession can serve the principle of common use because it creates three important conditions within society at large and within particular organizations: personal initiative, productivity, and peace. [35]   These three criteria do not guarantee the common use of property.  They do create conditions tending to ease the individual’s access to the goods of creation by overcoming the disparity in wealth we described at the beginning of this chapter.  Examining these three conditions in light of employee ownership can help us to see how a Christian ethic of property ownership can function.

            A) Personal Initiative and Motivation: When people own something, they are more likely to use it in a considered, enterprising way.  The person is more likely to dedicate time and talent to caring for and developing his own property than to caring for another’s, and is more likely to show consideration for properties that are owned by some agency than for those which are not known to be anyone’s special concern.  For example, one shows more initiative for the care of one’s house than for one’s rented apartment, and people generally treat city parks with more consideration than vacant lots.             For the individual employee, worker ownership can serve as a means to a greater sense of self-direction at work, since when people “know they are working on what belongs to them, they work with far greater eagerness and diligence.”[36]  Many employees are not concerned solely with the foundational, financial goods they receive from their labor.  They also want to know that they are working for themselves, and that their work is a matter of personal achievement and even an occasion of excellence.  Employees who do not participate in the ownership of the company find it more difficult (although not impossible) to make a personal connection with what is not their own.  Worker ownership can serve as an aid to employees’ development by fostering responsibility and accountability.[37]

            B) Long-term Productivity and Efficiency: This personal initiative tends toward greater productivity and efficiency, and less waste.  CEO of Springfield Remanufacturing Company (SRC), Jack Stack, brings this point out in favor of his company’s ESOP.  In his view, employee owners tend to reorient themselves to the whole question of what it means to benefit from the company.  They think of “sacrificing instant gratification” for long term stability and longevity.  Stack explains:

[If] you have equity and understand it, you know why it’s important to build for the future.  You can make long-term decisions.  You will pay attention to the day-to-day details, but you’re doing it for the right reason: because it’s the best way to achieve lasting success.[38]

 

            C) Social Peace: When people possess, as their own, the things they need to meet their responsibilities, keep their promises and realize their ambitions, they are simply more at peace and more disposed to harmony with others than they are in the opposite case.  This homely fact has become very evident in the downsizing of corporations.  Employees may have large pensions at stake in the aggregate, but--because they are not owners--lack any control over the disposition of their company.  In such cases, employees’ anxiety and hostility are likely to run in direct proportion to the size of their stake in outcomes over which they have no say.  The more people who participate in the ownership of property, particularly productive property, the better the chances that wealth will flow, like blood through the human body, as a force for social cohesion.[39]

            When employees are not enabled, or fail, to participate in the ownership of their own organization, a divergence of economic interests is created, making peace more difficult.  When shareholders and management seek higher profits, lower labor costs and greater efficiency, while employees seek higher fixed wages and stringent work rules, the ownership structure fosters distrust between employees and management. This weakens a company’s competitiveness in the marketplace and inhibits mutual cooperation for the good of the whole organization.[40]  A house divided against itself, as the Scriptures note, cannot long stand—let alone prosper.[41]  Isolating the means of production “as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of ‘capital’ in opposition to ‘labor’” makes the possibility of peace ever more difficult.[42]   Stack explains, “[Y]ou have to knock down the barriers that separate people, that keep people from coming together as a team.”[43]  At SRC, he saw the lack of shared ownership between management and workers as a critical barrier to overcome. By aligning the perceived goods of employees and managers through stock ownership, SRC could act as a unit in the increasing confidence that people were working for each other.[44]

            Personal initiative, long-term productivity and peace are necessary conditions for making corporate property common in use.  They do not, however, complete a Christian property/ownership ethic.  The common use of property requires further that we not regard property as something to be distributed and used merely for our own particular ends.  We need to go to a fourth level that calls us to use our property for the building up of “a community of work,” established by participation in common ends and virtues.

            All property, as Aquinas explains, should be seen “as common so that, in fact, a person should readily share it when he sees others in need.”[45]  A more equitable distribution of particular goods by individual ownership is not enough: employees and management alike must understand and treat their shares in the ownership of the company as instruments of others’ good, and not merely of their own particular interests.  This necessary regard for others’ good is twofold: it involves participation in seeking the good of each and every member of the firm by promoting the firm’s success;  it involves ordering the activities of the firm so as to promote the good of the wider community and its members (among whom, of course, are the members of the firm).

            The fact that a company is widely owned by employees, or that its financial success is otherwise immediately distributed among its employees, does not in itself entail that the firm is in pursuit of the common good.  Nor is the enthusiasm of a company’s employees, or their dedication to its business plan, a sure mark that they form a genuine communion.  Pornography and tobacco companies can be employee-owned, and criminal enterprises often generate considerable élan.   By comparison to the overall good of the (political) community, the common good, the ends of even the largest business organization are private, as are the ends of individual persons.  Like private individuals, business organizations’ fundamental contribution to the common good is observance of the law.  And like private individuals, their more mature contribution involves becoming a participant in the promotion of the goods of the whole community (we will examine the social role of products and services in Chapter 7).

            Real ownership by employees of the organization offers, so to speak, an occasion of virtue. When an employee sees her contribution to the organization as the source of benefits not only for herself and her family, but for her co-workers, and when her contribution to the success of the firm is also of clear service to the community at large, she participates in a fuller way--through virtue--in her work.  In the words of Aquinas, “a man’s will is not right in willing a particular good [such as property], unless he refer it to the common as an end.”[46]  The equitable distribution of corporate property is welcome for its own sake, but much more for the sake of establishing a community of work through which the firm’s success promotes at once the employee’s individual good and the good of the whole community.  Employees are connected not only on the level of economic gain, but also on the level of organizational purpose that is social at its core.

            This discussion of property suggests the answer to a scriptural question that should particularly unsettle those of us in the rich West: Why is it hard for the rich man to enter the kingdom of God?  If we fail to order our own particular goods to a common life, our lack of intent to build community is not neutral; it is a positive refusal to take up a duty incumbent upon citizens of the kingdom of God. This theme is particularly strong in Luke’s Gospel.  Jesus tells the story of the rich man’s quandary over what to do with his surplus harvest.

“What shall I do?” he asked himself. “I have no place to store my harvest. I know!” he said.  “I will pull down my grain bins and build larger ones.  All my grain and my goods will go there. Then I will say to myself: You have blessings in reserve for years to come. Relax! Eat heartily, drink well. Enjoy yourself.” But God said to him, “You fool!  This very night your life shall be required of you.  To whom will all this piled-up wealth of yours go?”  That is the way it works with the man who grows rich for himself instead of growing rich in the sight of God.[47]

 

            The parable is clear: the use of property must be directed to the good of others, if property is to serve as a means to the rich man’s development, especially to his ultimate development—salvation and happiness with God, the ultimate end of our human existence.  When property is not directed and used for the common good, property becomes a kind of evil, the occasion for regression from human virtue.  As the rich man’s failure to use his full granary for those in need has corrupted him, so our property, whether individual or corporate, can corrupt us if we fail to use it for others.

            This idea of property as it relates to common use and virtue may sound to some too idealistic, too communitarian, or too impractical.  Yet, we should ask: Why should this understanding strike us as a foreign intrusion into our usual way of looking at property?   Is it because we live in a culture that reduces all “goods” to commodities for particular, private consumption?  Or is it because we have privatized our faith to such an extent that we no long see its social and practical implications?  Whatever the reason, we should take care to reexamine how we view our property, since it affects how we see other dimensions of our life.

            To adhere to a strictly private, strictly individualistic view of property’s uses is like holding that personal pleasure is the only use of sex.