The “Anonymous Society” vs. “The Great Workbench”

'The “anonymous societies”-the corporations-can never deliver what they promise; they can never bring us limited government, free markets, or private property.'

From The Imaginative Conservative

By John Médaille

The “anonymous societies”—the corporations—can never deliver what they promise; they can never bring us limited government, free markets, or private property. But most especially, they cannot overcome the division between capital and labor; that can come only by sharing in ownership, and by identifying property with responsibility.

The directors of such [joint stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own…. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

— Adam Smith[1]

The Mills of Bazacle

In the year 1370, a group of mill owners on the Garonne River near Toulouse, the Société des Moulins du Bazacle, a “societas” that had existed since 1177, reconstituted themselves as the Société Civile Anonyme du Moulin du Bazacle. This was not a mere shift in the name, but a whole new conception of both “property” and business.

The original “society” was a collection of mill owners, each one owning a share in a physical property, namely, one of the twelve mills along the river.[2] But in the new “anonymous society,” the connection with physical property and ownership was broken. Now, each one owned a claim on the profits of “milling.” This new society had other goals in mind: destroying the competition and monopolizing all the milling in the Garonne River valley. They raised the height of their dam to drown out the mills upstream of them, in a part of Toulouse known as La Daurade. The Moulins de la Daurade—another societas—sued, and since Bazacle was in violation of all law and custom, they easily won. But, through an extravagant use of bribes, Bazacle kept the lawsuit going for 50 years, until La Daurade was forced to capitulate. Then the “anonymous society” attempted to merge with the nearby mills at Château-Narbonnais. The authorities of Toulouse put a stop to this: they feared that if all the mills along such a large stretch of the Garonne were under one ownership, the price of grain could be easily manipulated, especially in times of shortages. (Nevertheless, the two companies did make many deals on such things as purchasing agreements and labor relations).

Shares in the old societas were held by millers and sold in the same way physical property was sold: through a contract and “closed” in front of a notary. But in the new society, the owners had neither knowledge nor interest in milling, but only in the share prices as they fluctuated with market conditions. Actual millers became the employees of mill “owners,” and the mills were “managed” largely by their lawyers.

Bazacle forms both a template for (and a warning against) all the “anonymous societies,” which we now call corporations, that would follow. From the Muscovy Company of 1555 to our own “Alphabet Inc.” (Google), corporations tend to seek, and frequently get, monopoly powers, corrupting both law and political order. And by the 18th century their activities had aroused the interest of a certain Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Edinburgh who had turned his attention to the problems of political economy, one Adam Smith by name.

Capitalism and Corporations

One cannot long find oneself in possession of a few excess dollars without soon getting advice to “invest” them in the stock market. But in a 2022 issue of New Polity Magazine, Jacob Imam and Marc Barnes took on this primary symbol of capitalism, this same stock market, posing the question of whether a Christian should even buy stocks at all. Now, as radical as this thesis may seem, its way was paved by none other than Adam Smith, the putative father of modern capitalism. Indeed, between the first edition of The Wealth of Nations in 1776, and the fifth in 1789, Smith seems to have come to doubt the benevolence of the genie that his defense of a “free market” had released from its bottle. He even comes to doubt the efficacy of a principle he originally thought was the very foundation of “the wealth of nations,” namely, the division of labor. In 1776, he was full of praise for “the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”[3] But in the 1789 edition he added

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.[4]

But Smith’s most extensive revisions had to do with the “joint-stock” company—what we call the “corporation.” He was never very enthusiastic about them, but in subsequent editions his critique is vastly expanded. In a long section, inserted somewhat awkwardly into the chapter titled “Of the Expenses of the Sovereign or Commonwealth,” Smith lays out a critique that centers on the fact that share-holding is no longer a “copartnery,” a set of personal relationships. Rather, a corporation is abstract, anonymous, and its share-holders escape the personal responsibility that ownership normally entails. This leads to a host of problems: ownership is separated from responsibility (which encourages speculation over real investment); share-holders need have no real knowledge of the firm and generally don’t; the value of the share is no longer related to what the company produces but to the market price (which is a matter of mere expectation); the separation of ownership and management leads to mismanagement; and the interests of the “servants” (managers) come to predominate over those of the “owners,” the share-holders.

Imam and Barnes expand this critique, emphasizing the loss of responsibility implicit in shareholding and the shift from making a profit by providing goods to making capital gains by increasing the share price. “Making a profit” is something that happens in the present moment and is hence “real.” At its simplest level it is nothing more than one’s sales minus one’s expenses. But “capital gains” shifts our attention to the future, and hence to speculation. This represents a movement from reality to appearances, and from making money by providing goods to making money by increasing expectations. As the authors put it, within a shareholding economy “the primary purpose of a company becomes the production of this perceived value—that is, the purpose becomes what we might call marketing. For the public company, [actual] production is simply another form of this marketing.”[5]

Sadly, firms can increase our expectations without adding any real value to anything at all. As an example of this (of profit without value), one need look no further than the Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) that were responsible for the crash of 2008. The scheme was that the rich, working through banks and hedge funds, could borrow money at very low interest rates and use it to buy blocks of mortgages that paid a much higher interest rate. The difference between the two rates was the “profit” of the hedge fund. All this borrowing added not a dime to the mortgage market; it was simply an arbitrage of interest rates that contributed nothing to production. But it did encourage the banks, who collected high fees for brokering the MBS, to make ever riskier loans, until the whole market collapsed. We should not be too saddened by the fate of these hedge funds: the Federal Reserve Bank, in its infinite compassion and endless money-printing powers, bought up every single one of these failed securities, now labeled as “toxic waste,” to the tune of $4.2 trillion. This at a time when the FED had less than a trillion dollars on its accounts! The people who caused the problem didn’t lose a dime, but somewhere between four and six million homes went into foreclosure. The FED made the judgment that bailouts would be good for the rich but bad for the poor.

In this essay, I would like to expand the Imam/ Barnes critique to show that capitalism under the regime of shareholding can never be what it claims to be and never deliver what it purports to promise. Further, I think it necessary to propose a program of reform, one that is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. And we must start by examining the claims that capitalism makes on its own behalf, and by comparing them to the reality of the world it has made.

Capitalism: Rhetoric vs. Reality

Capitalism has always appropriated the language of limited government, free markets, and, above all, private property. It does this in spite of history, which shows precisely the opposite: the history of capitalism is one wherein the power and revenues of the state and the size and reach of the corporation grow together, markets become collectivized, and the importance of private property shrinks. Now, while these claims might seem startling, the history is clear and undeniable. No one, for example, doubts that the size, scope, and power of governments have grown in the last 200 years, the very years that coincide with the triumph of liberal capitalism; the correlation is pretty precise. Given this vast gulf between the rhetoric and the reality, it behooves us to understand how this came about.

The Expansion of the State

The capitalist might respond that correlation is not causation, and that it could have been otherwise, and that it will be so, once a sufficiently “libertarian” government assumes control. But the facts are different. It was precisely the 1832 victory of the Liberal Party (Whigs) that established laissez-faire as official government policy, one which led, paradoxically, to an expansion of the administrative role of the state. As Karl Polanyi noted, the Liberal victory led to,

an outburst of legislation repealing restrictive regulations, but also to an enormous increase in the administrative functions of the state, which was now being endowed with a central bureaucracy able to fulfill the tasks set by the adherents of liberalism…. Laissez-faire was not a method to achieve a thing; it was the thing to be achieved. True, legislation could do nothing, directly, except by repealing harmful restrictions. But that did not mean that government could do nothing, especially indirectly. On the contrary, the utilitarian liberal saw in government the great agency for achieving happiness.[6]

Aside from the information-gathering bureaucracies, the state enabled and invested in the vast infrastructures necessary for the laissez-faire utopia: the highways, canals, ports, and railroads upon which the new regime of free trade depended. The “infrastructure” of the British Navy, a rather expensive undertaking, enabled colonialism, which in turn provided the “free market” with so much of its raw material. But the greatest contribution of the state, its most important “infrastructure,” was the creation of the working class, a group of landless peasants with no choice but to work in the new factories or starve. Enclosure laws, which allowed for the privatization of common land and which Polanyi called “the revolution of the rich against the poor,”[7] are a well-known, state-sponsored contribution to a laissez-faire society. But just as important was the positive criminalization of “idleness” through vagrancy laws, the criminalization of hunting through the Game Laws, and the criminal enforcement of labor contracts. The 1823 Masters and Servants Act, for example, explicitly allowed “English employers to have their workmen sent to the house of correction and held at hard labor for up to three months for breaches of their labor agreements.”[8]

But even criminal penalties for “idleness” were not enough; poverty itself had to be criminalized. The New Poor Law of 1834, based on Malthusian principles, abolished what we would call the “welfare” available under the Elizabethan Poor Law and replaced it with the workhouse. The Poor Law of 1601 guaranteed work to all, and since 1795 it guaranteed subsistence to all. But the 1834 law required that the poor who wanted relief get it only at the workhouse, where families were separated, children worked at the treadmill from the age of four, and the diet was no better than that afforded by the lowest wage.[9] Regulation, it seemed, was bad for the rich and good for the poor.[10] Contrary to wishful libertarian theories, the new regime of capitalist Britain required and so built a vastly expanded state. The “proletariat” was its primary product.

“Free Markets?”

It has become customary to use the terms “capitalism” and “free markets” interchangeably, as if the one was the other. In fact, they are mortal enemies and polar opposites. More of the one means less of the other. Indeed, everywhere we look, whether from beer to banking, energy to entertainment, eyeglasses to meatpacking, we find a “cartelized economy,” in which between two and four firms dominate the market. Everywhere we look, we find that production and exchange have been gathered up into the vast corporate collectives that dominate our economy, our politics, and our lives.[11] The butcher, the baker, and the grocer have all disappeared into giant collectives like Wal-Mart and Kroger, destroying any possibility of local and rational economies. Indeed, capitalism has collectivized the economy beyond the dreams of any Stalinist bureaucrat.

The capitalist might respond that the market, collectivized or not, remains free to the degree that it is free of government regulation. But as we have seen, this “freedom” requires an awful lot of government. Besides this, it is at odds with the whole economic theory of free markets. That theory requires that each commodity be supplied by a vast number of firms, such that none have any pricing power; all are price-takers and none are price-makers, and all must accept what the market gives. This is the whole basis of free market economics, the assumption behind every supply-and-demand chart you have ever seen. But in the face of an economy dominated by corporate collectives, these charts have no meaning whatsoever; products tend to get a monopoly price dictated by a cartel rather than by the market. Only an economy of well-distributed property and a large number of firms for each commodity can be considered “free” in any economically or philosophically defensible meaning of that term. But “property”—properly understood—is precisely what capitalism destroys.

The Disappearance of Property

Certainly no argument is as basic to capitalism as is the argument over “private property.” Capitalism, it is argued, is a system founded on private property to the exclusion, or near-exclusion, of any socialized property, save for a few public services like parks, police, or national defense. But just as the claims for capitalism as “limited government” or “free markets” prove false in practice, the claims about “private” property are also contradicted by the reality on the ground, and the most obvious fact about that reality is that private property plays almost no role in a capitalist economy! To be sure, we still have a private property in our homes and our cars or even a small farm or perhaps a small business. But the vast majority of productive property is, as already shown, gathered into vast corporate collectives. Who “owns” these collectives?

The defenders of capitalism will likely respond that the collectives are “owned” by the shareholders, hence private property still holds. But can this be true in any meaningful sense of the term? Shareholding is obviously not ownership in any simple sense. Owning something gives me use and control of that thing, and makes me responsible for that thing. But owning a share of stock does none of these things. If I own, for example, a share of IBM stock, I cannot enter any IBM facility, examine their research, or even look at their books. I am not responsible for any actions of the company. Indeed, my share is not a “thing” to be “owned” at all, but a legal arrange- ment. And this legal arrangement conveys three rights only: the right to a share of the dividends, if any, that the directors care to distribute; the right to vote for the directors; and the right to sell the stock. The first two “rights” are fairly meaningless in practice. As Imam and Barnes show, “dividends” are not really a distribution of profits, which is what we would expect to accrue to an “owner” of a company in the normal use of the English language. They are an arbitrary amount paid out to shareholders by the directors who are mainly interested only in increasing the stock price. As to voting for the directors, most share “owners” simply do not have enough knowledge—or interest—in the firm to exercise this “right.” Most simply do not bother with it.

It is the third right alone—the right to sell the stock—that is of interest to speculators. The whole point of shareholding is to buy cheap and sell dear, and the sole reason for buying a stock is to get rid of it at an opportune moment, when its price is higher. In the time between the purchase and the sale, the shareholder has done nothing to add value to the stock. The speculator (shareholder) increases his claims on the circulating goods of the nation, without having added anything to those goods, hence his increase must come at the expense of those who do add value. For this much is mathematically certain: where there is wealth without work in one place, there must be work without wealth in many others. One can summon what defenses one will for this arrangement, but one cannot possibly call it “property.”

Ownership and Responsibility

The failure of capitalism to live up to any of its goals can be traced to shareholding, the level of abstraction it represents, and the shift in economic purpose it demands. The whole purpose of an economy is to provide the material basis for social and political life. Its success is—or at least ought to be—measured by the degree to which families and communities are flourishing. But shareholding shifts this goal to that of an increase of wealth, even (or especially) at the expense of the family and the community. The needs of a strong family for adequate food, housing, healthcare, etc. become a “drag” on profits, and hence an obstacle to monetary growth, the summum bonum of neoclassical economics. Just as the “owners” of the firm have no responsibility for it, so too economics has no responsibility for the health of society. But this loss of an authentic telos is the death of economic science and the corruption of political society. Restoring property is largely a matter of restoring responsibility.

Who Owns the Corporation?

If the shareholders do not “own” the corporation, then who does? Normally, we consider the person who has beneficial use, control, and responsibility for the property to be the “owner.” Clearly, that would be the senior managers. As Kevin Carson notes, “the corporation is an agglomeration of unowned capital, under the control of a self-perpetuating managerial oligarchy.”[12] John Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Investment Funds (no anti-capitalist he), says that

in the corporate system, the “owner” of industrial wealth is left with a mere symbol of ownership while the power, the responsibility, and the substance which have been an integral part of ownership in the past are being transferred to a separate group in whose hands lies control.[13]

Management seems to be an overhead expense with no natural limits, short of bankrupting the company. What management mostly produces is more managers, which means new configurations of power in the firm and in the economy. Indeed, the rise of managerial power has spawned a new class of über-managers whose pay and privileges dwarf those of line workers to an unprecedented degree:

Over the past century, a gradual move from owners’ capitalism—providing the lion’s share of the rewards of investment to those who put up the money and risk their own capital—has culminated in an extreme version of managers’ capitalism—providing vastly disproportionate rewards to those whom we have trusted to manage our enterprises in the interest of the owners.[14]

Just how disproportionate are the rewards? John Bogle is largely concerned with return to investors, but when we look at “return to workers,” we find that the ratio of CEO salaries to the average worker is 278:1. That is up from 20:1 in 1965, and 58:1 in 1978.[15] CEO compensation has increased an astounding 940% since 1978. This rate of growth is a fourth to a third higher than the stock market’s growth. And looking at workers in the 300 firms with the lowest worker pay, the ratio shoots up to an astounding 670:1.[16] What actually happens is that the über-managers compete with both the shareholders and the workers for the division of rewards. Now, the shareholders must be accommodated by higher stock prices, but the workers are tolerated only to the degree necessary, and are to be automated or outsourced whenever possible. The divisions between “capital” and “labor” become institutionalized, and society deteriorates even as GDP grows. But as Pope St. John Paul II notes,

A labour system can be right, in the sense of being in conformity with the very essence of the issue, and in the sense of being intrinsically true and also morally legitimate, if in its very basis it overcomes the opposition between labour and capital through an effort at being shaped in accordance with the principle put forward above: the principle of the substantial and real priority of labour, of the subjectivity of human labour and its effective participation in the whole production process, independently of the nature of the services provided by the worker.[17]

The “Eternal” Firm

One peculiar effect of the divorce of property and responsibility and the level of abstraction that it entails is that the firm is no longer a “copartnery” (societas), a particular set of relations between specific persons, for a specific purpose, and for a specific (if often unspecified) period of time. Things tend to have a time-limit, but when wealth is no longer conceived of as things, like land or property, but as an abstraction, like money or shares, we tend to regard it as “eternal.” Those who provided the original capital are regarded as the perpetual “owners” of the firm. But this is problematic. All production occurs at the intersection of capital and labor, and both are consumed in production. But while the claims of labor are dissolved by the wage, the claims of the capitalist endure long after his capital has been consumed. The capital must be renewed, and this can be done only by labor, yet the laborer never comes into possession of any of the capital his labor has renewed.

Bringing Back the “R-word”

Identifying shareholding with property owning is problematic on several grounds. In the first place, it divorces ownership and labor, and sets up a tension between the two: the workers create the value and the shareholders reap the benefits. But it also divorces “ownership” from responsibility. The shareholders have “limited liability”; misuse of the property entails no personal loss beyond the value of the shares. Compare that to real ownership. Say you own a car and crash it into someone’s person or property. Clearly, you are responsible for all the damages, and cannot say, “I am responsible only up to the value of my car.” But that is exactly what shareholders say; their “property” may poison a nation, but the most they can suffer is the loss of their shares.

This divorce between property and responsibility is the very death of property, even as it is the foundation of liberal economic theory. As David Ellerman notes,

“Responsibility” is the R-word that economics cannot utter. The reader is invited to find a single economics text that mentions that only human actions, not the services of things, can be de facto responsible.[18]

That is to say, only labor creates value; “tools and machines do not ‘produce’ their marginal product or anything else. Tools and machines are used by people to produce the outputs.”[19] But from within neoclassical economics, the instrumental cause of production (“capital”) is elevated over the final and material cause (labor). This is at the root of Pope St. John Paul II’s critique of capitalism:

In all cases of this sort, in every social situation of this type, there is a confusion or even a reversal of the order laid down from the beginning by the words of the Book of Genesis: man is treated as an instrument of production, whereas he—he alone, independently of the work he does—ought to be treated as the effective subject of work and its true maker and creator. Precisely this reversal of order, whatever the programme or name under which it occurs, should rightly be called “capitalism.”[20]

This “reversal of right order” leads to a fundamental confusion between means and ends:

In view of this situation we must first of all recall a principle that has always been taught by the Church: the principle of the priority of labour over capital. This principle directly concerns the process of production: in this process labour is always a primary efficient cause, while capital, the whole collection of means of production, remains a mere instru- ment or instrumental cause. This principle is an evident truth that emerges from the whole of man’s historical experience.[21]

What happens in shareholding is that this reversal of right order and this confusion of means and ends becomes “institutionalized,” becomes the “norm.” Indeed, if you remove responsibility from “ownership,” nothing remains but the imperative to increase the share price by any means necessary. Whether you are building houses or speculating in home mortgages, the goal is identical: make a profit. But only building homes can be properly called “investing”; buying up the mortgages is pure speculation, is wealth without work.

A Program for Reform

Any program of reform must have three goals in mind: one, reconnecting “ownership” with responsibility; two, spreading this real ownership throughout society as widely as possible; and three, encouraging investment while discouraging speculation. The ideas that follow are not meant to be exhaustive, but merely suggestive of the types of changes that could work to bring capitalism more in line with both the natural law and economic rationality. And they are certainly not meant to be revolutionary, but evolutionary. Shareholding is simply too well-embedded in our cultural, social, and economic systems to simply be “ripped out”; change, to be enduring, has to be a process.

Don’t Tax Profits, Tax Retained Earnings

This first reform might seem counter-intuitive, it may seem like saying, “The corporations are making too much money, so let them make more.” But the problem of wealth inequality doesn’t come from profits but from retained earnings, the profits that are neither invested in the firm nor returned to the investors or the employees. This is a huge source of financing for firms, but one that escapes capital market discipline, the scrutiny that investment firms give to borrowers, while increasing corporate power. Using these internal funds, the companies become behemoths, freezing out competition by limiting the opportunities for new firms. The tax on retained earnings should be some multiple of what companies pay to borrow funds. Let’s say businesses can generally borrow money at 5%. Put a retained earnings tax of 10%, so that holding becomes more expensive than borrowing or selling new shares. Hence, new investments will become subject to capital market discipline, which works to connect ownership and responsibility. Companies could avoid taxation by investing the profits in expansion of the business, thereby providing new goods and more jobs, or by distributing the profits as bonuses to employees and dividends to investors, where they would be taxed as ordinary income.

A Maximum Wage as a Multiple of the Median Wage

There is much debate over “minimum wages,” but what is really needed is a maximum wage. As things are today, the über-managers compete with shareholders and workers for a greater share of the rewards. But suppose their compensation was capped at something around 20–40 times what the median worker gets. Then, the interests of the workers and the managers would be more aligned; a CEO could increase his pay only by advancing his workers. Competition with his workers would become cooperation, which is a better management strategy in itself.

End the Practice of Stock Buy-Backs, Unless in Behalf of the Employees

The easiest way for a CEO to goose the stock price is simply to use company funds to buy up company stock. But this can happen only by diverting funds from investment, dividends, or wages. The practice used to be illegal, for the simple reason that it serves no rational business purpose, save and except in a system where stock price is the sole measure of success. But that changed in the Reagan administration. The flood-gates were opened, the über-managers were given a new tool to boost their compensation, and they have never hesitated to use it. Stock buybacks can serve a useful purpose when they are used to increase employee ownership of the firm. Which brings us to the next point.

Provide Low Interest Loans For Employee Buyouts

The ultimate goal of bridging the gap between capital and labor can be achieved only by extending ownership to the people who actually create the wealth; that is, the workers. The Federal Reserve Bank, always solicitous of the needs of investors and financial manipulators, could extend that same solicitude to the workers by providing low-interest loans, paid back by the company, to finance worker buyouts of the company. Allowing workers to easily buy stock in their own companies would help to convert the corporation into a true societas, a partnership working toward common goals. It also strengthens the community by binding the workers and their families to the corporation, giving everyone a common purpose.

Put a Time-Limit on Shares

The most radical idea comes from George Goyder, an English industrialist.[22] It simply recognizes the fact that investing cannot establish a perpetual claim. As we noted, at some point, the original capital is “used-up” and replaced by the products of labor. A time-limit on shares would recognize this reality. Let’s say that after twenty years, the company can redeem the shares on behalf of the employees by paying the investor either their market value or the book-value. Goyder favors the market value but I think the book value might be more just. But in either case, it requires the investor to reinvest his funds in another enterprise, thereby increasing the supply of capital.

Socializing the Great Workbench

I think we should be willing to admit that the socialists had the right idea: all capital is the result of labor, and laborers need to be associated with the capital their labor has created. But they had the wrong method. As Pope St. John Paul II pointed out,

Therefore, while the position of “rigid” capitalism must undergo continual revision, in order to be reformed from the point of view of human rights, … it must be stated that, from the same point of view, these many deeply desired reforms cannot be achieved by an a priori elimination of private ownership of the means of production. For it must be noted that merely taking these means of production (capital) out of the hands of their private owners is not enough to ensure their satisfactory socialization.[23]

In fact, true reform must go in the opposite direction: not eliminating private property, but extending it to every worker, insofar as that is practical. As the pontiff continues,

We can speak of socializing only when the subject character of society is ensured, that is to say, when on the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part-owner of the great workbench at which he is working with every one else. A way towards that goal could be found by associating labour with the ownership of capital, as far as possible, and by producing a wide range of intermediate bodies with economic, social and cultural purposes; they would be bodies enjoying real autonomy with regard to the public powers, pursuing their specific aims in honest collaboration with each other and in subordination to the demands of the common good, and they would be living communities both in form and in substance, in the sense that the members of each body would be looked upon and treated as persons and encouraged to take an active part in the life of the body.[24]

The “anonymous societies”—the corporations—can never deliver what they promise; they can never bring us limited government, free markets, or private property. Indeed, they can only negate all of these, as shown by their actual history. But most especially, they cannot overcome the division between capital and labor; that can come only by sharing in ownership, and by identifying property with responsibility.

Notes:

1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Fifth Edition, 1789), bk. V, chap. 3, art. 1.

2. For a good account of Bazacle and milling in the Middle Ages, see Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), chap. 1.

3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), bk. I, chap. 1.

4. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Fifth Edition), bk. V, chap. 1, art. 2.

5. Jacob Imam and Marc Barnes, “Should Christians Invest in the Stock Market?,” New Polity 3.1 (Winter 2022): 27–42, at 31.

6. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 145.

7. Polanyi, Great Transformation, 37.

8. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Kindle (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 182.

9. E. K. Hunt, History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 142.

10. See Polanyi, The Great Transformation, chap. 8; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), chap.

    VI.

11. For a good discussion of the degree of monopolization in the economy, see: Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

12. Kevin Carson, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (Charleston, SC: Booksurge, 2008), 226.

13. John C. Bogle, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 32.

14. Ibid., xix.

15. Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, “CEO Compensation Has Grown 940% since 1978” (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute), August 14, 2019, 14.

16. Sarah Anderson, Sam Pizzigati and Brian Wakamo, “Executive Excess 2022” (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2022), 4.

17. Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, sec. 13.

18. David P. Ellerman, Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life (Lanham, MD: Brown & Littlefield, 1995), 38.

19. Ibid., 41.

20. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, sec. 8.

21. Ibid., sec. 12.

22. George Goyder, The Just Enterprise (London: Andre Deutsch, 1987), chap. 9.

23. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, sec. 14.

24. Ibid., sec. 14.

The featured image is “Déchargement d’un brick à Marseille” (1876) by Alphonse Moutte, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.