Catholic Men at Work

Before we finish up our discussion of a Catholic view of private property, there's one more point that needs to be made. It's fundamentally important and we really didn't single it out in our recent posts: We should live more frugally to share more with the poor. We have talked about how we should create surplus in order to share that surplus with the poor. We focused on how we could use our energy, skills, and talents to increase efficiency, and thereby production, in our chosen field such that the total "pie" grows larger, providing more to share with the poor. Such efforts would be, no doubt, admirable. But here we've turned from creating more to using less. Using less hits home much harder and much more immediately. While I can't judge anyone's individual situation, I do know from observation and experience that many, if not most, of us in the West, especially in the U.S. would not suffer from an increase in frugality. Many of us live...