"MOST LEGISLATIVE PROGRAMS, political slogans, and radical catchwords of our times are concerned with the satisfaction of material wants. The Communist catchword is “jobs” “jobs” “jobs”; the politician’s slogan is “work” “work” “work”; the legislator’s promise is “[more] material security.” Add to this the sad fact that millions of citizens, whose bodies and souls have been ravaged by a materialist civilization, have reached a point where they are willing to sacrifice the last crumb of liberty for a piece of the cake of security. Reformers [and community organizers] have not understood their cry. Because man make demands for security, our reformers have neglected to inquire what they really want. A starving man asks for bread, when he really wants life. “The body is more than the raiment, and life is more than the food.” The unemployed, the socially disinherited, the poor broken earthenware of humanity ask for “work,” but what they really want is independence. The normal man does not want to be fed either by a social agency or a state; he wants to be able to feed himself. In other words, he wants liberty. But, as we said in the last chapter, there is only one solid economic foundation for individual liberty and that is a wider distribution of property.
Property is here understood primarily as productive property, such as land, or a share in the profits, management or ownership of industry. Property does not mean a distribution of created wealth [past savings] such as bread, circuses, and jobs, but a redistribution of creative wealth [future earnings]; not rations handed out by an agency or an employer, but a shared ownership of productive goods. Liberty to be real, concrete, and practicable must have a foundation in the economic order; namely, independence."
~ Fulton J. Sheen, Freedom under God, Economic Guarantee of Human Liberty, 1940/2013, (page 49).
