From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.catholic,alt.activism
Subject: Can Economic Policy be Based on Christian Principles?: part 5
Date: 26 Jan 93 17:9:56 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

The following series is taken from Executive Intelligence Review V20, 
#5 and is the cover story of that issue.  For further information on 
EIR, please contact me by Email.


LaRouche defines a science
of Christian economy against usury

{Lyndon LaRouche's 1991 book, }The Science of
Christian Economy,{ develops the principled basis for the
compatibility of Christian teachings and economic science.
We reprint excerpts from the preface here, so as to
highlight the distance from the anti-Christian doctrines
of Michael Novak and company:} 

   During the course of these next several pages, we
shall come to the point at which we shall turn the
attention of our ecumenical readership to numbered section
72, of the famous 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, {Rerum
Novarum.} We shall then focus upon the concluding sentence
of that section, and also upon the passage from Thomas
Aquinas's {Summa Theologica} which the author of the
encyclical has footnoted there. The referenced sentence of
the encyclical's text reads thus: ``For laws are to be
obeyed only insofar as they conform with right reason and
thus with the eternal law of God.'' 
   The footnoted passage from St. Thomas Aquinas's
{Summa Theologica} reads: ``Human law is law only in
virtue of its accordance with right reason; and, thus it
is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And
insofar as it [man-made law--LHL] deviates from right
reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is not
law at all, but rather a species of violence.'' 
   A hundred years ago, {Rerum Novarum} treated the
remedying of the evil then being run by a ``devouring
usury,'' which, ``although often condemned by the Church,
but practiced nevertheless under another form by
avaricious and grasping men, has increased the evil''
effected by the handing over of workers, ``each alone and
defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers and the
unbridled greed of competitors.'' 
   At the time of the assassination of U.S. President
John F. Kennedy at the end of 1963, approximately
three-quarters of a century had passed. It appeared to
most observers then, that the pleas for economic justice
in {Rerum Novarum,} if not yet successful, were assuredly
on the way to becoming so. 
   In the so-called ``industrialized capitalist''
sectors of this planet, the trade-union movement and other
meliorist agencies had won, and were continuing to win
cumulatively invaluable, and putatively permanent gains in
human rights for most strata of the populations. Although
a vicious form of neo-colonialism had been established at
the end of the 1939-45 World War, the spirit of the United
Nations Organization's First Development Decade Project,
and the U.S. Kennedy administration's Alliance For
Progress, suggested a commitment to global justice
paralleling, and perhaps echoing the rise of the civil
rights movement inside the U.S.A. itself. 
   During the middle of the 1960s, that hopeful
direction of development was reversed. During the recent
quarter-century, social conditions in most parts of the
world are far worse, on the average, than during the
1960s, and threaten to become soon far worse than one
hundred years ago. 
   The impulses for evil which have caused this recent
calamity are not altogether new. A conspicuously leading
cause of the greatly increased immiseration and
endangerment of the human species, during the past
quarter-century, has been the willful murderousness with
which such forms of the old ``devouring usury'' as
so-called ``International Monetary Fund (IMF)
conditionalities'' have been so widely, so murderously, so
shamelessly applied to the precalculable effect of rapid
and large-scale increases of death rates by means of
malnutrition, disease, and related mechanisms. 
   The most striking of the various included features of
the new evil, is the dominant influence of the so-called
``New Age.'' This feature includes such presently pandemic
expressions of this as the ``rock-drug-sex
counterculture,'' and increasingly irrationalist
mass-murderous expressions of self-styled ``ecologism,''
or ``neo-malthusianism.'' 
   The ``New Age'' is not itself an entirely new form of
evil. It is as old an evil as the pagan roots of
gnosticism. Prior to the 1963 launching of the ``New Age''
as a mass movement within the United States, this form of
New Age satanism was an endemic cancer in such forms as
the theosophical existentialism of the followers of the
proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche, and the pro-freemasonic
satanists of Aleister Crowley's networks. 
   What is notable on these accounts is the increasingly
emboldened way in which the two evils, the ``New Age'' and
usury, have exhibited their natural affinities for one
another, combining their forces in even the highest places
of Anglo-American power, to demand, in the misused name of
``freedom'' and ``ecology,'' the rapid extermination and
global outlawing of every scientific and moral barrier
which has hitherto existed as impediments to rampaging
immiseration and dictatorial oppression of mankind. 
   Such are the leading characteristic distinctions
between the problems immediately addressed one hundred
years ago, and today. 
   The former hegemony of scientific and technological
progress, upon whose continuation the existence of our
populations depends, is being suppressed by both the loss
of simple rationality in the education of the young, and
by the spread of the paganist cults of anti-science,
irrationalist ``ecologism.'' As a concomitant of such
specific, catastrophic effects as this one, those European
and American forces which are committed to calculated
mass-murder of populations of all developing nations, and
which are committed to the extermination of the Christian
faith and conscience, have come plainly into the
ascendancy in the policy-making processes of most of the
governing international and national governmental
institutions which have gained leadership and dominance
over this planet today. 

              - The ecumenical standpoint -
   We propose that it is necessary, but not sufficient
to view the referenced state of affairs from a Christian
standpoint; for practical reasons, it is essential that
even the Christian standpoint itself be presented here
from an ecumenical standpoint as {ecumenical} is typified
by Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa's dialogue, {De Pace
Fidei.}...
   Faith may read those writings it deems sacred, or
authoritative commentaries on such writings. Or, faith may
``read the bare book of universal nature,'' a book which
plainly has been written directly by none other than the
Creator himself. It is certain to all men and women of
ecumenical good will, that the two kinds of books--the
written ones, and the book of nature--cannot contradict
one another, on condition that the written one be true,
and that both the written and the natural one be read by
means of the inner eye of true reason. 
   So, where doctrinal writings differ, we may turn the
eye of ecumenical reason to the common book of nature. 
   Let us argue the point in the following, twofold way.
We emphasize, on the one side, the ecumenical notion of
{intelligible representation} of a principle of knowledge
of cause-effect in our universe, a means by which all men
and women, despite differences in profession of
monotheistic faith, may be brought by their own powers of
reason to agreement upon a common principle of law.
Second, we emphasize the importance of stressing
{Christian} principles of Christian civilization as
{Christian,} even within the framework of a monotheistic
ecumenicism.... 
        
                  - Physical Economy -
   By the nature of the case, there is no field of
inquiry which unites all subjects of human reason--law,
science, art--as directly, as immediately, as the science
of Physical Economy which was founded by Gottfried
Leibniz. That is a special standpoint of the work we
preface here. 
   As is to be seen in summary in the appended document,
{Physical Economy} is the science of {successful change,}
a study of the dependency of the continued existence of a
society upon {successful} forms of successive generation,
transmission, and efficient assimilation of fundamental
scientific progress. The measure of that effective
progress is an increase in what Physical Economy defines
as the rate of increase of the potential
population-density of that society as a whole. That
thus serves as an efficient empirical measurement of both
the appropriateness of the society's way of changing its
method of reasoning, and, therefore, the appropriateness
of the principle of change adopted for that practice. 
   Any society which defies those considerations, is
threatening its own continued existence, and, a society
implicitly becoming an abomination in God's eye, a society
which is not only losing the moral fitness to survive, but
which, by God's clock, will not long survive in its
present form. 
   Historically, to date, the closest approximation of a
form of political economy consistent with Christian
principles is the so-called {mercantilist} form growing
out of {Colbertisme} in France, and the far-reaching
influence of Leibniz. This outgrowth came to be known by
the name given to it officially by U.S. Treasury Secretary
Alexander Hamilton, ``the American System of Political
Economy.'' This name came to be associated with the
work of the U.S. economists Mathew and Henry Carey and of
Germany's Friedrich List. 
   The deadly adversaries of the so-called
``mercantilist,'' or ``American'' system, were the
Anglo-French-Swiss known in the early eighteenth century
as the ``Venetian Party.'' This was the political
faction allied against Leibniz and his friends, and allied
with the first Duke of Marlborough, allied with the
networks of Voltaire, with the Physiocrats, and with
so-called eighteenth century ``British liberalism'' of
Hugh Walpole, David Hume, Shelburne, Adam Smith, Jeremy
Bentham, and Thomas Malthus generally. These Physiocrats
and liberals were the chief guise for the pro-usury
faction of that century. 
   That issue of the eighteenth century is more
efficiently understood by emphasizing that the liberals
and {illuminati} of Voltaire's eighteenth century were
committed to a return to the model of a pagan imperial
Rome. Hence we call them ``romantics.'' These romantics
were dedicated to the overthrow of Christianity for the
purpose of advancing their {romantic imperial utopianism.}
That is the root of the structures of sin in Western
European and North American civilization today. 
These were then, and are still today both the pro-usury
faction, and the utopian cultural form from which the
present-day satanic ``New Age'' utopianisms have sprung....


----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com