“I am not advocating that the state expropriate the existing wealth of stockholders. I do believe that stockholders have the right to control the destiny of the firm, but the critical question is not stockholders’ right to control, but how they control it. The Christian social tradition advocates private property not because it allows one the freedom to do whatever one wants–choice is not the highest value here. Rather, private property provides an opportunity for persons to contribute to the common good, which serves as the basis for developing virtue at work. Virtue will not come about from the mentality of maximizing stockholder wealth, but rather from reconnecting capital to labor, communities, and others who have a stake in the capital.” — From Michael J. Naughton’s “The "Stumbling and Tripping” of Executive Pay", which was published in December of 2001 in the New Oxford Review. Peter Leithart passed the full text along to me, which I’ve (possibly illegally) reproduced here; he also summarized this article on his blog. It seems that the Catholic social tradition stands to inform the enervated, free-market sloganeering you hear from most American Christians (here’s another post from Leithart on Cavanaugh that encapsulates what I’m getting at). I’d also say that there’s a lot in this article to deepen the Protestant doctrine of Vocation—or, at very least, my own shallow understanding of it. December 15, 2010