The economy degraded by a lack of justice

57. The Apostolic Letter Tertio millennio adveniente proposes very specific initiatives to actively pursue social justice(⁸²). It thereby encourages us to discover other ways of responding to the problem of hunger and malnutrition which this Jubilee of the Year 2000 might adopt.

The Jubilee is a particularly necessary practice in the field of the economy, for if left to itself, the economy becomes drained of its life-blood, because it no longer does justice. Every economic crisis, the extreme effects of which are food shortages, essentially appears as a crisis of justice which is no longer being carried out(⁸³). The chosen people of the Old Testament had already sensed this, and today it must be made a reality. This crisis must be analysed today within the framework of the free market. In each country, as in international relations, the free market may be an appropriate instrument for sharing resources and responding effectively to people's needs(⁸⁴). Social justice makes trade permanent. Every human being has the right to accede to it, at the risk of foundering in an economic neo-Malthusianism based upon a stereotyped vision of solvency and efficiency.

Having said that, however, it must be noted that justice and the market are often analysed as two contradictory realities, which relieves the human person of any responsibility for social justice. The need for equity is then no longer the responsibility of the individual, who is resigned to succumbing to the market, but is transferred to the state, and more specifically to the Welfare State.

In general terms, prevailing moral philosophies are largely responsible for a shift in thinking in this area. This shift has moved away from the field of just behaviour to the field of just structures and just procedures, a theoretical construction that is now out of our reach. Furthermore, this State-provided welfare, ad intra and ad extra, now seems to be running out of steam and to be increasingly less able to guarantee any genuine distributive justice, to the point of threatening the efficiency of the national economy. Should this not be cause to reflect on the relationship between the lack of an individual contribution to the establishment of social justice and of moderation in our own economic behaviour on the one hand, and on the other, the increasing ineffectiveness of existing re-distribution mechanisms that eventually diminishes the overall efficiency of our economy?