Lots of ponderables in The Church Confronts Modernity. Woods quotes John Ryan, an early apologist for Catholic social teaching, who opines that men are "more susceptible to religious influence and can know and serve God better when they are contented and comfortable than when they are impoverished and miserable." This seems in line with my (very limited) personal experience, but I have to wonder how closely connected comfort is to service to God.
Meanwhile Woods describes the early debate over minimum wage laws:
One of the most respected treatments of the subject was John Ryan's A Living Wage, the thesis of which will be described below, but which in general argued for a moral obligation incumbent upon employers to provide their workers with a wage that allowed both them and their families to live in reasonable comfort. But a reviewer for the Catholic University Bulletin in 1907 objected that Ryan, in his understandable zeal to vindicate the laborer's right to a living wage, overlooked the fact that, both realistically speaking and as a matter of justice, the economic value of the work done must play a key role in an employer's determination of wage rates.Perhaps so, but it seems completely unjust that someone can't earn a living wage due to a lack of native intelligence, something that can't be controlled. In Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve" the link between household income and IQ is so firmly established that it seems there'll come a time when you'll be able to predict someone's future income not long after birth.
The unfairness becomes increasingly obvious in today's brain-based society versus the old brawn-based. The chances of a brain in a brawn-based society seems better than a brawny man in a brain-based one (though the Irish in their ninth century Golden Age didn't stand much of a chance against the marauding, brawny Vikings).
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