The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law
Michael D. Greany and Dawn K. Brohawn
(Tan, $30, 383 pages):
For 40 years the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab has pushed a globalist agenda of stakeholder capitalism which would make companies answerable not to their shareholders but a global elite that share a centralizing worldview of welfare statism and monopoly capitalism. The WEF is mostly a talk shop, but their ideas have some currency among like-minded politicians and Schwab has repackaged his old prescriptions for the post-COVID era under the guise of The Great Reset. Michael D. Greany and Dawn K. Brohawn have a counter-offer, The Greater Reset, based on Catholic social teaching and an understanding of the common good, to remedy the societal and economic ills that plague modern man. They argue for institutions with human and humane scope in order to bring about the conditions to create the Kingdom of God on Earth. The problem with Schwab’s Reset is that it ignores “the impact of concentrated power on the dignity, equal opportunity, and empowerment of every human person.” Schwab’s plan would “vastly increase the power of the State and that of a tiny elite.” This is anti-human because the vast majority of citizens and consumers “become mere objects of the acts of others.” On the other hand, economic personalism, the authors argue, “seeks to diffuse economic power structurally by democratizing access to capital ownership for every person” so all people can become “full participants in the institutions of the common good.” This view of how society should be ordered not only respects but highlights the dignity of every human being. The “give-and-take in social life” that is only possible in human-scale institutions that eschew both libertarianism and collectivism is a (uniquely) happy median between “isolated individuals (and) indistinguishable members of the collective.” Only then are people “responsible for their own acts” because they are free to “distinguish truth and falsehood as well as good and evil.” The limitless rights of radical libertarianism and rule by diktat of collectivism denies human agency and self-determination. Not only is The Greater Reset a necessary alternative to the collectivist-monopolist goals of the WEF jetsetters, it is a timely reminder of what Catholic social teaching is (and isn’t), focused on “three principles of economic justice: 1) participative justice, 2) distributive justice, and 3) social justice” that should speak to all people of goodwill and seek “an understanding of the universal principles of natural law.”
