If we could be sure that it was only high schoolers who would be interested in these jobs and that it would not take away jobs from adults, then, yes, I agree with you.

In answer to your question, I would not take a job that paid $11/hr (unless there were no others available) because I have a family to support, but 25 years ago as a high schooler I would have jumped at the chance.

And that's why I was outraged by the NY City Council killing off those 2,000 jobs- during a recession yet. Those jobs would have been in the Bronx, the NY borough w/the highest unemployment rate.
Why not let the locals, particularly the teens looking for "starter jobs", decide if they wanted to be employed there?

Or do you agree w/the Left that having no job is better than having one that pays below the "living wage"?

So I pose a rhetorical question, would we have a fiat economy like the one run by today's Wall Street Shylocks if the Church was not excluded?

Thank you for your generous and informative reply. I have already begun to read Quadragesimo Anno and look forward to reading Leo XIII's encyclical On the Condition Of Workers as well. Right off I saw that the popes rejected socialism, so I breathed a sigh of relief.

This has been such a vexatious argument for as long as I can remember. The fate of those of us born near the mid-point of the 20th century, it seems, has been to be deprived of any middle ground, any safe rear area behind the battle lines, both ideological and literal, in the great contest between economic and moral systems usually described as communism/socialism vs. capitalism. No amount of reading, arguing, contemplation or obliviousness, fleeing or fighting has sufficed to bring my conscience to rest in this matter. It is therefore no small comfort to me to find, at last, that I can turn to these our great stalwarts of truth for guidance that has been cleansed of man's impurities.

I certainly was not suggesting that Pius XI, or any pope, was a socialist. In fact, it was Pius XI who said that no true Catholic could be a real socialist. But at the risk of writing too long a post, I'll go into this matter at more length.

In Quadragesimo Anno Pius XI characterized capitalism as "that economic system, wherein, generally, some provide capital while others provide labor for a joint economic activity." In other words, under capitalism some labor for wages using the property of those who own the capital. Now, some distinctions are in order.

First, such a system is not in itself unjust. But Pius XI recognizes that as a matter of fact, both historically and at the time he was writing, capitalists behaved unjustly and exploited workers extensively. This doesn't mean that capitalism is unjust (which I never said in my earlier post), simply that capitalists often behave badly. What was Pius' solution? Briefly put, he did not mandate capitalism (more on that later), but basically said that as long as we have capitalism we have to have considerable regulation, best done not by the central government, but by intermediate bodies which represent both capitalist owners and workers. The state has a role, to be sure, but as much regulation as can conveniently be done should be done by these lower bodies, which are akin to the medieval guilds in their function and membership. Ok, this pretty much summarizes Pius XI's attitude toward the capitalist system.

Here, btw, is a link to Quadragesimo Anno. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno_en.html

Now, what of alternatives? Just because capitalism, as regulated according to papal social teaching, is not unjust, does not mean that it is required. There are many alternatives to capitalism besides socialism. I myself think that distributism is the best alternative. I won't go into this here, and you can find much in favor of distributism by me and others via Google. I'll just note that while distributism is not mandated by papal social teaching, it is fully in accord with it and it seems to me that it eliminates the inconveniences and many of the temptations to injustice that even a just capitalist system would have.

Other systems championed by important Catholic thinkers include Fr. Heinrich Pesch's Solidarism and what was widely known as corporatism, a confusing name which does not denote the business corporation (a corporation here is pretty much the same as a guild. In fact in the middle ages the proper name for a guild was corporatio in Latin.) You might also look into the German social market economy, which was an attempt to modify capitalism along the lines of Catholic social teaching by trying to break down the class divide and provide for more joint control over the enterprise by capital and labor.

To recapitulate, to criticize capitalist greed is not the same as to assert that capitalism is always unjust, still less to advocate socialism. But I'll add, that our present capitalist system as we have it here in the U.S. seems to me to stand condemned by the teaching of the popes.