Federal Reserve Economic Database Data Analysis Questions Use the Federal Reserve Economic Database (“FRED,” www.fred.stlouisfed.org) to answer the followi

Federal Reserve Economic Database Data Analysis Questions Use the Federal Reserve Economic Database (“FRED,” www.fred.stlouisfed.org) to answer the following questions. Size your graphs to keep your answers on the same page that these questions are located on. The final assignment you turn in should be exactly six pages, no more. 4/23/2020
120. John A. Ryan, A Living Wage (1912)
120. John A. Ryan, A Living Wage (1912)
Source: John A. Ryan, A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic
Aspects (New York, 1912), pp. 67–73, 297–301.
During the Progressive era, the ideas of “industrial freedom” and
“industrial democracy,” which had entered the political vocabulary
during the Gilded Age, moved to the center of political discussion.
They had many meanings, including improving the general
standard of living and working conditions, and empowering
workers to participate in economic decision making via strong
unions. In any form, these terms challenged traditional definitions
of freedom, as well as the idea of the inviolability of private
property. The government, Progressives believed, had the right to
expand liberty by regulating economic activity in the public
interest.
One of the era’s foremost advocates of social justice was John A.
Ryan, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at Catholic University
in Washington, D.C. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII had called on Catholics
to engage in social activism on behalf of industrial workers. Ryan
became the leading proponent of the idea that all persons had a
natural right not simply to subsistence but to a “living wage,”
which would enable them to share in the fruits of modern
technology. His book on the subject helped to popularize the idea
and influenced legislation of the Progressive era and New Deal
establishing minimum wage levels. Ryan would become so close to
President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1930s that he was
known as the “Right Reverend New Dealer.”
THE RIGHT TO a Living Wage is derived from the right to live
from the bounty of the earth. The latter right acknowledged by
most nations and insisted upon by Christianity. It is evident
from a view of man’s nature and his relation to the earth. It is
superior to and limits the right of private ownership. Meaning
a decent livelihood. Its rational basis is the sacredness of
personality. Men have not natural rights to equal amounts of
goods; for they are unequal both in individual needs and
productive powers. Nor rights to equal satisfaction of the
totality of their needs. . . .
A man’s natural rights are as many and as extensive as are
the liberties, opportunities and possessions that are required
for the reasonable maintenance and development of his
personality. They may all be reduced to the right to a
reasonable amount of external liberty of action. Some of them,
for instance the right to live and the right to marry, are original
and primary, inhering in all persons of whatever condition;
others are derived and secondary, occasioned and determined
by the particular circumstances of particular persons. To the
latter class belongs the right to a Living Wage. It is not an
original and universal right; for the receiving of wages
supposes that form of industrial organization known as the
wage system, which has not always existed and is not essential
to human welfare. Even today there are millions of men who
get their living otherwise than by wages, and who, therefore,
have no juridical title to wages of any kind or amount. The
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120. John A. Ryan, A Living Wage (1912)
right to a Living Wage is evidently a derived right which is
measured and determined by existing social and industrial
institutions. . . .
Private property is morally legitimate because it is the
method that best enables man to realize his natural right to
use the gifts of material nature for the development of his
personality. It is, therefore, merely a means, and its scope is
determined and limited by the end which it promotes, and
which is its sole justification. The private right of any and
every individual must be interpreted consistently with the
common rights of all. . . . Hence a man’s right to a superfluous
loaf which is his by a title of private ownership does not
absolve him from the crime of injustice when he withholds it
from his starving fellow man. . . .
So much for the right to subsistence, to a bare livelihood. By
a decent livelihood is meant that amount of the necessities and
comforts of life that is in keeping with the dignity of a human
being. It has no precise relation to the conventional standard
of living that may prevail within any social or industrial class,
but describes rather that minimum of conditions which the
average person of a given age or sex must enjoy in order to live
as a human being should live . . . in a reasonable degree of
comfort. . . . He must have food, clothing and shelter. He must
have opportunity to develop within reasonable limits all his
faculties, physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. . . .
The obligation of providing the laborer with a Living Wage
. . . rests upon the State. . . . Negatively, liberty is the absence
of restraint; positively, it is the power to act and to enjoy. . . .
The absence of State intervention means the presence of
insuperable obstacles to real and effective liberty. . . . [Such
legislation] would secure a wider measure of freedom in larger
economic opportunity. . . . The State has both the right and the
duty to compel all employers to pay a Living Wage.
Questions
1. How does Ryan justify the idea that people have a right to a
Living Wage?
2. Why does he see governmental action to promote a Living Wage
as an expansion of liberty rather than a threat to it?
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