‘Socialist views’ Digong may want to consider

Quite amazing indeed is the ascendancy of President-elect Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte to the highest office of the land—the presidency. This, despite the barrage of accusations and innuendoes of disparaging nature, the most serious among them that he is a communist and NPA protector, which he vehemently denies, though he admitted that he is a “socialist.”

The hunger for change on the part of the masses and the unorthodox way he “marketed” himself—in words and deeds—to the electorate, catapulted him to the presidency.

If by being a socialist his concern is inclusiveness and the promotion of social justice sacrosanctly enshrined in the Philippine Constitution, then he would find an ally in his holiness Pope Francis who, in his first papal exhortation “Joy of the Gospel,” condemned “trickle down capitalism” as inimical to human development.

Borrowing his words: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape … those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes, or its disenfranchised—they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not even the exploited—but the outcast, the leftover.”

The above scenario has brought to the fore Dr. Jose P. Laurel’s definition of social justice, articulated in the celebrated case of Calalang vs Williams before the Supreme Court:

“Social justice is ‘neither communism, nor despotism, nor atomism, nor anarchy,’ but the humanization of laws and the equalization of social and economic forces by the State so that justice in its rational and objectively secular conception may at least be approximated. Social justice means the promotion of the welfare of all the people. The adoption by the Government of measures calculated to ensure economic stability of all the component elements of society, through the maintenance of a proper economic and social equilibrium in the interrelations of the members of the community, constitutionally, through the adoption of measures legally justifiable; or extraconstitutionally, through the exercise of powers underlying the existence of all governments on the time-honored principle of salus populi est suprema lex (the welfare of the people is the first law).”

Let it not be said that those who have been catapulted to the position of power have been called, and yet they failed to respond.

—FLORENCIO A. DE LOYOLA, Batangas City