But does this imply a government policy? Yes and no. People make a serious error in transferring arguments that are morally valid for individuals and small communities to the state. If the state is collectively forcing us to give money to strangers who deserve it as a right, it is robbing us of our duty to practice charity and or our duty to make intelligent decisions about the objects of our compassion. The larger the state grows, the more money it squanders and the more people it plunges into poverty. Catholics interested in these questions have got to spend less time repeating the statements of well-intentioned Popes and more on economic reality. But, even then, it is quite wrong to speak of ethically neutral economic policies. In the end, it is far better to be poor and honest under a theocratic economic system, than to be fat and greedy under a Misesian system. Misesian writers are to be condemned, if only for confusing so many people about priorities. Christ’s warning against the likelihood of a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven applies doubly to those who reinvent the Kingdom of Heaven as a free market tax haven. The question is not Athens or Jerusalem but Athens or Las Vegas. Woods and his friends, in the last days, will be shooting craps instead of saying the Rosary.
Thomas Storck seems to be responding to Dr. Fleming here:
It was also suggested above that we set aside the papal encyclicals. I’m not sure why this would be desirable. If the Church continues to speak with the voice of Christ, then her teaching on the modern economic situation would be highly relevant to Catholics, I should think.
Pius XI on Casti Conubii is pretty clear on the duty of the state to provide welfare in some cases. I’ll paste the text here, although it is a bit long, followed by some more comments of mine.
“20. If, however, for this purpose, private resources do not suffice, it is the duty of the public authority to supply for the insufficient forces of individual effort, particularly in a matter which is of such importance to the common weal, touching as it does the maintenance of the family and married people. If families, particularly those in which there are many children, have not suitable dwellings; if the husband cannot find employment and means of livelihood; if the necessities of life cannot be purchased except at exorbitant prices; if even the mother of the family to the great harm of the home, is compelled to go forth and seek a living by her own labor; if she, too, in the ordinary or even extraordinary labors of childbirth, is deprived of proper food, medicine, and the assistance of a skilled physician, it is patent to all to what an extent married people may lose heart, and how home life and the observance of God’s commands are rendered difficult for them; indeed it is obvious how great a peril can arise to the public security and to the welfare and very life of civil society itself when such men are reduced to that condition of desperation that, having nothing which they fear to lose, they are emboldened to hope for chance advantage from the upheaval of the state and of established order.
121. Wherefore, those who have the care of the State and of the public good cannot neglect the needs of married people and their families, without bringing great harm upon the State and on the common welfare. Hence, in making the laws and in disposing of public funds they must do their utmost to relieve the needs of the poor, considering such a task as one of the most important of their administrative duties.”
It seems to me that those who object to the state helping those whose means are insufficient have an essentially libertarian or classical liberal understanding of the state and of human society. Everything must be voluntary and given or agreed upon by consenting adults. You’ll notice perhaps the carryover into the other kind of liberalism that we have today, the kind that celebrates all sexual activity provided that that mythic being, the “consenting adult” is involved. Both kinds of liberalism, the classical sort which loves the “consenting adult” when it comes to economics, and the 20th century kind, which loves the “consenting adult” when it comes to sex, are really two sides of the same coin.
I put consenting adult in quotes because the concept really is spurious. People consent for all sorts of reasons, fear, boredom, hope of obtaining something beyond, etc. Just as Leo XIII realized that workers sometimes agreed to substandard wages because had no hope of something else – those wages are not really free and in the nature of things cannot be – how many young women yield to a man not as a “consenting” adult but for fear of losing him, force, etc. Human psychology is a lot more complicated than either classical liberalism or 20th century liberalism imagines.
There seems to be something incongruous when a government which is unable or unwilling to order society justly takes away from the average citizen to support social welfare as a bandaid solution to its failure to rectify the political economy in the first place. Laws should be made to govern acts of both distributive justice and commutative justice.
In a rightly-ordered political community, would it be defensible for the state, as a last resort, to use some of the treasury to aid citizens who have encountered difficult economic circumstances? It seems so--if no one else can directly help them, then the government (or the community which it represents) can.
There are also the questions of of what authority is best suited to this task, and whether a state that is too big can regulate its political economy well (and accordingly, whether it can implement a just taxation policy). The states should be better suited than the Federal Government to have oversight of welfare, but while they lack real sovereignty (due to Federal aggrandizement and also to the fact they are not autarkic and self-contained) how can they fulfill this responsibility?
(By self-contained I mean that regardless of how things are stated in the Constitution, the states exist more as provinces than as sovereign states -- citizenship in a state is automatically conferred when one moves, someone who does not reside in a state can have the same property rights as someone who does, and so on.)
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