V. Rejection of distributive justice
Today, the human race as a whole is consuming many of the earth’s resources at unsustainable rates, even though much of humanity still lives in severe poverty. We cannot all persist in producing and consuming more and more. It should therefore be obvious that redistribution, combined with reduction in wasteful consumption, is the only possible route to a just overall distribution of the planet’s finite resources.
But libertarians are blind to this fact. They stick to their view that the only way to eliminate penury is to press ahead with economic growth, to provide ever more goods for the infallible free market to distribute. We have seen how Smith’s classical economics called for unrestrained competition to encourage more and cheaper production. But that strategy has run into the buffers of global sustainability. It has ceased to be relevant, yet still it dominates our thinking and practice.
Since libertarian economics became fashionable in the 1970s, replacing more interventionist state policies, inequalities have clearly widened practically everywhere. Thomas Piketty, a French economist who is a noted specialist on this subject, writes that, over the 1980s and 1990s, “American inequalities seem to have reverted to the level at which they stood just before the First World War”.[24]
Most practical methods of reducing inequalities are repugnant to libertarians. Labor unions are hated because they obstruct the worker’s freedom to agree his own contract with his employer. Minimum wage rates are another blasphemy against the divine free market, whose worshippers assert, against much historical evidence, that fixed minima “inevitably” reduce the demand for labor and so cause unemployment. Redistributive taxation (higher tax rates on higher personal incomes) “is a mode of disguised expropriation of successful capitalists and entrepreneurs”[25] according to Mises, while his admirer Murray Rothbard stated that “Taxation is Robbery” and that “the libertarian favors the right to unrestricted private property and free-exchange”.[26]
Hayek rejected outright the principle of distributive justice: “the results of the individual’s efforts are necessarily unpredictable, and the question of whether the resulting distribution of incomes is just or unjust has no meaning.”[27]
Catholic teaching flatly repudiates all that nonsense. Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum, §45) spoke of “a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner”, and he strongly commended (#49) workers’ associations, of which “the most important of all are workingmen’s unions.” John Paul II (Centesimus Annus, §20) observed that “unions… are indeed a mouthpiece for the struggle for social justice, for the just rights of working people.”
While many libertarians see taxes as immoral attacks on private property, “Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute and untouchable” (Compendium,#177). John XIII (Mater et Magistra, §132) insisted that citizens should be taxed according to their ability to pay (ut tributa pro civium facultate imperentur) whileGaudium et Spes (§30) censures those who “resort to various frauds and deceptions in avoiding just taxes and other debts due to society”.
Catholic teaching inherits the Jewish tradition, based on the Mosaic law, that provision for the poor is primarily an obligation in justice (Hebrew tzedakah, a word whose basic meaning is justice), rather than a matter of voluntary charity. This does not, of course, mean that charity is superfluous. But, as Benedict XVI explains in Caritas in Veritate, (§6),“I cannot “give” to the other… without first giving him what pertains to him in justice… charity goes beyond justice and completes it”, echoing St Thomas: “charity does not abrogate justice, but complements it.”[28] This doctrine validates obligatory transfers via the tax system as means of legally administering justice.
In these difficult times, it is worth noting that redistributive taxation offers a means of stimulating economic recovery without swelling our already excessive budget deficits. The very rich seldom spend all their revenue; they tend to accumulate. If the state transfers some of this unspent revenue to the very poor, it will certainly be spent, giving a boost to our morose economies.
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