Continuing with "Capitalism and Christianity" ...

In asking Chris Scaperlanda for permission to post his message (here), I added:

"'Government is not the answer.'  Government is not the answer to what?  There are surely many things that 'government'--collective public action--is not the answer to.  But just as surely there are many things that collective public action *is* the answer to.  Any 'third way' will try to discern which is which, yes?  And there will be many reasonable disagreements, yes?"

To which Chris kindly replied:

"As for the role of government in achieving economic justice, please note that I was not commenting on my own view, but rather was making clear the views of those doing the heavy lifting. And I think that each of them would argue that government should enact certain policies and not others and should generally not favor the unregulated market above all else. And of course, there is (and must be) plenty of room for debate on which government policies should be enacted and which rejected, and frankly, I'm sure that if you got Bill Cavanaugh, Rod Dreher, and Alasdair MacIntyre into one room to discuss government policy, they themselves would debate the issue pretty heavily.

"One common thread that runs through the thought each person I mentioned in my previous email - as well as Oxford Economist E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful and Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin in The Dismal Science - is the importance of community in creating and sustaining what Schumacher termed "economics as if people mattered." And actually Marglin, in the introduction to his book, discusses how, ironically, free-market economic thinking is what got us to the point where the only community we take seriously is the 'imagined community of the nation.'

"They have varying degrees of tolerance for state action. Cavanaugh, in particular, seriously mistrusts the nation-state. He has an article called Killing for the Telephone Company that is a pretty strong attack on the conservative rhetoric leading into the Iraq war. His major critique is of the conservative claim that Catholics may support the war because government is given, by the catechism, discretion about when to launch a war. The Catechism actually says that 'those bodies charged with the common good' have that discretion, and, after analyzing the history and philosophy undergirding the nation-state, he is convinced that it is unreasonable to trust the nation-state with the common good."

Chris concluded with this question:  "If you don't mind, what role do you think the state should play? And what about community?"  I wish I were competent to give a good answer to that question, but, alas, I'm not.

Thanks so much for your messages, Chris.