Thursday, March 25, 2010
Catholic Teaching and Big Government
I appreciate the comments, both posted to the Mirror of Justice and by email, on my continuing series on what I believe are the serious flaws in the health care legislation enacted this week, as well as my hopeful suggestion that the potential is still out there to do it right (Post 1 and Post 2). (I'll post the third in the series, on the fiscal implications of the health care bill, this afternoon.) I especially welcome my colleague Rob Vischer's direct engagement, asking "is the Church opposed to big government?"
I am tempted to respond simply, well, if the Church isn't yet opposed to big government, it should be! But the better answer is more nuanced than that, even if one believes, as I do, that our Catholic-grounded belief in the dignity of each human person and in the liberty that God bequeaths to all of us should lead to a presumption against government solutions when adequate alternatives are available.
I agree with Rob that the judgment as to the best mix of government and alternative public solutions to problems calls on prudence and that these are judgments on which reasonable, faithful Catholic can and will disagree. (I would add, as well, that this prudential judgment includes the decision about which matters of human relations should be left to individuals, families, neighborhoods, employers and employees, private intermediary groups, etc. rather than calling for public mandates or legal regulation of any kind.) For some things, such as national defense, "big government" appears to be the best solution, or at least is inevitable. For other "big" things, such as interstate highways and government buildings, government is a necessary part of the partnership, in terms of planning and funding, but the actual construction is better accomplished through contracts with private enterprises rather than creating government construction companies staffed by government construction workers. For social welfare programs, again, the right mix is one that deserves thoughtful debate, with those on both sides still being comfortably under the big tent of Catholic social teaching.
I do want to submit, however, that all things being equal (in terms of quality solutions to social problems, effectiveness in administration, cost, etc.), we should presume against "big government" solutions and prefer partnerships with private enterprise and voucher-type programs. And we should do so not only for the most nitty-gritty of practical reasons but as a matter of moral principle. Let me identify five reasons why I think this is right:
1. Empowerment v. Dependency for the Disadvantaged: When possible, we should design public welfare programs in a manner that promotes individual autonomy and empowers the individual recipient to more fully participate in society by making individual choices. We should eschew as much as possible those government-centric solutions that foster dependency and treat the disadvantaged as wards of a powerful government guardian. Doesn't that description of the choice better accord with Catholic social teaching on human dignity? Haven't we had enough experience by this point in time to know that social welfare programs that make recipients passive dependents results in social deterioration, the break-down of family and community structures, and inheritance of dependency by the next generation?
2. Government Idolatry: By instinctively looking to government for answers, the left side of the political divide risks engaging in idolatry (just as the right side might treat the market as an idol, although the difference is that the market does not demand anything from us and leaves us free to walk away, unlike the government). When we create a nanny state, we begin to think of government as a parental figure, not as merely a tool to an end. We begin to regard charity and compassion as something we accomplish by delegation to government programs and bureaucrats. As concrete evidence of this trend, study after study has shown that those who look to government for solutions are much less likely to be generous in charitable giving. The embarrassingly low rate of charitable contributions by the last three Democratic presidential candidates confirms the tendency. When one begins to conceive of charity as giving a tithe to the government, he or she is well on the path to idolatry. As for what the Catholic Church says about this matter, we need not look beyond the First Commandment (or what our elder Jewish brothers and some Christian denominations count as the Second Commandment).
3. Displacement of Religious and Cultural Institutions: It is not a coincidence that the development of a pervasive welfare state in Western Europe has been accompanied by a loss of faith in the public. When government demands priority in conducting or regulating all matters, then secularist and majoritarian rules will be imposed on all. The increasing incidents of governments trying to dictate how venerable religious institutions provide social services -- such as Catholic Charities in offering adoptions in Massachusetts or providing social services in Washington, D.C. -- show that government as it grows is not tolerant of competitors. Intermediary private organizations that are closer to the people, and motivated by compassion, find it difficult to survive in a society in which government controls everything from the top-down. Catholic Church teaching about the vitality of religious and intermediary groups is emphatic.
4. The Loss of Liberty: Too often, in my view, our friends on the political left seem to have little regard for liberty or appreciation that every choice to confer government power to address what has been identified as a problem results in a loss of liberty. The Catholic Church teaches us that God gave us freedom so that we could freely choose how best to honor Him and live rightly with our neighbors. When government tells me that I must do this or must not do that or must do it this way and not that way or must pay for this rather than contribute my money in another way, liberty dies just a little (or sometimes more than a little). To be a part of a community means that I surrender some of my freedom for the greater good. But we should never forget that it is a loss and not something to be casually taken.
5. The Rise of Government as a Special Interest: The Catholic Church calls us to promote the common good over the narrow interests of a few, with special attention to the preferential option of the poor. When government expands to the point that it becomes a special interest, seeking to grow and take greater power for its own ends, the common good is threatened. The exponential growth of government at all levels, together with the growth of government employees, has given rise to increasingly powerful government employees' unions that participate in political elections to promote their own good, which may or may not coincide with the common good. The insolvency of California, due to the demands of public employee unions over decades, should be an object lesson.
Contrary to Rob's suggestion, I do not deny the value of public employees; indeed, to do so would be to denigrate my own wife who is both a public employee and a member of a government employees' union. But neither am I blind to the special interest realities of the situation. We are deluged with communications from the union, about 25 percent of which speak of union matters, negotiations for higher salary and benefits, etc., with the other 75 percent telling us why we should support Democratic Party platforms and vote for Democratic Party politicians. Diligent, thoughtful, creative, compassionate service to the public that pays the salary is, at best, an after-thought.
I do not hate government or civil servants. I recognize the value of government in its place, am thankful to live in a society in which security is enhanced by a well-organized public presence, admire the social welfare opportunities offered by government, and recognize the quality service of most public servants. Indeed, not only is my wife presently a civil service employee but I have been one myself on more than one occasion. Government and its employees have their place. But we should try to avoid having more unless absolutely necessary.
Greg Sisk
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/03/catholic-teaching-and-big-government.html
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While Catholic Teaching does not oppose big government per se, American Catholics taking a realistic view of our ruling Leviathan should oppose a big U.S. federal or even state government.
John Zmirak confronted the problem of Catholicism and Big American Government and reaches a realist-libertarian conclusion:
"In an American context, given our constitutional heritage and the large body of legal decisions solidifying its interpretation, on nearly any issue, Christians of any denomination should reject the assistance of the State. Our efforts to capture it, the courts have made it clear, will always fail. Any attempt to infuse the activity of the government with the moral content of a revealed religion will be rejected, in the end. Indeed, the more our own institutions cooperate with the government, the more they will be compromised; hospitals which take federal funds will be subject to secular ethics on issues like contraception, end-of-life, and even abortion. Religious colleges accepting federal grants will eventually be federalized, and so on.
"It seems clear that the public sphere in America is irretrievably secular. So the only logical response of Christians must be to try to shrink it. Instead of attempting to baptize a Leviathan which turned on us long ago, we’d do much better to cage and starve the beast. We should favor low taxes—period, regardless of the “good” use to which politicians promise to put it. We should oppose nearly every government program intended to achieve any aim whatsoever. We can make exceptions here and there: We can favor the protection of innocent lives, which would cover things like fixing traffic lights and throwing abortionists into prison. But that is pretty much that. Christian public policy should focus not on capturing the power of the State but shrinking it, to the bare minimum required to enforce individual rights, narrowly defined. Likewise, the share of our wealth seized by the state must be radically slashed, to allow for private initiatives and charities that will not be amoral, soulless, bureaucratic and counterproductive (like the secular welfare state). Instead of asking for handouts to our schools in the forms of vouchers, we should seek the privatization of public schools—which by their very nature, in today’s post-Christian America, are engines of secularism. And so on for nearly every institution of the centralized State, which has hijacked the rightful activities of civil society and the churches, and which every year steals so much of our wealth to squander on itself that we can barely afford to reproduce ourselves. (So the State helpfully offers to replace us with immigrants, but that’s another article.)
"This is not to endorse the universal claims of doctrinaire libertarians, and assert that every State in history has been a tyranny (except perhaps medieval Iceland). It’s not to deny that any community anywhere has the moral right to employ the State to pursue its vision of the Good. (There’s nothing wrong with Kaiser Franz Josef endowing a monastery here and there, or the Israeli government helping educate rabbis.) In many cultural contexts, the State can fruitfully employ its power to promote the faith and morals held in common by a community. But that can’t happen here. Not in America. Several of our Founders, and generations of our lawyers, have seen to that. We have no more reason to cooperate with the secular state than Irishmen have to trust the British Crown."