Tuesday, April 5, 2011
“Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”*
David Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times about Congressman Ryan’s budget plan joins a host of recent pieces about the end of the welfare state and the model of economic growth and social democracy that most of us take for granted--I’m thinking also of my friend Yuval Levin’s “Beyond the Welfare State” in National Affairs, Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation, and Walter Russell Mead’s writings at The American Interest (here and here). While I know there’s room to question many details of this account (and some will reject the account outright), I’m more interested in the implications of this for Catholic social thought. Much of CST--in both its more liberal (Dan Finn, for example) and more conservative (Michael Novak, for example) forms--is premised on something like the modern welfare state, viewed either with enthusiasm or with skepticism. Certainly much of the papal social encyclical tradition and the US Bishops’ 1986 pastoral letter on the economy are very much about the who, where, what, and how of the role of the state in regulating the economy and redistributing wealth.
But what if we really are on the verge of a new economic order--at least with regard to the ability of the state to finance entitlement programs to aid the poor, the sick, and the elderly--and the approach of the social tradition to economic questions needs to be reframed? A tradition that goes back to John Chrysostom and Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi should surely have something to say about the ordering of economic life that doesn’t start with certain modern premises. So what is it?
*The title of an essay by David Foster Wallace (an epochal genius, though tragic) reviewing John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, which has nothing to do with the topic of this post.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/04/certainly-the-end-of-something-or-other-one-would-sort-of-have-to-think.html
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I don't see Ryan or other mainstream Republicans calling for an end to the welfare state to the extent that the welfare state is defined by the big 3 entitlement programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. I see the debate focused on how to best preserve the core function of these entitlements in a fiscally responsible way.
To the extent that these entitlement programs were to be scrapped completely and replaced with nothing, I don't think it's just a question of reframing CST; it would be a time where CST would need to speak prophetically to the political order, which would have rejected some of CST's foundational premises. Relatedly, I'm not sure if we can characterize Finn and Novak as simply trying to work out the implications of CST from opposite ends of the spectrum. Novak is *rejecting* much of CST when it comes to the role of the state and economic justice, isn't he? Is calling Novak's approach to economics CST in its "more conservative form" akin to calling Frances Kissling's approach to abortion CST in its more liberal form? I'm not denying that there is more space for prudential judgment on economic issues than on abortion, just pointing out that Novak does not appear to take CST as a given, just as Kissling does not take Church teaching on abortion as a given.