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| Cdl. Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga. |
Perhaps there’s some confusion among the ranks; as Kevin and
Teresa Rice explain in Catholibertarian, “As it is uncommon to find two
Libertarians who agree on very much, there is a wide room for difference of
opinion and degree of commitment to at least the latter part of this composite.”
Is what Cdl. Rodríguez
condemned something that at least three out of four self-described libertarians
assert?
Or perhaps libertarians and other conservatives have just
stopped listening to the Church on economic matters. Cdl. Rodríguez cited an article in
the National Catholic Fishwrap by Michael
Sean Winters, who further references the
ineffable Fr. John Zuhlsdorf: “I wonder how many people are still listening
to [Pope Francis] seriously on this issue …. It comes across as naive, out of
step with history.” This extract, partial and out-of-context as it is, is
gentler than the
nutty thrown by John Moody of FOX News:
By appearing to sanction what amounts to forced redistribution, Francis grievously exceeded his authority and became what amounts to a robe-wearing politician. He also exposed his Church, one of the wealthiest institutions in the world [one of the most pernicious myths in Western history], to inevitable charges of hypocrisy. And he put himself in a position of having to back up his frothy talk with ruinous action.
As
I’ve noted in The Impractical Catholic, political progressives aren’t the
only Americans who practice “cafeteria Catholicism”; not all conservatives and
libertarians are above doctrinal cherry-picking.
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| Bp. Blase Cupich of Spokane. |
Indeed. “For economists, the real world is often a special
case,” said economist Edgar R. Fiedler forty years ago; of all the social
scientists, economists seem most resistant to abandoning theories not justified
by real-world data. Commenting on a rather controversial New York Times editorial by economist/blogger Tyler Cowen, “The
Egalitarian Tradition of Economics”, French economist/entrepreneur Pascal-Emmanuel
Gobry wrote in Forbes:
In my view, the fact that so many economists praise Cowen’s finding which undermines economics’ claim to scientific knowledge highlights that many of these economists think their value system is, well, right. Their cri de coeur endorses a view of economics-as-it-is-practiced as not just a science but also a political ideology. “We are good”, economists hear this op-ed as telling them, not “We are biased.” [Bold font mine.—ASL]
Gobry is even more damning in his post on First Things, “Let’s
Listen to Pope Francis On Economics”:
For me, the financial crisis was an eye-opening moment. I’ve long believed in free market economics and believed that the Church would do a lot of good in the world if it embraced it. And I still believe those things. But what the financial crisis has laid bare is that the most conventional version of free market economics was actually dead wrong. … What it turns out is that economists actually know very, very little, and that a lot of what we thought we knew turned out to be wrong. Given this hard-to-swallow fact, the prophetic voice of the Church that reminds us of what must be the ends of economic activity is very salutary. [Bold font mine.—ASL]
Gobry’s censure properly belongs to what he calls the “Washington
consensus”, which is very close to the version championed by many libertarians
(Gobry styles himself a “conservatarian”): maximal deregulation of business,
minimal government intervention in poverty. Market forces will take care of
poverty, they say, because “a rising tide raises all the boats”.
Except that it doesn’t; at least, not equally. From 1984 to
1999, the consumer price index increased faster than real wages; after 1999,
the real median household income began declining. The same period saw a rapid increase in consumer debt and a concurrent diminishment
of personal savings, while healthcare and post-secondary education costs began
to spiral. The problem was exacerbated as companies started shipping labor
dollars offshore, replacing the outsourced jobs with lower-paying positions. By
2012, the bottom 40% was barely making more in real wages than they were in
1980, while prices had more than doubled; the bottom 80% had all lost shares of
aggregate income to the top 20%, none more so than the lower middle class.
“But this was due to crony
capitalism, not free markets,” one might protest. And there is the
indictment of de-regulation: free
markets by their nature can’t protect against crony capitalism; they can
only crash when the robbery goes on too long. Without regulation, there’s no
need for regulatory capture: there’s no watchman to be watched.
The “rising tide” argument makes the Hegelian mistake of supposing that markets have an ontological independence from the human behavior they attempt to describe. Markets are not blind “forces” which impose their dictates on human behavior: people retain their free will even when they unconsciously submit to influences outside themselves. If people don’t work to help the poor, neither will the markets.
Since communities are, at minimum, collections of
individuals, if we grant equal dignity to each person as our common human
inheritance from God, then the individual has no right to harm others in the
pursuit of his self-interest; from the community he derives not only privileges
but also obligations. Saint John Paul said, “Every generation of Americans
needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having
the right to do what we ought” (Homily,
Eucharistic Celebration at Oriole Park, Camden Yards, Baltimore, 10/8/1995,
§ 7). So far as the
law permits us to do good and right, then, our freedom is maximized; license to
do evil, on the other hand, should not be confused with liberty.
At risk of making a long post longer:
It should be obvious to anyone who has done his/her Catholic
social theory homework that Francis isn’t speaking solely from his Argentinean
background. Benedict XVI, who grew up in post-war Germany, spoke of the same
principles in Deus Caritas Est and Caritas in Veritate. Saint John Paul,
who came to manhood in Communist Poland, reinforced and built on the groundwork
laid before him by Paul VI, Pius XII, Pius XI and Leo XIII. And all these popes
built on a rich tradition which for centuries taught that care for the poor was
not an option but a social duty:
What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead (James 2:14-17).
Finally, as Bp. Cupich reminds us, libertarians “rightly
argue that [human] dignity is not given by society but by the Creator and
therefore freedom, self-determination and all other human rights are
inalienable, echoing the principals [sic] in the documents of democracy. However, they
… fail to uphold … that since this dignity belongs to all human beings in
common, it implies the solidarity of all peoples. By uncoupling
human dignity from the solidarity it implies, libertarians move in
a direction, that not only has enormous consequences for the meaning of
economic life, and the goal of politics in a world of globalization, but in a
direction which is inconsistent with Catholic Social Teaching ….” Just as there’s
no “I” in team, there’s no “me” in community.
In sum, so far as economics can be called a “science” in
truth, the best it could claim is that it describes how people do behave; it can make no claim that it’s
the way people ought to behave, or
that they can’t learn to behave otherwise (save so far as the discipline is
poisoned by a strict determinism, a common failing in the social sciences). But
even its primary claim — that it describes the truth about human economic
behavior — is very much in question since the recession.
I submit that Pope Francis, like his predecessors over the
last 134 years, knows as much about economics as he needs to. It remains for us
to listen and learn.
