Latin mass this morning was basically the Church of Milton Friedman, with some cultural conservatism thrown into the mix. The priest for today was the one who talks about patristics and philosophy, not the one who’s into politics and the cultural wars. But his topic of choice for today’s service was politics. Still, he stuck with his usual practice of quoting church encyclicals and the pope, something the politically-inclined priest hardly ever does.
Essentially, the priest was saying this: Socialism (government ownership of the means of production) is wrong, for Catholicism supports private property. Socialism mostly hurts the very people who don’t have much, and it consigns everyone to poverty. It’s all right to choose to be poor for spiritual reasons, but no one should be forced to be poor by an atheistic state. The right to private property existed before the government (no, the priest didn’t cite John Locke, neither the philosopher nor the LOST character). While the state has some right to subodinate private property to the public good (through taxes or eminent domain that’s not designed to benefit private interests, as is so often the case today), throwing people off their land because they can’t pay property taxes is wrong. And using property taxes to support public schools is an anti-Catholic idea because public schools promote the bad side of the culture wars. The free market is good, but it’s not sufficient to help the poor, so we should have private charities. And the idea of the separation of church and state is false, since the church has made valuable contributions to political discourse.
I’m not in the mood right now to read Pope Benedict’s lengthy encyclical on social justice (“Caritas in veritate” – Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Benedict XVI), but there are bits and pieces that I’ve encountered in articles. For example, the Pope supports the United Nations, environmentalism, and unions, and he warned against free markets becoming a “place where the strong subdue the weak.” But the priest today read the encyclical as a right-wing document, even as people on the far right accuse the Pope of supporting a one world socialistic dictatorship!
To be honest, I’m not sure right now how vast the role of government should be. Conservatives say that a government with the power to give is a government with the power to take and destroy, and they have a point. But isn’t that a potential problem once we give the government any power, including the roles that conservatives think it should have (the protection of life, liberty, and property)? Conservatives may say that’s why we should limit the government’s role to these particular areas, but why not expand the limit? Why not limit the government’s role to protecting life, liberty, and property, health care, and helping the poor get on their feet through social programs? Conservatives like to argue that more government means less freedom, but I don’t feel particularly free in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism, where one’s very survival depends on being smart and talented enough for a job.
I also wonder why we have to see things in terms of a strict Left/Right dichotomy. On an episode of Brothers and Sisters last season, the Walkers’ newfound brother Ryan argues politics with his half-sister Kitty, a conservative pundit who’s married to a Republican Senator. Ryan’s a member of the Green Party, and he argues against businesses and family, whereas Kitty passionately supports these institutions. But why should being on the Left have to mean opposing the nuclear family and small businesses? Although there are plenty of radical Leftists who are like that, not everyone with Center Left or Left-of-Center convictions believes that way. Our President is a family man and (at least theoretically) supports people having businesses.
Here’s another thought that occurred to me as I was watching Bill Moyers last night (October 9, 2009 — Full Transcript): I’m sort of middle-of-the-road nowadays, but my favorite politicians are not the wishy-washy moderates. Rather, they’re the people from the far left and the far right, the ones who think in non-conventional ways. Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur was on Bill Moyers’ Journal last night. She’s a “progressive Democrat,” who appeared on Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. Joe the Plumber is talking about running against her. Although (or maybe because) she’s Left-of-Center, she’s critical of the federal government bailing out Wall Street and dumping its mistakes onto the taxpayers. She calls that “socialism.”
I’m not much of a John Bircher or a libertarian these days, but one thing I got from these movements is that the government giving big businesses a “leg up” is not genuine free market capitalism; rather, it’s big businesses making money off the taxpayers, and it hinders the competition that’s so necessary for the free market to help people. The “moderates” are those largely satisfied with the status quo (and, in many cases, connected to it, if not responsible for it). It’s the “outside-of-the-mainstream” thinkers—like Ron Paul, Jeff Flake, Marcy Kaptur, and Dennis Kucinich—who take a clear stand against “corporate welfare” and the government giving big businesses an unfair advantage.