Catholic Business

Lateran University Conference

I will be presenting a paper at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome on Wednesday, November 21.  Here is a draft of the paper:

 

Politiche di aiuto allo sviluppo e self-reliance nell’economia globale

Policies to support development and self-reliance in the global economy

We used to joke that the Social Doctrine is the Church’s “best kept secret”—a valuable treasure that was too well hidden, because no one knew anything about it. This was always more true in the United States than in Italy, and fortunately it is less true today, since through the efforts of many, including people in this room, it is now more widely and better understood. However, there are two parts of this teaching that are still not sufficiently appreciated, it seems to me, and yet which have great significance for development and self-reliance. The two parts I want to focus on are subsidiarity and private property. 

The general point I wish to make is that concentration of wealth and power—which is opposed by the principles of subsidiarity and private property—is harmful to the growth of self-reliance. 

I will begin with an argument made by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek in his 1944 work The Road to Serfdom, which he attributes to the English historian Hillaire Belloc, who made the argument in a book called The Servile State, published exactly 100 years ago in 1912. Beyond the obvious questions of justice, Hayek, and Belloc, make the case that concentration of wealth is not politically sustainable in a society that is based on principles of freedom and equality, because when wealth, and therefore power, are concentrated into a few hands, the majority of the population do not feel so free or so equal, and this leads to social unrest. It is remarkable how well this explains the unrest we have seen with the global Occupy movements and their concerns about the “one percent” who own the majority of the capital. 

Because of the instability of a society based on concentration of wealth, Hayek and Belloc argue that unless more widely held property ownership can be achieved, the system will predictably move in the other direction, towards further concentration of property ownership, leading ultimately to totalitarian government. 

Unfortunately for us, once we reach a point of highly concentrated ownership—as we have done—then moving in the opposite direction towards more widespread property ownership is very difficult.  It works against the grain, because people no longer expect to rely for their security upon their own property. They have exchanged self-reliance for “other-reliance.” What is it we ask of our politicians, and what do they offer us, from all different political parties?  “Jobs!”  Not the freedom and opportunity to make our own way, but a wage in someone else’s establishment.  And therefore it is almost impossible to achieve a more just distribution without a renewed understanding of the importance of self-reliance and therefore of the essential role of private property and subsidiarity. 

Today there exists a serious misconception about what is private property is. It is commonly understood to be a source of pleasure and comfort, or a conspicuous display of one’s wealth.  The original idea of private property, as the foundation for self-reliance, needs to be recovered. 

The Social Doctrine of the Church offers one of the strongest and most consistent defenses of private property. The Second Vatican Council affirmed that private property is “wholly necessary for the autonomy of the person and the family.” The wording is interesting: the Council did not say that because we are free, we have the right to private property; instead the reverse: private property itself is necessary for the exercise of that freedom. Humans are material beings, and we need material goods to live.  But interestingly, the Social Doctrine does not place the justification of private property primarily in that it helps us provide for our daily material needs. Ahead of such needs, the Catechism of the Catholic Church places the role of private property as “guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of persons.” Because as a property owner, you are free in practice, not just in theory.  For example, if you find yourself in an unacceptable situation at work—say you’re being pressured to do something you think is wrong—if you have no property, no savings, then your “freedom” to walk away and find some other work is much more limited (especially in a weak economy) than if you had some property to live off while you look for another position. 

In earlier days, a family’s security was largely based on the property that it was able to accumulate and put to work. In the past century, however, we have moved from relying upon private property for our security, to relying in large part upon government transfer payments. When times are tough, or when I retire, I am dependent less on my property, and more upon unemployment support, welfare, or social security.

There is a fundamental assumption underlying this shift: that property and income are equivalent. I would like to argue that this assumption is false. They appear to be equivalent: property can be invested to generate income; income can be saved to accumulate property. But this assumption only holds if the purpose of private property is solely to help meet your needs and those of your family, which it isn’t. Unlike private property, income from government transfer payments does not do much to allow you to exercise your freedom and self-reliance. With private property, you have the freedom to decide how much to save, how and where to invest, and when to draw from your savings. You also have the responsibility to make those decisions carefully and correctly—to exercise self-reliance.  Your Social Security “contributions,” on the other hand, are compulsory, you have no say in how they are “invested,” and the amounts and timing of both contributions and withdrawals are determined for you.  A government transfer payment doesn’t foster much responsibility: it arrives monthly, and all you have to do is cash the check.  But private property requires you to invest it, care for it, make decisions about it and reinvest it as necessary—to work with it in order to ensure that you are getting a good return out of it, and in doing so to exercise and grow in self-reliance. Nobel economist Amartya Sen is famous in part for his work on how unemployment benefits are an acutely inadequate substitute for real work, because of the loss of dignity, personal development, and responsibility associated with unemployment. Private property enables freedom and encourages self-reliance; government transfer payments do neither. 

And here’s how the misunderstanding of private property arises.  When we give up much of our reliance on private property for our economic security, and place it instead upon government transfer payments, we relinquish responsibility, but we still keep our natural desire for property. Helped with the force of mass marketing, this desire is redirected in part towards luxury or status goods. But luxury or status goods are not very effective at providing either of the benefits of private property: they don’t give us much opportunity to exercise our freedom and responsibility, nor do they support our material needs very efficiently.  Mostly, they just provide pleasure: a home that I own and rent to others is a source of income and independence, while a vacation home is a source of pleasure; a fishing boat gives me security and food, while a yacht gives me pleasure.

The purchase of luxury goods is indeed an exercise of ones freedom, and so it is not my suggestion here that we should be prohibiting luxury goods. What is important to recognize is that certain kinds of purchases encourage freedom and self-reliance, while others do not. Yachts and vacation homes are not evil things. Each in their own way can help spread joy among families and friends: an evening cruise on the Tyrrhenian Sea or a weekend in the mountains, for example, can be very good things. The point is simply that when we think about private property today, we tend to think about these kinds of luxury goods or status goods.

We need to restore the idea of private property as productive property, which is so essential for self-reliance because it enables us to provide for our own security. Goods such as rental housing, shares in a business, tools and equipment—these are true private property: productive property. But when the majority of people come to depend on government instead for their security, then the natural desire for productive property is perverted towards luxury goods. At this point, the institution of private property itself becomes very difficult to defend.  If private property is just yachts and vacation homes, a luxury of the rich, rather than the foundation of the security of the majority, then we should not be surprised at all to see more and more attacks on the right to private property and on “greedy capitalists”. 

Hayek and Belloc warn about the dangers of concentration of wealth and power, of what we now call crony capitalism. Supporters of the market are deeply suspicious of, and generally hostile to, concentration of power in government.  But according to Hayek and Belloc, the problem starts with concentration of power in both business and government. It seems to me that advocates of the market have had a big blind spot with regard to this issue for the past several decades: well aware of the dangers of concentration of power in government, but apparently unaware, or unconcerned, about the perils arising from concentration of power in business.

This is perhaps because of a certain discomfort among champions of the market with any criticism of big business—isn’t a big business, after all, nothing other than a very successful small business?  Isn’t criticism of big business therefore a criticism of the market? Not necessarily.  After they reach a certain size, some companies choose to move outside the market to apply political power to defend and grow their businesses. Economies of scale and scope take you so far; beyond that, the temptation to grow or protect profits in ways that are anti-competitive proves to be too great to resist in many cases. 

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the phenomenon of “regulatory capture,” a concept described by Nobel economist George Stigler.  Regulatory capture is where government regulation is turned, over time, to favor those it is intended to regulate. Regulatory capture happens because the interest of regulated companies in how they are regulated is very, very great, given its potential to impact their bottom line.  They are also very small in number, so it is easy for them to organize to influence that regulation. And they are usually successful in their efforts, because consumers are vastly more numerous and too busy with the details of their daily lives to provide much effective countervailing efforts.  How much time did you spend in the last year thinking about the price of electricity, for example, or, still less, organizing your neighbors to lobby the government about it? How much time and effort do you think the electrical utilities spend on the same question? 

In opposition to the concentration of power in both government and business, the Social Doctrine of the Church proposes the principle of subsidiarity. If there is some confusion about the meaning of private property, there is even more scope for confusion about the meaning of subsidiarity. In a recent article in the Journal of Markets & Morality, Prof. Donati noted that secular interpretation of the term “subsidiarity” has wavered between bringing assistance on the one hand, and preserving autonomy on the other (Donati, 2009, p. 212). As a result, plenty of misunderstandings arise (ibid. p. 214). He clarified the different meanings or types of subsidiarity, in particular vertical, horizontal, and lateral subsidiarity (p. 229) and then offered a generalized definition of subsidiarity to mean “helping the other to do what he or she should” (Donati, p. 229).

What I want to focus on here is what kind of help—what aspect of subsidiarity—can serve as a check against the concentration of power.  Because when we think of what we are doing as helping people, it is sometimes easy to slip, without realizing it, into harming their self-reliance. There is a phenomenon that psychiatrists have identified called “learned helplessness”—where a human being (or an animal) learns, through various ways, that it is unable to rely on itself to improve its situation (Seligman). We can see this most clearly with children.  My wife and I have six young children, and I have seen this time and again—if you try to do too much for children, it impedes their development.  (This is in fact one of the central insights of Dr. Maria Montessori’s approach to child education).  And it is relevant to adults also: doing too much for someone can create learned helplessness, and so sometimes the best “help” you can give someone is to leave them alone.  Of course, when people do not have the bare necessities of life, this is not the time to be “helping” them by leaving them alone. But we must be vigilant to ensure that our attempts at help are not in fact harming the development of self-reliance. 

And thus I believe that it is not accidental that Pius XI formulated his definition of subsidiarity in the negative, and with such strong language: “…that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” (Quadragesimo Anno, #79 [#80 in Italian edition]; emphasis added). It is this aspect of subsidiarity, as defined in the Social Doctrine, which opposes concentration of power, and is relevant for the creation of self-reliance. 

This is evident in the moral justification for subsidiarity, which is not one of efficiency—i.e. societies function more efficiently when decision-making is widely decentralized.  It is indeed true that subsidiarity can promote efficiency, but this is not the primary moral rationale for it.  The primary rationale for the principle of subsidiarity is liberty.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church, echoing St. Thomas Aquinas, explains it as follows: “The way God acts in governing the world, which bears witness to such great regard for human freedom, should inspire the wisdom of those who govern human communities”—in other words, if God rules us with such profound respect for our freedom, then our human rulers should do likewise. It seems to me that this strong, negative formulation is a response to the recognition that in mass society—with the power of the mass media to influence society so strongly—the lust for power is among the greatest and most dangerous personal disorders we face, especially when hidden in the guise of the desire to serve the public good.

Let me provide just one example.  The debate about Keynesianism is a large and ongoing one, and it is not my intention to enter into it in any way here. But I think it is fair to say that one result of Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is that it gave generations of politicians an excuse to give in to the temptation to exercise more personal power, though deficit spending. Instead of being restrained by natural limits on the ability tax, they now had apparently unlimited spending ability—a sort of political consumerism, if you will, with the same negative consequences that consumer debt has on consumerism, i.e. the ability to magnify it greatly.

The dangers of the violation of subsidiarity are displayed very well in an extensive study by the late professor of development economics John Powelson. His book, Centuries of Economic Endeavor, tries to explain why sustained economic development—across a long period of time (centuries)—has only occurred in Europe, North America, Australia and Japan.  The same policies, tried elsewhere, seem invariably to have failed.  Powelson’s explanation is that in the successful regions, power was diffused, widely held, whereas everywhere else it was concentrated. Concentration of power seems to lead, inexorably, to economic stagnation and decline. 

The long-term economic dangers of concentration of power are so great, that it even makes sense to oppose concentration when such opposition itself might seem economically inefficient. An example of this is what Prof. Luigi Zingales of the Chicago Booth School of Business has identified in the US as a “populist anti-finance bias,” which “led to many political decisions throughout American history that were inefficient from an economic point of view, but helped preserve the long-term health of America's democratic capitalism.” In the past, Americans valued freedom more than the supposed efficiency that would arise from consolidation of banks, because they feared the power that such large banking entities would wield.  Zingales points to President Andrew Jackson’s opposition to renewing the charter of the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s, to numerous state-level banking restrictions, and to the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, as examples of this populism. He admits that from a purely economic point of view, such restrictions are “crazy,” but also recognizes that positive side effects arouse.  The fragmentation of the banking industry that resulted from such regulation led to the rise of a thriving securities industry and prevented for a long time the massive political power that banks now wield.

Deregulation of the US finance industry over the past few decades has overturned these restrictions.  Attempts at re-regulation of the finance industry, and specifically the 2010 Dodd-Frank act, are of a very different kind. We can divide regulation into two types, those that foster subsidiarity and those that hinder it. Glass-Steagall was largely of the former type; Dodd-Frank is of the latter.

Regulation that hinders subsidiarity tends to focus on activity and outcomes: you may or may not do this, that, or the other; if you do, you should do it in this way; and you should get these kinds of results, and not others.  Environmental protection regulation is largely of this type. Anti-trust regulation is too: it focuses not on the absolute or even relative sizes of firms, but on whether their market power is expected to affect consumers negatively.  By its nature, regulation of activity or outcome requires a large bureaucracy to implement it, because one needs to monitor almost everything that firms do, and well as the results they achieve. Regulation that fosters subsidiarity tends to focus instead on size and scope restrictions—you may not be bigger than x, you may not do business in an area wider than y, etc.  It is therefore much easier and therefore cheaper to monitor: you don’t have to watch everything firms do, you just have to keep an eye on their size.

Because our current regulation is predominantly hostile to subsidiarity, we experience the perverse result that smaller enterprises, who typically violate regulations least, pay a disproportionate cost of regulation.  In the US, despite some attempts at regulatory relief over the years, in general, small business is still far more heavily penalized by most regulation. For example, businesses with fewer than 20 employees incur 44% more in per employee costs of regulation in total; for environmental regulation, they pay over 300% more. And yet ironically, even though regulation costs them more, in many cases they need it less, usually because it is easier for small businesses to regulate themselves and to be scrutinized by the local community; one recent study showed that manufacturing facilities owned by small companies tend to have significantly lower employee injury rates, for example.

Let me bring this to a close.  I have argued that two principles of the Social Doctrine of the Church, subsidiarity and private property, are vitally important for the creation of self-reliance. When these principles are violated, development policy tends towards concentration of power, and a weakening of self-reliance, and ultimately a weakening of economic prosperity itself. 

 

Andrew V. Abela, Ph.D.

Chairman, Department of Business & Economics

The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC

 

With Phillip Blond, Age-Old 'Distributism' Gains New Traction

From last year, just in case you missed it:

"Can an Anglican theologian from Britain revive an 80-year-old Catholic social justice theory and provide a solution to America's economic woes and political polarization?

Philosopher and political thinker Phillip Blond thinks so, and he's giving it everything he's got.

Blond, who has been a counselor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, just wrapped up a two-week U.S. tour to pitch his retooled version of "distributism," a theory that argues that both capitalism and government are out of control.

In that sense, the thinking goes, both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are right."

More here.

Happiness and the Economy Project

As part of the MGT 301 Business Ethics course, which I am currently teaching here in Rome, we are working on a project to explore what the components of an economy ordered to human happiness might be. This blog post will serve to keep track of what we are reading.

[revised February 20, 2012]

OUTLINE

1. Does the current economic arrangement lead to happiness?

Happiness is the highest good
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2002.htm#article1

Wealth, not happiness, is the purpose of the market economy
http://www.economist.com/node/8450035

Happiness and wealth are only weakly correlated
http://oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/54353115535

The Easterlin Paradox (increases in income do not correlate with increases in happiness)
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3439

The current happiness and economics debate appears to focus on government policy
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/0621_happiness_graham.aspx

The current economic order appears to be leading to greater concentration of wealth and power, and hence towards Belloc's Servile State
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/capitalism-after-the-crisis

 

2. Are there any alternatives?

Other alternatives won't make us any happier
http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods136.html

The current state is inevitable
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Liddy.shtml

The Quest for a Third Way (Allan Carlson)
http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc.acc.110323.3way.uva.htm

 

3. What principles should underly an economy ordered to happiness?

(In the article above, Carlson proposes several principles for what he calls "The Family Way"):

1. Widespread private property, firmly in family hands as the foundation of a free society
2. Subsidiarity: Decentralize, decentralize, decentralize
3. Responsibility: the central social and political challenge is to keep competition and the quest for efficiency out of the family and other small community; and at the same time to keep family-styled altruism out of central government
4. Defend the natural family economy through appeals to human nature and human history, emphasizing marriage and the generation of children
5. Place primary faith in cultural affirmations, and only secondary trust in state actions
6. Religious motivation: Look to the infusion of religious energy into culture, politics, and economic life as the surest source of renewal. Only homo religiosus, economist Wilhelm Röpke’s name for man created in the image of God, only this ‘religious man’ can stand up to the servile heir of homo economicus, or ‘economic man’
7. Build on small acts. In the end, the Family Way means reconnecting everyday tasks with the great purposes of the Creator. Only then do common deeds bend toward transcendence

We might also add:

1. An extra emphasis on subsidiarity in food production
2. Resistance to Consumerism
3. Free markets, within a framework of solidarity
4. Practical education
5. Environmental and moral sustainability
   
   (Are we talking about Shire Economics?)

4. What examples are there of applications of these principles?

Localism
http://www.ilsr.org/
http://www.newrules.org/retail/
http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/
http://www.livingeconomies.org - Business Alliance for Local Living Economies
http://www.livingeconomies.org/local-first-FAQ
http://www.livingeconomies.org/node/757 - Towns with more smaller businesses have greater physical health

Practical education
http://www.schoolofliving.org/

Local farming
http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/familyfarms/
http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

Widespread private property ownership
http://assets.newamerica.net/

Homesteading

http://soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/Brsdi.intrvw/The%20Plowboy-Borsodi%20Interview.htm
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0302hsted/030204borsodi/030204borsoditoc.html
http://www.mlive.com/living/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2010/05/cooperative_lifestyle_in_pavil.html
http://www.lakevillagehomestead.org/
On the economic tradeoffs of working in vs. outside the home for women, see http://faculty.cua.edu/aguirre/population/childcare.doc

Homemaking
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/shannon-hayes/live-dangerously-10-easy-steps

Local currencies
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-04-05-scrip_N.htm
http://localcurrencycouncil.org/

Land trusts
http://www.landtrustalliance.org/

Employee ownership
http://www.esopassociation.org/

Economy of Communion
http://www.catholicbusinessethics.org/economy-of-communion/
http://www.focolare.org/en/news/2011/05/30/economia-di-comunione-il-futuro-e-qui/

Home made entertainment
https://www.folkschool.org/
http://www.folkalliance.org/

 

5. What barriers stand in the way of building an economy ordered to happiness?

http://www.upjohninst.org/publications/wp/03-91.pdf Barriers to development of local economies (study)

6. How could these barriers be overcome?

 

Shire Economics - corrected

Apologies - the original version of this post had page 23 missing.  

With the kind permission of Joseph Pearce, Editor of the St. Austin Review, here is my recent article on the economic structure of JRR Tolkien's Shire. (If the type size is too small for you to read on your browser, hit the Control (CTRL; use the Command or "Apple" key on a Mac) and Plus (+) keys simultaneously a few times until it gets big enough). 

Preferential Option for the Poor

A group of academics, some from Catholic University, sent an open letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner, on the occasion of his addressing our 2011 graduating class a couple of weeks ago, accusing him of dissent because the budget cuts he is championing allegedly violate the Church's teaching on the preferential option for the poor.  I did not like the letter, both because of its overtly political intent, and also because of its clear misrepresentation of that teaching.

Fr. Sirico from the Acton Institute provided an early and thorough response. Kathryn Jean Lopez, a CUA alumna, wrote on the issue in the National Catholic Register, quoting a couple of other CUA faculty who had some incisive things to say about the letter.  

But perhaps the best closure on the issue is the recent exchange between Congressman Paul Ryan and Archbishop Dolan, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, also covered by Lopez, which demonstrates that Catholic Social Teaching is far more rich and insightful than the academics' letter held it out to be.  

Perhaps we can now return to studying Catholic Social Teaching as a source of great and timeless insight, instead of trying to force fit it into supporting our political preferences of the moment.  

 

From the Archives: The Reasonable Limits of State Authority (Cardinal William O'Connell, 1919)

I came across this in the Catholic University of America archives recently:

"The history of the human race, from its first to its latest page, is a record of bitter conflict between those invested with authority on the one side, and those subject to it on the other.  For two mighty forces have ever been at work in human society--the greed for power and the love of liberty; one manifesting itself in tyranny and usurpation, the other, unchecked, leading to chaos and anarchy. ..."

Read the full speech here.

 

The Temptation to Tidiness

A friend of mine forwarded this to me yesterday.  I found it to be very insightful.

Oriens: The Journal of the Ecclesia Dei Society of Australia

Winter 1999

The temptation to tidiness

 

"THERE ARE many mansions in my Father’s house," so says Our Lord. "If there were not I should have told you."

 

The metaphor of the Church as God’s household is an attractive one. We live in a rambling old house that has rooms both in time and in eternity. It has rooms full of apparently useless junk, kitchens, dining rooms, rooms to sleep in, rooms just to sit around in, rooms for fun, rooms for quiet, solemn rooms of State and rooms to drink wine and sing songs in. The important point is that the rooms in God’s household are for His family, and that there is a place for everyone. It has been a sign of authentic Catholic faith throughout the ages to allow God’s family to dwell in His house undisturbed by unnecessary demands for moral or doctrinal conformity.

 

The heretics have generally been the puritans, fanatics and purists. The Catholics generally had the softer approach to life. The heretics were always wanting to clean up the house like Martha, the Catholics content to put up their feet and chat with the head of the household like Mary. The Catholic attitude to life should be just a little bit irresponsible and perhaps even scandalous, rather like the Church’s founder.

 

The Traditional Movement because of its unfortunate marginalisation is always in danger of this temptation to tidiness which historically has not been the characteristic of a Catholic outlook but of a heterodox one. The Church of Christ has never been tidy, efficient or well organised. Catholics, with some notable exceptions, have never been very good, for example, at running wars or bureaucracies. This is as it should be since the Church’s job is to get people into heaven, not to wash or scrub them or to make them into model citizens of whatever sort.

 

This should also be the aim of the Traditional Movement which should be content to live in the vast and rambling mansions of God and to encourage others to do so. More frequently than we would like to admit, however, we traditionalists can see ourselves as bouncers at the front door keeping out the riff raff who might make the place untidy. The rules for admission, however, were laid down by Our Divine Founder in embarrassingly minimal terms: "Come to me all you who labour and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest." There are four gospels, seven sacraments and ten commandments. All the rest is optional.

 

Integrist temptation

 

There is a tendency among traditional Catholics to see Tradition as one big package of religious, social and political conservatism. Those who do not accept this whole package can then be portrayed as inconsistent and not really Traditional at all, just eclectic cafeteria Catholics who happen to like incense and chant, as mere aesthetes who just like dressing up or even in more alarming terms as agents or infiltrators of unseen sinister forces trying to subvert the Church.

 

Neither...nor...

 

The fact is, however, that the traditional movement cannot impose any other agenda than that of the Church itself. It can be neither republican nor monarchist. It cannot take a line on which is the best way to advance the pro-life cause. It does not have a view on gun control. It neither condemns nor approves home schooling. It does not have a line on the privatisation of public utilities. It is neither capitalist nor socialist. It does not and cannot endorse or condemn any political party. It can only encourage individuals to follow the Church’s teaching on Faith and Morals and to promote them in the public forum. To require more of people than the Church requires is to make ourselves more Catholic than the Pope and more Christian than Christ.

 

If traditional Catholics, moreover, are to accept the whole of the Church’s teaching then we must also recognise the Church’s traditional teaching on social and political matters. For over a hundred years the Popes have spoken in encyclical after encyclical about the rights of workers, about the injustices associated with debt and the centralisation of economic power. We cannot ignore the consistent teaching of the Popes from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus. To do so would be to embrace the very same "cafeteria mentality" of the progressives that is so often condemned in traditional circles.

 

The Church’s social teaching should not be seen as a regrettable family secret that we try to keep anyone else from finding out about. There is no contradiction between a desire to see a restoration of liturgical and doctrinal Tradition and a lively interest in the issues of social justice so consistently urged upon us by the Magisterium of the Church. One might indeed hope, that the alienation felt by many traditional Catholics as a result of the manifest injustices that many of us have suffered would lend us a certain sense of solidarity with the poor and dispossessed.

 

Interior coherence

 

There is furthermore an interior coherence between the Truth of Christ expressed so purely and so eloquently in the traditional Mass and our refusal to accept the deceptions of the dictators and despots of this world. The traditional Mass is much more difficult for the world to subvert. It cannot easily become propaganda for any party. In its easy and expansive silences Truth is easily nurtured in the soul and the whispered lies of tyrants die. In that hospitable silence the peasant may kneel next to the king, and the only measure between them is that of personal holiness, and God keeps that secret in the recesses of His own mystery.

 

The traditional Mass is indeed the Mass of God’s rambling and welcoming mansions into which it is our happy duty to invite all of His scattered sons and daughters.

 

Pope speaks to Roman business leaders

"The Roman business reality, made up in great part by small and medium enterprises, ... today operates also in a context characterized by globalization, by the negative effects of the recent financial crisis, by the so-called "financialization" of the economy of businesses themselves. It is a complex situation, because the present crisis has sorely tested the economic and productive systems of several countries. Nevertheless, it must be lived with confidence, because it can be considered as an opportunity from the point of view of the revision of models of development and of a new organization of the world of finance, a "new time" -- as has been said -- of profound revision."

Read the rest here, courtesy of Zenit. 

Red Toryism and the Associative State

Please join the Tocqueville Forum for a two-part conference:

Red Toryism and the Associative State: A Radical, New Political Settlement

Thursday, March 18  7:00 - 8:30 PM
Location: ICC Auditorium 
Reception to follow

Featuring Phillip Blond, Director of ResPublica, a public policy think tank

Is there an alternative to the monopolization of society and the private sphere by the state and the market? Phillip Blond will outline his vision of an Associative State: strengthening local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistributing the tax burden and restoring the nuclear family.

Phillip Blond is the Director of ResPublica, launched by David Cameron MP in November 2009. Phillip was born and raised in Liverpool, and was trained as philosopher and theologian at the Universities of Hull, Warwick, and Cambridge. He was until recently a Senior University Lecturer in Christian Theology and Philosophy but left academia for politics and public policy. He first made an impact on British politics with a series of articles in The Independent and The Guardian and Prospect arguing for a new brand of radical conservatism - in which he allied social and relational conservatism with a transformative, Tory political economy, on which he will elaborate at his lecture.

Roundtable Response to Mr. Blond

Friday, March 19 12:00 - 4:00 pm

Location: Copley Formal Lounge

12:00 - 12:30 PM Lunch

12:30 - 2:00 PM Panel 1
Ross Douthat, Op-ed Columnist for the New York Times

Rod Dreher,  Director of Publications, Templeton Foundation
Daniel McCarthy, Associate Editor of The American Conservative

2:15-4:00 PM Panel 2
Andrew Abela, Associate Professor of Marketing and Chair of Business and Economics, Catholic University of America
Charles Mathewes, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia
John Milbank, Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham 

Respondent: Phillip Blond, ResPublica
Moderator: Patrick Deneen, Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair Associate Professor of Government, Director, Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, Georgetown University

RSVP for both events or either event 
to Tara Jackson at [email protected].
(RSVP required for lunch on Friday.)

ISI Conference and Patronizing Small Business

I gave a lecture on Saturday (October 10) at ISI's National Leadership Conference, Freedom and Virtue: Challenges and Prospects in a Time of Economic Crisis.  My lecture was titled Consumerism and Concentration of Power: The (Im)moral Roots of the Current Crisis, and it was a variation I gave as the Calihan lecture Thursday night (October 8).  Once I am happy with it, the Acton Institute will publish the text.  

Also at the ISI Conference was Robert P. Murphy, author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, who gave a really very talk on how everything you learned in US history about the Great Depression and the New Deal is wrong.  Murphy's work is of course very timely, given the parallels between the current crises and the Great Depression, and the current government response and the New Deal.

After my lecture, Murphy asked me a question about buying locally and Wal-Mart.  He posted this question on his blog, and I commented, to amplify on my original response. I am reproducing part of the exchange here:

Murphy: People are actually supposed to feel good about "buying local" even when they're from out of town. Do you see how ridiculous that is? Would the waiter have objected if I ordered a cut of meat, raised in Indiana, while sitting in a restaurant in Nashville?

I know I know, one of the reasons you're supposed to prefer locally grown vegetables etc. is that it is fresher. Fair enough. But a lot of the "buy local" people aren't simply saying, "You should do this because it tastes better and is better for you." No, it is a moral argument, that you should provide income to people who live down the street from you, rather than providing income to people who live in other states, or--gasp!--people who live in other countries.

Abela: I think it's important to distinguish between small and local. My talk was about the dangers of concentration of economic power, and so I was mostly focusing on supporting small businesses. Small and local often go together, but the rationale for local is somewhat different. Yes, it's more environmentally friendly, as one of your commentators noted. Yes, in terms of food it also means more freshness, as you noted. More important than freshness, though, is food security. If I buy my milk from a local farmer, the chances of it being contaminated with melamine are infinitesimally smaller than if I buy milk that has been shipped from China, because the local farmer knows that any such trick would spell the end of his business, whereas a global supplier can easily start again under a different name. And therefore (here's an argument a libertarian can love) there is less call for regulation when transactions are local.

I think you can generalize this point: local transactions are easier to monitor by the parties involved, and therefore there is less justification for state regulation, be it for product safety, workplace safety, truth in advertising, etc.

 Obviously, much much more to be said and done on this topic.