Catholics Against Capitalism

Something strange happened in Washington last week: A panel of Catholic intellectuals and clergy, led by His Eminence Oscar Andrés Maradiaga, was convened to denounce a political philosophy under the headline “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” The conference was mainly about free-market economics rather than libertarianism per se, and it was an excellent reminder that the hierarchy of the Church has no special grace to pronounce upon matters of specific economic organization. The best that can be said of the clergy’s corporate approach to economic thinking is that it is intellectually incoherent, which is lucky inasmuch as the depths of its illiteracy become more dramatic and destructive as it approaches coherence.

The Catholic clergy is hardly alone in this. There is something about the intellectually cloistered lives of religious professionals that prevents them from engaging in anything but the most superficial way with the 21st-century economy. Consider Tricycle, the American Buddhist review, which periodically publishes hilariously insipid economic observations — e.g., the bracingly uninformed writing of Professor Stuart Smithers of the University of Puget Sound religion department, whose review of Conscious Capitalism by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Raj Sisodia contains within it a perfect distillation of fashionable economic antithought. Like Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga, he writes about the “structural” problems of capitalism, but gives no evidence at all that he even understands what that structure is. Unfortunately, relatively few do.

“As Marx pointed out,” Professor Smithers writes, “capital is full of contradictions. Capital not only creates wealth, value, and jobs — it also destroys wealth, value, and jobs. Those ‘wondrous technologies’ also manifest as wrathful deities, efficiently eliminating or reducing the need for labor.” The implicit economic hypothesis here is that producing a certain amount of goods more efficiently — in this case, with less labor — makes the world worse off. (“Why not use spoons?”) The reality is the opposite, and that is not a matter of opinion, perspective, or ideology — it is a material reality, the denial of which is the intellectual equivalent of insisting on a geocentric or turtles-all-the-way-down model of the universe.

The increasingly global and specialized division of labor and the resulting chains of production — i.e., modern capitalism, the unprecedented worldwide project of voluntary human cooperation that is the unique defining feature of our time — is what cut the global poverty rate in half in 20 years. It was not Buddhist mindfulness or Catholic homilies that did that. In the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens, neither of those great religious traditions, nor anything else that human beings ever came up with, made a dent in the poverty rate. Capitalism did. One of the great ironies of our times is that so many of the descendents of the old Catholic immigrant working class have found themselves attracted to an American Buddhism that, with its love of ornate titles, its costumes, its fascination with apostolic succession, and its increasingly coddled professional clergy, is a 21st-century expression of Buddhism apparently committed to transforming itself — plus ça change! — into 15th-century Catholicism. Perhaps it should not be entirely surprising that it has embraced the same intellectual errors.

Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga and likeminded thinkers, stuck as they are in the hopelessly 19th-century distributist model of economic analysis, apparently are incapable of thinking through the implications of their own dogma. The question of how certain goods are “distributed” in society is a second-order question at best; by definition prior to it is the question of whether there is anything to distribute. To put it in Christian terms, all of the great givers in Scripture — the Good Samaritan, the widow with her mite, Joseph of Arimathea — had something to give. If the Good Samaritan had been the Poor Samaritan, with no resources to dedicate to the stranger’s care, then the poor waylaid traveler would have been out of luck. All the good intentions that we may muster are not half so useful to a hungry person as a loaf of bread.

Those who put distribution at the top of their list of priorities both make the error of assuming the existence of some exogenous agency that oversees distribution (that being the Distribution Fairy) and entirely ignore the vital question of what gets produced and by whom. Poverty is the direct by-product of low levels of production; the United States and Singapore are fat and happy with $53,101 and $64,584 in per capita economic output, respectively; Zimbabwe, which endured the services of a government very much interested in the redistribution of capital, gets to divide up $788 per person per year, meaning that under circumstances of perfect mathematical equality life would still be miserable for everybody. Sweden can carve up its per capita pie however it likes, but it’s still going to be 22.5 percent smaller than the U.S. pie and less than two-thirds the size of Singapore’s tasty pastry. You cannot redistribute what you don’t have — and that holds true not only for countries but, finally, for the planet and the species, which of course is what globalization is all about. That men of the cloth, of all people, should be blind to what is really happening right now on the global economic scale is remarkable, ironic, and sad. Cure one or two people of blindness and you’re a saint; prevent blindness in millions and you’re Monsanto.

Unless His Eminence et al. have come up with a way to apply something akin to a literal loaves-and-fishes model to the global economy — and I’m going to go ahead and predict that that isn’t happening, no matter what color the alleged economist’s hat is — then production precedes consumption. “The poor you will always have with you,” Jesus said, but in the capitalist world, that simply is not true — there is no poverty in the capitalist world comparable to poverty in the early 18th century, much less to the poverty that was nearly universal in Jesus’ time. Our people are clothed, fed, and housed, and the few shocking exceptions, as with the case of the neglected mentally ill, are shocking because they are exceptions — and those are not economic failures but political failures.

Which brings us to our fundamental problem: The errors of the Catholic hierarchy regarding the economy are the product of errors in its thinking regarding the state. Catholic thinking about the role of the state has evolved precious little since “render unto Caesar,” even though there is, especially in the Christian world, a blessed shortage of Caesars just now, and has been for some time. The Catholic clergy still operate under the Romans 13 assumption that “the powers that be are ordained of God.” (Paul apparently forgot to add “ . . . and the Electoral College.”) From the old royalist Right to the redistributionist Left, there is an implicit and sometimes explicit belief that the state is a channel for moral expression, whether that expression takes the form of entrenching traditional ideals about family life or or collaborating with the state in the seizure and redistribution of wealth. (Probably worth keeping in mind the clergy’s historical track record here: The last economic idea that it got itself exercised about was Marxism.) But the state is in fact no such thing. It is a piece of social software, a technology, a tool with no more moral significance in and of itself than a hammer. Like a chainsaw, its uses depend on whose will is controlling it — sometimes you get the United Chainsaw Carvers Guild (which, no kidding, exists) and sometimes you get Patrick Bateman. Having failed to reckon with both the epistemic challenges to the various economic-planning orders they dream of (without understanding “how little they know about what they imagine they can design”) and the public-choice analysis of state action, Catholic economic thinkers conclude that they can invent a chainsaw that can cut through wood but not their legs. (Which keeps going wrong and wrong and wrong.) Enthralled by the power of selecting among the millions of choices about what the state should do, they never consider the relatively restricted and plebiean question of what the state actually can do.

This is true even among the so-called conservatives. Consider John Paul II writing on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum:

If Pope Leo XIII calls upon the State to remedy the condition of the poor in accordance with justice, he does so because of his timely awareness that the State has the duty of watching over the common good and of ensuring that every sector of social life, not excluding the economic one, contributes to achieving that good, while respecting the rightful autonomy of each sector. This should not however lead us to think that Pope Leo expected the State to solve every social problem. On the contrary, he frequently insists on necessary limits to the State’s intervention and on its instrumental character, inasmuch as the individual, the family and society are prior to the State, and inasmuch as the State exists in order to protect their rights and not stifle them.

But the state in fact has no way of knowing to any practical effect what the common good even is or how its policies might affect priorities relating to it. The “common good” may seem like a relatively straightforward thing when your theater of operations is the general moral intuition of a saint, but it’s something else when you’re working with 20,000 pages of Affordable Care Act regulations — and that, not refined sentiment, is the realm in which the state operates. Meanwhile, he also expects the state to determine just wages and union work rules, to administer unemployment insurance, to calculate the economic consequences of immigration, and a hundred other things that the state has no capacity for doing. Like Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga and others, he assumes that the state will act in the cause of justice for the poor rather than being the most ruthless and pitiless exploiter of the poor, as history, including the history of this country, very strongly suggests that it will be. “The relevance of these reflections for our own day is inescapable,” the sainted epistolist writes, saying perhaps rather more than he meant to. Put not your trust in princes. Expecting them to deal rationally — to say nothing of morally — with systems of incomprehensible complexity is an error.

“The case against libertarianism”? As usual, the most important part of the question goes unstated and unanswered: “Compared with what?” You can have free trade or you can have trade managed by politicians; you can have free markets or you can have capital managed by politicians; you can have real prices or you can have shortages, waste, and chaos; you can have a society in which people are free — free, among other things, to follow the Gospel to a higher kind of freedom — or you can have . . . something else. “Can you be Catholic and libertarian?” the Washington Post asks. I suppose that it depends on how you intend to fulfill the Lord’s command to feed His sheep — with rhetoric or with bread — and how much faith you put in the proposition that “deep within his conscience, man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey.” And it must depend very heavily upon how you feel about the peaceful, cooperative, egalitarian, collaborative, poverty-pulverizing economy that we built when Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga wasn’t looking, the billions it has saved from poverty, and the billions more that it will save. Can you be Catholic and celebrate that? How could you be Catholic and do anything else?

I myself first felt the pull of the Church in a very, very poor place — India, as it happens — that was at the time engaged in the humane project of making itself a considerably less poor place, largely by ignoring the advice of the Hindu versions of Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga. I am grateful to our clergy, and if my criticism herein seems unduly uncharitable to these princes of the Church, it is only because their backward views on capitalism are doing real, material, irreversible damage to the world and especially to the lives of poor people, who are most in need of what only capitalism has to offer. His Eminence may not entirely understand it, but the banks and boardrooms are full of men and women doing more in real terms for the least of these than he is — more, in fact, than he would even understand how to do — and what he proposes mainly is to stand in their way. For God’s sake, stop it.

“Catholics were settled on this continent before anyone else.”

Yeah, in Mexico and New Orleans but they had almost nothing to do with the British colonies that became the United States.

Maryland was established to be the ‘Catholic’ colony but that didn’t last long. The only prominent Catholic I can think of as a Founding Father was Charles Carroll.

America was regarded as a WASP country for good reason.

“What about the Catholics that settled in the southern part of Florida?
Established missions in California?
Built hospitals?
Established universities?”

Every one of them was a subject of the Kingdom of Spain. They weren’t part of the development of United States.

Spanish Florida was mostly unsettled other than St Augustine. It was absorbed by treaty into the United States in the 1820s.

California was Spanish territory but had very few Spanish in it. The Missions were for the Indians. California didn’t become part of the US until 1850.

The only early Catholic University in America that I know of us in Mexico City. And that’s still Mexico.

There were pockets of Catholicism in early America, most would have been in the South along the coast.

I had Catholic ancestors in America in New Orleans but that wasn’t part of the US until Jefferson purchased it from Napolean.

Well, unlike the author’s suggestion it does not get it’s name from anything to do with the distribution of goods, it has to do with the distribution of productive property. I’ve noticed several articles published lately criticizing distributism, but upon reading all of them it was apparent the authors heard the word “distributism” mentioned by someone somewhere and just sort of guessed at what was meant by the term.

Lately, I’ve been reading G.K. Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity, which is basically his treatise on the subject. I’d recommend getting a copy (I found mine dirt cheap), so that, at the very least, you won’t be wondering about what distributism is. I’m only halfway through the book and I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on the subject, but regardless of what you find yourself thinking about Mr. Chesterton’s economic philosophy (which differ in many ways from American conservatism) I can definitely recommend his other works, his writing style has much in common with Mark Steyn. Not only were his thoughts on theology profound, but he also knew how to humiliate the progressive liberals of his day.

however, I’m only about halfway through so I’m wouldn’t consider myself an expert on the subject.

Basically, the economic philosophy behind distributism is that productive property (whether land or capital) should be dispersed widely amongst the population. The ideal is that as many people as possible should be proprietors of their own small businesses instead of working for others (I should note, that because of this distributism’s critics frequently equate it with agrarianism) . Like socialism, distributism holds that working for big business is exploitative, and eventually becomes wage slavery (though not necessarily so at first, basically the view of distributism is that capitalism will inevitably evolve into what we would call “crony capitalism” today. As Chesterton put it, he does not ‘condemn capitalists, for their capitalism, but for their socialism.’). Unlike socialism, distributists view private property as a big part of the solution to that exploitation, distributists hold private property as something essentially sacrosanct, and the only way to protect the freedom and independence of the productive class.

Do I buy into any of this? 10 years ago I wouldn’t have. However, many of the criticisms he has of capitalism seem to hit awful close to home when I see the increasingly incestuous relationship between big business and big government, especially during the current administration.

I have read that document, and while is sound great, there is one glaring issue. Human nature.

There has to be an all powerful body that can take part of a business or productive enterprise and give it to someone else. In the cases that Chesterton cited, it was mainly farm land taken from the great estates and given (sometimes forcibly) to the lower classes. All good in theory. It would free up land that was enclosed by large estates to a more Common’s plan.

The problem is that if I was a powerful man, I would try to make sure to influence that body that distributes things up. Maybe get a son or two on the board. Maybe give a generous donation to the guild. Maybe a nice donation to the Church. In short, it would be corrupted rather quickly by those who corrupt everything. Namely people.

It is a great theory on paper, and Chesterton and Belloc address a great many things that are abused today (Belloc is very correct in saying that capitalist materialism leads to the same place and communistic materialism). But both men were Romantics in the best sense of the word. They assumed that men could be angels, without looking at times when such economic arrangements, or something close to it, held sway. Instead of something to give the means of production to every man, it would be used to exclude those men out of production in order to support those guilds who held sway.

In other words, I fear we would end up the same way we are today.

The prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church all considered usury a sin on a par with sodomy.

Marx praised usury-based capitalism as the best system for the purposes of destroying all of traditional society before it. He saw that capitalism was functioning as the destructive engine which would undermine and collapse the family and relations based on custom, religion and morality. The further capitalism rolled the more it would centralize ownership and control, depriving vast numbers of people of small proprietorship, the free and responsible use of their own productive property.

The usurers would capture the state. And then, the overthrow, and the socialist state.

The prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church all considered usury a sin on a par with sodomy.

Correction: Jews are forbidden to lend at interest to other Jews (and even then there's Hillel's prozbul) but are explicitly permitted to lend at interest to non-Jews. As a matter of fact, one of the blessings Israel will merit if it is faithful is that it will lend and not borrow, whereas one of the curses for unfaithfulness is that it will borrow and not lend.

I confess that I am not aware of whether or not non-Jews are permitted to loan at interest, but I could find out.

There are good things and bad things about interest and capitalism. A good thing is that it enables social mobility. A bad thing is that this very social mobility is at odds with traditional pre-capitalist society. The highly stratified medieval European society was derived ultimately from the hindu caste system, and while much more sane morally required one and all one's descendants to be doomed for life to the same social status . . . which was fine if one was nobility, but not if one was a serf. The truly Theocratic society of ancient Israel was neither medieval Europe nor the modern "West" but rather something quite unique.

Unfortunately, Catholic and palaeocon anti-capitalism/usury is often a front for anti-Semitism (please note that I am not accusing you of this; I'm merely pointing out that this is so). But at any rate, this point of view is almost absent from American conservatism, and more American conservatives need to be exposed to it, whether they agree with it or not. For this your post is much appreciated.

Whatever similarities there may be between a feudal society and a caste society, the former did not derive from the latter. Hindus had virtually no contact with Europeans until well past the era of feudalism, which declined in the 14th century partly as a consequence of the Black Plague, when labor became scare and workers were in a position to demand wages.

As befits one who is fascinated by languages, I assume that European culture, like European languages, ultimately derive from India. This of course doesn't mean I'm right. (Then of course there's the Jewish Tradition of Roman/chrstian Europe being 'Edom, which is descended from Jacob's twin brother.)

The important point is that Biblical Israel was absolutely unique in world history. Despite superficial resemblances it was comparable to neither modern secularism nor any other religion on the face of the earth--not even the other Semitic ones.

Ancient Israel was the only true Theocracy in world history. May it be HaShem's Will to restore it and bring all mankind under His Laws soon, speedily, and in our day!

It is true that there were trade routes which facilitated traffic in commodities, but not in cultures. The existence of the Nestorian Stele, a tablet erected in Ch'ang-an (on the far western edge of China) suggests there was cultural contact even east of the Indus. But I call the Stele an "oddity" because it was seen as such by the people there: a token of a highly exotic foreign culture, incomprehensible and "walled off" from them both physically and culturally. Contacts between the cultures were sporadic and very slender.

There is no evidence that Hindu social-religious systems influenced, let alone established, European feudalism.

The Hindu castes were seen as sacred and immutable, almost as if the people in them constituted different species (I don't mean this literally, but as an analogy). In contrast, the tumultuous nature of European history, and the incipient egalitarianism of its Christian basis ("You are neither slave nor free, but one in Christ") insured that people did not see classes as inevitable, nor as expressive of God's perfect and permanent will.

Let me first confess that I am not an expert on the Middle Ages, but chrstianity as it developed in ethno-geographical chrstendom was very different from the plebeian religion of the early chrstians. The medieval corporativist model with its guilds mult-generational social classes were interpreted as the model society and Paul's "ye are members one of another" was invoked to prove this. Catholic advocates of a restored chrstendom today justify this highly stratified society (the TFP people being merely one example) and there are sites and articles on the Internet dealing with this very subject.

I'll ping to wideawake. He's the expert here.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.