It’s not always easy being a free market thinker and a Catholic. On the one hand, you have centuries of economic thought going for you. On the other, you have several authoritative papal documents published since then that endorse various aspects of the modern welfare state. You also have modern Bishops allaying themselves with a huge range of statist causes. This is why Thomas Woods’s book is such a welcome addition to the literature. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/4177/must-catholics-adore-the-state/
Must Catholics Adore the State?
Previous post: Surprise: National Stereotypes Unscientific
Next post: Baptizing a Bad War
{ 20 comments }
Another book, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” – which is about the opensource developement model (which libertarians ought to read about – this is a model which is neither statist nor corporatist – I don’t want my music habits micromanaged by Washington, either DC or Redmond).
Interestingly it makes the same kind of point, if obliquely. The Cathedral (expert coders who review changes in detail) may produce “better” code in an abstract sense, but can’t adapt or handle other cases. The “Bazaar” is a marketplace of ideas that adapts quickly and will address even 4th sigma needs.
I find the parallel in the titles interesting.
On Distributivism, I don’t think it could work if imposed, but after considering what a proper set of property rights laws would produce, it might look a lot closer to that than anything else. The multinational megacorporation is the result of the regulatory and statist environment – success in their largess thus ought not be lauded.
And let me defend some of the Papal dicta (as opposed to Dogma). What Rothbard correctly points out (but comes to the wrong conclusion) is that a pregnancy imposes a burden on the woman carrying the child. The child is unlikely to be able to pay the fee for a while, but is getting free food and “health care” and whatever else from the mother. I think most Catholics would say the “Right to Life” overrides the lesser property right (violated by trespass). Or to use Walter Block’s idea – if he mistakenly gets on the wrong plane (so is not invited with an implicit contract), he can be pushed out without a parachute at 30,000 feet. I say whomever must wait until the plane lands and take the trespass to court – you cannot take life to preserve property from nonviolent trespass.
Prosperity allows us not to worry about a “right to food and water” but they are problems in some regions of the world, but life is at stake in health care. I don’t think the popes are talking about a child with the sniffles, but someone with a potentially fatal but fully treatable condition. Same thing with pensions – do we force 80 year old arthritic women to scrub floors so they can barely eat? How long would they live?
In the sense of “quality of life”, I don’t think there is any moral justification, but in the sense of “right to life”, it is a different matter. What about people in jail (or for that matter, debtors who have their wages garnished so can’t afford anything) who could not obtain a life-saving treatement even if it was very inexpensive?
Yet there is the difficulty that many life-saving treatments are expensive (even if we fix the litigation problem). We literally cannot afford to save everyone. And I have no resolution beyond the traditional ideas of triage.
Another attempt by people of Faith to justify
their economics intertwined with Religion.
Let’s not try to beat a dead horse in an attempt
to bring it back to life. Catholic doctrine at
heart is Communistic all the way. Fortunately
for the Pope and his colleaques they need not
produce the goods that States who have adopted
communisn have to and they fail all the time.
Capitalism cannot mix with religion, when it does
only suffering and death can occur to the extent it is mixed. History is repleate with examples.
Unfortunately men of learning even today close ther eyes to all of that needless suffering that
took place and will take place in the future.
Reason and Faith are incompatible no matter how
many tomes are written to deny that.
To say that reason and faith are different things is one thing, but to imply that a person (without contradiction) can not be rational and religious is quite another thing.
Many of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world have been religious, and some of these people have been Roman Catholics.
I agree that if a Pope really said something like “the Welfare State is a good idea – and I claim infallibility for this statement” one would be faced with a choice between the Roman Catholic church and reason.
However, no Pope has ever claimed infallibility for their opinions on economics – many people just think they have.
The Bishops of Rome feel (because of their high position) a duty to express their opinions on all sorts of public questions, well outside of religous doctrine. Their opinions should be treated with respect – but when they are mistaken this should be pointed out.
There is nothing antichristian or anticatholic in this – as the Popes themselves would accept.
I find it interesting that the author claims that the Austrians are the heirs to the Catholic intellectual tradition, and, when enumerating some of the strongest pronponents of Austrian Economics, he lists F.A. Hayek.
As one who has read some of Hayek’s works, and holds him in high esteem, I do not disagree with him, I simply think such inclusion in the context of being an heir to catholic tradition raises some questions. He claims the Catholic Intellectual tradition to be at odds with the 19th century British tradition (including Adam Smith), yet anyone who has read much of F.A. Hayek’s work will confirm my assertion that Hayek attempted to fuse Austrianism with the 18th century British tradition, ~including~ Adam Smith as an heir to this thought. Hayek seems to draw the line as to where the British tradition went wayward with J.S. Mill / Jeremy Benthem, and NOT Adam Smith.
That said, I am not contending that Hayek would claim you cannot draw from the Catholic intellectual tradition if you are not one, or if you don’t like where other heirs took it. His association with Edmund Burke while rebuking Continental thought would seem to affirm quite the opposite. I am also not saying that one cannot find Hayek’s agnostic rightings quite compatible with a mind that has faith, as my own mind’s receptive to his thought will attest. All I am saying is that the discrepency between where he sees fissures in economic thought and where Hayek seems to find them is interesting, and, since he agrees Hayek is a proponent of Austrian thought, this might be something worth exploring.
If anyone has read the book he was introducing, I would be very curious to know if he addresses this difference
Thanks,
Corey A. Hendon
One of the weirder hobbyhorses of this weird website is the attempt to fuse Catholic social thought with secular, rationalist Austrianism — this effort is too hilarious on too many levels even to enumerate. I just take it as another sign of all the cultural baggage Austrianism has acquired during its torturous migration from Vienna to the American Sun Belt/Bible Belt.
I tend to agree more with F.A. Harper’s moral postulates.
If I go to the grocery store, I don’t care if the cashier is atheist, communist, homosexual, whatever. I just care about getting goods for what I consider to be a subjectively proper price for me (which may not be a proper price for the person behind me).
However, as soon as the government forces me to pay for something that I don’t want–farm subsidies for powdered skim milk, for example–that is when the Decalague and the Golden Rule are violated. The welfare state is fundamentally immoral.
Ben Parkinson
Bruce,
Nice of you to drop in.
By “weird website,” do you mean this blog or Mises.org as a whole? If that latter, would you mind telling us what you find weird about it?
He probably find it hard to believe that people can have morals dictated by God. If anything, Capitalism has helped the church’s work by elevating the poor out of existence, at least in this country. I don’t think any Pope would say America or Capitalism hasn’t been the most generous country in existence. John Paul II even fought against socialism for decades!
You must learn that economics cannot make positive statements, which come entirely from morality and belief.
Andy D,
Let me play devil’s advocate here (my response to Bruce notwithstanding) and ask you why dictatorship, which is otherwise antithetical to libertarianism, is perfectly acceptable when it comes to God?
Is it not the ultimate coercion to be told to “do this or burn in hell”? What kind of freedom does one have under such an edict?
It’s a conflation to refer to economic law and moral law in the same breath. Moral law is law. Economic “laws” are laws only metaphorically – they are what scientists call “regularities” – principles by which, in isolation (which never happens in economics) causes and effects can be described and related to each other. As the review suggests, economic “laws” have no more to do with moral laws than individual actors allow moral values to influence their economic behavior.
To say that an individual must heed moral law over opposing economic interest makes sense enough, but in the grand scheme of things, moral law simply can’t overcome economic principles. It can only influence WHICH economic principles may dominate in particular situations, and that only to the extent the moral are given primacy.
Except both moral and economic law are natural laws perceivable with reason, which is where the Catholic, and more specifically the Scholastic tradition comes in. Nicholas Osreme and the late Spanish Scholastics got most of Austrian economics down long before Adam Smith was born (and the Jesuits were THE scientists of the 17th and 18th century).
The problem you have if you divide things too far is that things like murder, robbery, and thievery BECOME merely economic calculations. They aren’t wrong or evil (the latter word having no definition).
But as CS Lewis pointed out (in The Abolition of Man), the moral law, or the Tao as he called it (or the “natural law”) ends up being the same in nearly every lasting society. The 10 commandments and the Torah as well as rabbinic teachings are very close to what Confucius taught. Either the moral law is perceivable via reason the same way that say arithmetic or geometry is (2+2=4, the sum of the inside angles of a triangle add to 1/2 a circle) – or it is simply a personal opinion or taste of every individual. But it would seem to be the former.
Just as Mises would point out This is what people will do (praxeology) , and these are the bad things that happen when you interfere – based on reasoning, a moral philosopher can do exactly the same thing. Don’t regulate theft (ignore property rights) and X happens. Don’t regulate licentiousness and we get out-of-wedlock births and the family is destroyed.
Yet these two spheres do intersect. If you have a bunch of barbarians who can’t think beyond one week’s satisfaction, and won’t sit still to listen to anyone here explain the libertarian philosophy (Q. What does a cannibal call a stoic? A. Lunch. The same thing he calls an epicurean, platonist, aristotelian, phenomenologist, etc.), you won’t construct a free society. Uneducated people don’t make good citizens, neither do those who cannot delay gratification or otherwise control their desires or emotions.
Mises points this out on the bright side in his description of genius in On Human Action – they work for the internal gratification, the self actualization. But there is a dark side – the evil genius or the simple barbarian who is satisfied by food and blood and sex and isn’t very discriminating about what or how.
And if “Austrianism” only works or applies to a secular, rationalist society, do you impose it at the point of a gun, or should we all simply give up? Especially when many of the same natural-law based religions seem to converge on the economic principles and their political extensions?
There is an interesting discussion here on how E.F. Schumacher, the author of “Small Is Beautiful”, a key book in “Green” political thinking, moved on to Catholicism under the influence of Aquinas and others.
It’s a shame Schumacher didn’t live long enough to read Woods’ great little book. Here in Australia in the 1980s, an independent conservative thinker, poet, literary hoaxster and cultural critic, Max Harris, saw the future for a humane conservatism being in marrying Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful” with Milton Friedman’s “Free To Choose”.
Maybe Max Harris’s suggestion indicates a possible route to making Raimondo’s dream of an “Old Right Nader” a daytime reality.
Joseph Potts writes:
“Moral law is law.”
But where does it come from? If from God, then morals are “given” to man under the threat of the use of force (eternal damnation) if they are not obeyed. Furthermore, according to the teachings of different religions, I can only obey the moral of one by disobeying the moral law of the other.
How should libertarianism respond to this dilemma?
Let me begin with tz’s question: “[I]f ‘Austrianism’ only works or applies to a secular, rationalist society, do you impose it at the point of a gun, or should we all simply give up?”
Answer: You do neither. Instead, you go about the business of libertarianism by giving full recognition to the fact that many religions have indeed “converge[d] on the economic principles and their political extensions,” doing so, however, with the understanding that morality needn’t be grounded in any of them. For “ethical precepts…are more likely to be products of the brain and the culture. From the consilient perspective of the natural sciences, they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates — the behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are themselves willing to accept for the common good. Precepts are the extreme on a scale of agreements that range from casual assent, to public sentiment, to that part of the canon considered sacred and unalterable.” — E. O. Wilson, “The Biological Basis of Morality, “The Atlantic Monthly, April 1998
Thus, rather than stemming from divine coercion, morality can be understood as having evolved out of the cooperative process that libertarianism recognizes as the essence of the social enterprise.
And God? Insofar as he is man’s ultimate end, perhaps that is precisely where he is to be found:
“If the universe, as the physicists now suppose, has taken some [12-15] billion years to come forth out of chaos and old night, God is the faint glimmer of a design still fully to emerge, a rationality still to be achieved, a justice still to be established, a love still to be fulfilled.” — Lewis Mumford, “The Conduct of Life”
David, I was referring to the blog. The website as a whole has a lot of good reference material on Austrian economics. The blog, I fear, reflects the preoccupations and education level of the broader “Austrian” community. I read it for the interesting discussions of creationism, “states rights” legal theories, and conspiratorial views of history. I suspect that cosmopolitan, secular Jews like Mises would cringe if they could read it. Bruce
Bruce,
“I read it for the interesting discussions of creationism, ‘states rights’ legal theories, and conspiratorial views of history.”
I’m new to Libertarianism and I wonder what I could possibly learn from you. Maybe it would be better if you just read if this is the best you can do.
Having not read a lot by Mr. Mises thus far, still I don’t think it’s much of a stretch of the imagination to presume he would jump right in to a grand discussion such as is taking place in this thread if he were here.
David White, good to run into you again. David, don’t you realize that we are living in the age of Free Market Religion? If I, a Catholic, choose, I can renounce my faith tomorrow and become a Presbyterian, Unitarian, Moslem, whatever. Where is the coercion? As for the doctrine of ‘eternal damnation’, that is just an attention-getting way of saying that all our choices and actions have real consequences. If a person is eternally damned, it comes as the direct result of the choices they make in life, the actions they take. If one person kills another, both are permanently changed by the action. Nothing mysterious about that. If morality comes from God, it is because he made the world in a certain way. It is called reality. Flying would be so much easier without gravity. Economics would be so much easier if fiat money worked.
And with the breakdown in a common sense of morality, as Wilson wistfully talks about it, we are long past the point of return. As a result we are heading, and I am glad to see it, toward a Free Market Government. It is in government that we have true coercion. Point-of-the-gun coercion. Oddly, I think it is the breakdown of a commonly-held morality that is leading us toward the Free Market Government, non-territorial, non-coercive in the way that religious congregations now are. Then we will choose our government, and the morality that underlies its laws, just as we now choose our religion, without leaving home.
Hi Dwight,
Interesting. I can freely choose to believe whatever I want, but I can also be eternally damned for the choices I make. But how is that any different than the state saying that I can freely choose whether to pay taxes, but I will be imprisoned if I choose not to? The answer is that it’s a LOT different, since the state can only imprison me for the rest of my life, while God can (presumably) imprison me for all eternity, resorting to all manner of cruel and unusual punishment in the process. No wonder “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” What true believer wouldn’t be scared witless every waking moment of his life, were this “reality.”
Furthermore, which lord should I fear? If I obey the teachings of the Christian lord, I ipso facto disobey the teachings of the Muslim lord. If I then go to the Christian heaven, must I not also go to the Muslim hell? But of course, each side will answer, “You cannot go to the other religion’s hell because the other religion is false. Only our religion is true.”
No, what I fear is not these other-worldly lords but that all too worldly lord who daily wreaks havoc in a world gone mad — make that long mad — with the above fear. And all I’m saying with regard to libertarianism is that it aligns itself with ANY lord, temporal or otherwise, at its peril. This includes the source and sustenance of morality, which is better found where E. O. Wilson does, in the voluntary cooperation that is the essence of the social enterprise.
We’re kind of getting off topic here. This is a really good book; just finished it last week, and I will be going to hear Prof. Woods next week in North Jersey. He claims in the beginning of the book to be directing his comments specifically to orthodox Catholics who perhaps read too much into papal encyclicals, giving opinions about economic matters more weight than they deserve. But he also addresses the attitudes of progressive Catholics who want to use the big stick of government for good, not realizing how dangerous a proposition that is.
David, I agree that libertarianism per se cannot align with any single religion. Yet I believe that the methodology of Austrian economics, praxeology, is harmonious with Christianity (and other religions) since freedom is at the core. Prof. Woods makes a good case that some Catholic scholastics had independently come to many of the same conclusions as the early Austrian economists. I don’t think he wants or intends to show dependence, but only a similarity of approach and end result.
As for morality, as we had discussed before, laws, moral, economic, physical, are all discovered by us, not created. The world is what it is. When it comes to such laws, we work to discover the truth and live accordingly, or we oppose them and are eventually crushed by them. In saying this, I am referring to physical, moral, and economic laws equally.
Dwight,
While I believe that locating the source of morality in human cooperation rather than in divine coercion is vastly more compatible with libertarianism, insofar as organized religion is otherwise “harmonious its principles, I’m all for it, if for no other reason than that those who believe as I do are (or at least seem to be) very much in the minority.
Which is to say that if Lew can consort with liberals, I can consort with Christians.
The book was very good, but I was a bit concerned by some parts of it. It seems at times as if Woods is trying to cram the entire edifice of Austrian theory into the body of Catholic philosophy, and it isn’t a perfect fit. The book works much better when Woods takes things point by point and examines particular elements of economics in light of Catholic teaching and practical necessity. Austrian economic recommendations may be compatible with Catholic teaching, but Austrianism stems from a slightly different set of philosophical assumptions- for example, Catholic teaching believes that some economic choices, even when made by rational men seeking their own happiness who do harm to nobody else, can be objectively wrong. This doesn’t mean that the Austrian approach to these choices must be wrong in light of Catholic teaching, but it means that we have to use a different approach.
Comments on this entry are closed.