Leftist Catholic writer Michael Sean Winters pens a letter to Catholic Republicans, and promises to follow up with one to Catholic Democrats. It's always worth reading a thoughtful critique of one's position, so let's see if Winters is playing a truly prophetic role.
He writes:
The heresy of libertarianism has taken root within the Republican Party, and it has done so in the area of our culture where it is most dangerous because most pervasive: economics. I say “heresy” for two reasons. First, because libertarianism fits with the definition of heresy attributed to Lord Acton, it is a “truth run amok,” that is, it takes sound ideas about human freedom and responsibility and runs too far with them, ending up in the kind of knee-jerk, anti-government politics that could scarcely be more at odds with the classic view of government as a good found in Catholic social teaching, in the writings of Aquinas and even, with a big qualification, in Augustine. Secondly, and more dangerously, this libertarianism raises issues of theological anthropology of the first order.
I think that is a fair critique. Libertarianism is premised on a distorted anthropological view of humanity. People are selfish and invividualistic, but they are also altruistic and communitarian. An anthropology that rejects either dimension of being human will get things fundamentally wrong.
Winters expands his point with respect to income inequality:
Nowhere is the inability to grasp the social nature of man more obvious than in the reluctance of today’s Republican Party to come to terms with the fact of rising income inequality. Over at Vox Nova, Morning’s Minion has a great article about Catholic teaching on the sin of income inequality, with quotes going back to Pope Pius XI. The willingness of Republicans to trash the very idea that government has an obligation to ensure that its citizens have adequate health care and other basic human needs places them squarely at odds with a different, but equally long, catalogue of explicit papal teachings. As well, when I hear certain Catholic commentators suggest that the right to private property is inviolable, nay, even such that its violation is an intrinsic evil, I wonder if they have read the same encyclicals – or the same Summa - I have been reading since college. Above all else, Catholic Social Teaching stands for the proposition that all human activities and organizations, including the economy, must be judged in terms of their moral worth. The economy must serve man, not the other way round. And, yet, to hear some Republican Catholics talk, it is hard not to conclude that their view of the market is a superstitious, even idolatrous view, assigning to its invisible and inscrutable workings an ethical value that seems, to them, coincident with a rising GDP. The Master, of course, was clear on this: We will be judged not on the basis of our material success but on how we treat the least of these our brethren.
This is true in the last part, but what does that have to do with income inequality. Is it the case that because somebody has $100,000 today and $200,000 tomorrow that they will be less attentive to the poor? It seems that if their attention to the poor remains constant, then they will be in a position to do more good.
As noted by Theodore Dalrymple, income inequality is a phenomenon of rising standards of living, it is brute fact of mathematics:
Two considerations arise here, however. The first, as a simple thought experiment shows, is that equality in health is not necessarily desirable in itself. Suppose that the infant-mortality rate in the highest social class is three per 1,000 live births, while that in the lowest is six per 1,000 (approximately the case in Britain today). Then suppose that we could reduce the rate by one death per 1,000 births in each social class, yielding two per 1,000 in the highest class and five per 1,000 in the lowest. A cause for rejoicing, certainly—but not from the point of view of equality, for the ratio of deaths in the lowest class to deaths in the highest class would widen from 6:3 to 5:2—that is, from 2.0 to 2.5. Surely, however, only a latter-day Lenin would reject such an improvement because it increased inequality. Similarly, an increase in the infant-mortality rate of the highest social class, to six per 1,000, would represent an advance to complete equality; but again, no one but a Lenin would wish it.
Is there something unattractive about contemplating a society where the lines of the highest ten percent and the lowest ten percent are getting wider? Absolutely. Would it be nice if the lines were closer? Well, that depends on how you make that happen.
And that's the rub - in theory, using a magic wand to remove income inequality would be a good thing; in practice, it has led to injustice of Lenistic proportions.
Society must take care of the poor. It should prevent the concentration of wealth through unjust means, but if society is to improve the standard of living for the poor, it may have to tolerate an increase in income inequality, not as a goal, but as a means.
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