Abortive Politics

May 21, 2010

If the idea of the left-wing and right-wing parties joining to form a coalition government here in the UK isn’t weird enough to us Americans, a woman at church last Sunday pointed out to me another huge disconnect between American and British politics.  In Britain, she said, it’s an open question who Christians are going to vote for; most likely, in a sizable and reasonably diverse congregation, fairly equal numbers of the members will vote for the Tories, the Lib Dems, or Labour.  But in America, so far as she could tell, it was pretty much assumed that if you were Christian, you were voting Republican.  She recounted the bizarre experience some of her friends had had of receiving emails from American friends back in 2008 asking for prayer that Obama wouldn’t win.    I regretfully assured her that her impressions of the polarization were quite accurate.  But why?  

Why is it that Christians in the US are so politically partisan compared to their British counterparts?  Is it because good and evil are so much clearer in US politics than in the UK?  I must confess that I’ve never seen anything to suggest a clear division of good and evil between the Democrats and the Republicans.  Is it because Brits simply don’t take their faith seriously enough to apply it to politics?  I suppose there might be something to that, but I don’t think that’s a fair criticism.  Let us pause to consider this, though.  A flexibility among Christians with regard to political affiliation could imply an underdeveloped sense of the Gospel’s relevance to political life; however, it may well simply imply a healthy understanding of the provisionality of politics.  In our modern societies, it is important for Christians to recognize that, although there may be in theory a robustly Biblical politics, none of the existing political options comes close to embodying it, but each of them does offer some prospects of achieving some provisional goods that Christians can recognize as genuine public goods.  In such a situation, complete abstention from voting is a legitimate route to take (and is more or less my own persuasion), on the grounds that each of the options represents a sufficiently flawed, unChristian, and untrustworthy platform that it would be wisest not to support any.  But it is also potentially legitimate to, acknowledging the essential rottenness of all the options, weigh up the provisional public goods of each option, and vote for the one that seems on balance the best, all the while granting that your Christian brother may well weigh things up a little differently, without this implying any fundamental disconnect between your ultimate values.  Such a sense of provisionality seems (so far as I have discerned in my very brief time) to dominate the thinking on politics among British Christians, but not among Americans.  American Christians, for the most part, have trouble letting go of the idea that political allegiances are matters of ultimate value, and should be a religious battleground.  

The chief cause of this religious partisanship, so far as I can tell, seems to have been the abortion debate.  Of course, that’s far from the only issue on which Christians line up with the conservative party line, but my sense is that it’s the tail that wags the dog.  Where would Christians have gotten the idea that all these conservative policies were Christian policies?  Why should love of gun rights be a particularly Christian political position?  Or opposition to immigration?  Or being perennially hawkish about military action?  Etc.  The closest thing I’ve been able to come to an explanation is simply this: when Roe v. Wade happened, the Democrats happened to be dominated by socially liberal leadership (McGovern), and so the Republicans were able to position themselves as the anti-abortion party.  Christians, fired with fanatical political activism over the abortion issue, flocked more and more to the Republican banner and began assimilating its ways, even if there wasn’t anything very Christian about them.  The abortion issue was one on which Christianity had a clear answer to give, and so it came to be the only one on which Christianity had any answer to give.  And, since Democrats are seen as the embracers of abortion, which is clearly wicked, they can be easily demonized in the popular Christian imagination--they must be wicked, filthy people, and so every political stance associated with the Democrats must be a wicked, filthy one...no need to investigate the matter much further.

In Britain, where the abortion issue never became politicized*, Christians never flocked to one party en masse, nor did they start attributing life-and-death significance to politics.  So, while we may allege that have not sufficiently put faith in politics in the sense of putting faith into politics, making their Christianity central to their political involvement, they seem to have thereby avoided our error of putting faith in politics in the sense of making an idol of politics and thus losing our grip on the Christianity that we were trying to bring into the public sphere.  

*Note: It is particularly odd, as this woman and I were discussing, that the abortion issue should have become politicized in the US and not the UK given that in the former, it was was a judicial decision, and in the latter, a legislative one.  Historically, an independent, unpoliticized judiciary has been seen as a chief bulwark of freedom, but American Christians have heedlessly chucked that ideal out the window in their single-minded pursuit of a political solution to the abortion problem, a problem that is not a fundamentally political problem.  And so, even while decrying “liberal activist jurisprudence,” we have aggressively and explicitly tried to turn our entire political process, at every election, into an attempt to stack the Court with politically-aligned judges to overturn abortion.  And so we have connived with the liberal activists for the destruction of an independent judiciary, so that we now regularly expect Supreme Court decisions to fall along partisan lines.  

Red Tories or Blue Liberals?

May 12, 2010

Here on the tea-drinking, Marmite-spreading side of the pond, everyone has been in a tizzy for the past few days about the sensational outcome of the General Election last Thursday--no less sensational for having been widely predicted.  With the voting public of the UK having developed a thorough contempt of Gordon Brown and Labour’s dismal record of nine years of licking America’s boots, yet unable to forget the deep hostility to the Tories that they contracted in the ‘90s, they found themselves seeking to steer between Scylla and Charybdis.  Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat party set out to occupy that strategic position between the two monsters, and thought they were poised for a breakthrough election, but failed dismally, winning only 57 of the 650 seats despite 23% of the popular vote.  The result, generally anticipated but still quite disconcerting when it happened, was a Hung Parliament, the first in 36 years--meaning that no party had a majority, even though the Conservatives had managed to beat out Labour by a margin of 305 to 258.  The options at this point were four: 1) the Tories could form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats to form a solid majority government; 2) Labour could form a coalition with the Lib Dems and a couple other minor parties to form a slight majority government; 3) no coalition would be formed, but Labour would defiantly cling to power until it became too unpopular to continue to do so; 4) no coalition would be formed, but Gordon Brown would resign, and David Cameron, the Tory leader, would become Prime Minister and run a minority government until it became too unpopular to do so.  

Clearly option 1 was the most desirable, and yet seemingly quite difficult to achieve, since the Lib Dems and the Tories occupied rather opposite ends of the political spectrum.  And so an odd drama played out over the last five days, as both parties grovelled at the feet of Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, despite his terrible showing in the election.  Finally, last night, having wrung generous concessions from the Tories (the deputy prime ministership for himself, and five other cabinet positions for the Lib Dems), Nick Clegg threw his lot in with David Cameron, giving the UK its first coalition government since WWII and its youngest prime minister in 198 years.  

As someone who has just been reading with interest Philip Blond’s Red Tory [I should clarify to American readers that, everywhere outside the US, “Red” equals left-wing, and “Blue” equals right-wing], I can’t help but be intrigued and excited by this outcome, and disposed to be much less cynical than normal.  Does this coalition of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives suggest the possibility of a genuinely Red Tory agenda, the best of both left and right--social conservatism and fiscal responsibility combined with anti-nationalism and anti-corporatism?  Or will it mean rather a Blue Liberal agenda, the worst of both worlds that we saw with Labour--market libertarianism and social libertarianism, expensive welfarism co-existing with unprincipled corporatism?  Only time will tell.  Of course, more likely than either is that the alliance will prove impossible to maintain, and will break down within a year or two.  

In any case, however, as an American who is accustomed to the unseemly spectacle of Republicans and Democrats refusing to ever even vote for the same bill, it is an exciting and refreshing prospect to see such historically-opposed parties uniting to actually form a single coalition government!  It’s as if McCain had won the election and then invited Al Gore to be his vice president!  So, although opportunities for cynicism abound, I insist on seeing the bright side, at least this once.

Review of The Shock Doctrine

April 26, 2010

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is a must-read for anyone in the modern West.  Okay, that’s a broad statement, so let me try one more focused: it is a must-read for Red-state Christian America.  Too long have we blindly thrown our weight behind the idea that capitalism would bring peace, freedom, and prosperity to the benighted Third World, and have we, with dangerous syncretism, imagined that its onward march was the vanguard of the Kingdom of God, trampling over secularists in our race to declare its victories as the offspring of our Christianity’s genius.  We glibly reassure ourselves that we are “pro-life” because we decry the crimes of abortion doctors, all the while ignoring the blood of the neoliberalism crusade’s millions of victims.  Naomi Klein calls on us all to wake up and smell the ugly stench of reality.  What makes this book so compelling is that it transcends standard debates about whether the “free enterprise system” or state-run enterprise works better, by examining the actual track record of the Chicago School, pure capitalist notion of free markets, and concluding that this “free enterprise system” has never existed.  We are accustomed to treating “the government” and “private companies” as two antithetical actors, and yet this assumption is no longer true, if it ever was.  

Take Lockheed Martin, for example--the US government is their biggest client, and Lockheed receives a greater share of the federal budget than do several large governmental agencies like the Department of Commerce.  What we have now is a corporatist state, an unholy alliance of government force and market greed, each of which is dangerous enough on its own, but which together are a truly terrifying combination.  In this combination, the government imposes a “free” market by force on unwilling citizens, then helps make sure that big corporate or political supporters get the lion’s share of that market, at the expense of most of the citizenry.  These corporate giants then come to wield the lion’s share of political power as well, which they continue to use for their benefit.  At the same time, this alliance means that, as things like war and disaster relief become for-profit enterprises, large corporations position themselves both to exploit and to encourage political and social chaos worldwide.  

Klein’s core thesis is that all of this has been the direct result of the attempt to apply Friedmanite Chicago School economics, a thesis that does not need to rely on tendentious causal connections or vague post hoc ergo propter hocs, since in many cases she can show how self-avowed Friedman proteges were the architects of these enterprises, which were enthusiastically hailed by Friedman and his cohorts.  Shortly after I started reading this book, I looked at some of the reviews on Amazon and decided to check out the small cluster of 1-star reviews, just to see what the opposition was saying.  A common complaint seemed to be: “This woman must not have read Friedman!  Friedman’s ideal wasn’t all this stuff that she’s portraying--dictatorships and oligarchical economies and a powerful corporatist state--he wanted freedom!”  Yes, but these people must not have really been reading this book.  The point isn’t what Friedman’s ideal was, just as the point isn’t what Marx’s ideal was.  With both, the problem is that their ideal, while great on paper, simply did not reflect the way real societies function, with real power interests that will protect themselves.  Especially if read with Polanyi’s argument about the inherent unnnaturalness of the self-regulating market in mind, The Shock Doctrine strongly suggests the conclusion that Pinochet-style violence, repression, inequality, and corporate dominance is the inescapable result of the attempt to apply Friedmanism in the world as we know it.  Forget the facile equation of capitalism and “freedom” or “democracy”--a democratic society, Klein shows, will revolt against the attempt to impose such an economic system, and so it can only be imposed by force or chaos, and then freedom is out of the picture.

  

How did we ever trick ourselves into believing that if we just removed the impediments to letting society be run by greed, we’d have a free and peaceful world?  Greed means that Lockheed Martin will fund war propaganda to get us to invade Iraq, and who’s to tell them that’s off-limits?   

Now, this book has some flaws, of course, which can get quite annoying at times.  For one thing, Klein doesn’t always seem to realize the radicalness of her own thesis--the thesis that we can no longer dichotomize business and government, since the two have increasingly merged their interests, personnel, and operations.  Repeatedly, she falls back into talking as if we’re dealing with a straightforward government vs. business, public vs. private battle, in which the public sphere is always the good guy, and private business is always the bad guy.  All of the problems, on this narrative, stem from not enough government--if only the government were bigger and stronger, all would be well.  And this gets tiresome--for some reason, whenever some crucial task currently administered by government isn’t getting done, it’s because the government is underfunded and sapped of resources, but whenever some crucial task currently administered by a private company isn’t getting done, it’s because they’re lazy, corrupt, and inefficient.  This is a rather dubious picture.  However, that said, the book does force us to rethink some of our equally dubious conservative assumptions--namely, that a private company will always do a job better than the government will, or that governments cannot do a fair bit of good in restraining baleful inequalities within society.

Also, Klein is terribly one-sided in her telling of the story.  She never really gives Friedman, et. al., a chance to tell their side of the story; when she does quote them or give a bit of their perspective, she immediately makes snide mockeries.  I think this tale could be even more compelling than it is were she to give them a fair hearing, to say, “Here’s what this movement wanted to achieve.  They really wanted these great goals, and they really thought these things would happen, and here’s why.  But here’s why those dreams failed when they met reality.”  Without that kind of sympathy and perspective, this ends up sounding propagandistic at times.  

Of course, another related criticism is that, as would surely be the case in any book of this size and scope, there are some places where the argument seems much weaker, and somewhat strained.  Was there really foul play going on here?  Was the story really that simple there?  Are we really to believe that this policy was such a bad thing?  She has some really damning material when she’s discussing Chile and the South American juntas, and also when she discusses post-9/11 developments and the Iraq War.  Most of the stuff in between contributes valuably to her thesis and narrative, but in some of it, it feels like she’s overreacting.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly for us Christians, this book is handicapped by the fact that it is written in an almost relentless torrent of moral passion, but a passion without any clear basis.  As a Christian, I can offer all kinds of reasons why most of the phenomena described in this book are indeed evil and appalling and should be resisted.  But what’s her basis?  At times, it seems to be an unswerving devotion to democracy.  Time and time again, her objection to Friedmanism is that its adoption in a society has to be undemocratic--it will not be supported by the majority of the people, and so the rulers have to find some way of imposing it against their will.  I’m not convinced this is automatically wrong.  After all, the purpose of rulers is to rule, is to make hard decisions that may not be popular, and if the rulers are in fact wiser than the ruled, that may mean they will take the right course of action, even if it is not generally supported.  But there is a difference between governing and oppressing, and in most of her examples, the actions taken were not merely undemocratic, but violent and deceptive.  So, a Christian can get angry about this as well.  She also seems to operate on the assumption that there’s a huge range of tasks in a society that ought to be provided by the government rather than for a profit.  Many of us may not entirely agree with her here, but I do begin to see the benefits of leaving the profit motive out of the picture when it comes to basic services for a society, even if that doesn’t mean it’s best to put the central government in charge of them.    And as Christians, we should agree that there is something wrong and dangerous about companies making a profit off of disasters, violence, and people in great need.  Biblically, the principles are clear--if your brother is weak and poor, you can’t try to make money off of him; you have to help him at your own expense.  Capitalism says, “Aha!  This person or this country has been brought to its knees--now’s the chance to make a killing!”  Finally, she is operating on the assumption that the people of a country have a right to a fair share of the products of their country, and that huge income inequality is an unjust state of affairs. I have a feeling that many people from my background will not share these assumptions, but I confess that I’m finding it rather difficult to object to them.  

In conclusion, this book is a wake-up call for Christians in the Western world who are accustomed to take it as one of those inevitable facts of life that the two-thirds world is poor and oppressed, and who subconsciously (or even openly) attribute it to the native incompetence and wickedness of these peoples: “We’re Protestant Christians, and so we’ve figured out how to prosper; they’re not, so it’s no wonder they’re condemned to keep wallowing in poverty.”  This book alerts us to the fact that this poverty and oppression is the result of particular decisions and policies largely emanating from our shores, policies that we have enthusiastically supported as long as they made us richer, and that we have a responsibility to repent of.

A few more responses on the taxation issue

April 16, 2010

Since a few people have told me they appreciated the stuff I’ve been posting on taxation and theft here, I thought I’d post just a bit more from the Facebook discussion--the text below was in reply to a section of a large rebuttal someone wrote up there, but it should basically make sense on its own.  Also, since it’s that time of the year again, and the Tea Partiers were out in force yesterday, I recall my first little essay on this whole business, which I wrote last Tax Day, and you can find here.

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You then make a statement that my problem is that I “blur the concepts of necessary taxes and redistributive taxes....Taxes for the common defense fall in the first category, taxes for the redistributive principle fall in the second.”  Yes, it is precisely my point to blur these categories.  Why are taxes paid for defense necessary?  Well, they’re not absolutely necessary, but we generally think that they’re important for the preservation of society.  In an economy characterized by dangerous inequality and serious poverty, one might argue that redistributive taxes are just as necessary for the preservation of society.  Moreover, many taxes are “redistributive” in the sense of benefiting some more than others, including taxes for the “common” defense, as I argued in the original post and in my comments after the first post.

Then you extol the virtues of voluntary giving.  Great--let’s have more of that.  If the Church can motivate people to give voluntarily, and care for the poor, then let it do so, and the government will have no reason to get involved.  I remember reading about some 19th-century Scotch Presbyterian who organized such an effective and generous church system of poor relief that the local government was able to vastly scale back their welfare program.  But if the Church is failing, she can hardly complain when other institutions try to pick up the slack.  A couple quibbles with what you said in this paragraph, “None of these services were based on an enforced-tax or upon a social principle of wealth distribution”--neither of those is strictly true; in many nations in Christendom at various times, the tithe was enforced, whether or not it should’ve been; second, in the early Church, church charity was based upon “a social principle of wealth distribution”--many of the Church Fathers called explicitly for the rich to sell all their excess and give the proceeds to the Church for it to distribute equitably, Acts 4 style.  Also, you say, “Nor did the apostles, church fathers, or any others enforce any such standard, but leave it with the conscience.”  Well, it depends what you mean by that; the Church Fathers may have “left it with the conscience” but they raked consciences over the coals regularly on this subject, so you can’t quite characterize it as a hands-off approach.

At this point you move on to make some (to put it charitably) rather ignorant and snarky comments about Popes Pius XI and John Paul II.  If you don’t agree with them, fine, but I think you need to respect them, and the great body of teaching they represent.  I don’t know enough about Pius XI to defend him specifically (but I doubt you know enough about him to attack him specifically) but John Paul II was, by all counts, a very holy man and a noble leader, who devoted himself to the good of the Church, so far as he understood it, and the cause of the oppressed.  The Catholic Church in the past few decades has put Protestants (especially conservative ones) to shame when it comes to defending the cause of the poor, and sacrificing much for them, so let’s not throw around charges of “hypocrisy.” 

Your reading of Pius XI’s quote here was particularly odd.  Pius said, “[the state] does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and rushing to its own destruction.”  You seem to have a problem with the last clause, somehow reading it as if Pius was against “material things.”  What Pius says here seems self-evidently true--that the private possession of goods, in itself a good thing, will, if unrestrained, cause intolerable evils and eventually its own destruction.  Wasn’t it the Apostle James who said “The love of money is the root of all evil”?  Private property is a dangerous thing, because private owners can easily fall into selfishness and greed, and, unless restrained by laws, destroy others in their greed.  There’s no opposition to material things here, just the cold hard truth about human nature.

Then you tell me all this stuff from Richard Bonney’s book.  I appreciate all the extra information, but I’m not sure exactly which parts are relevant to the matter at hand.  Yes, taxes are higher now than historically; yes, Rome had a very oppressive tax system, particularly oppressive because it disproportionately afflicted the poor--it was if anything a reverse redistribution at times, as some of your own citations show.  Indeed, you cite Basil the Great calling for the poor to be exempted from taxes--this sounds like what conservatives would decry as a redistributive system--everyone receiving the benefits of government, though only some people pay for them!  

This line jumped out at me: “In the past, as Brad points out, other Christians have failed to realize the full Biblical principle of private property”--OK, so here we have at least a concession that our modern teaching on this matter is not the Early Church’s teaching.  Good.  I do not think that we have to adopt the Early Church’s teaching on this matter wholesale; but my point is that we must acknowledge that some of our claims on this subject (e.g., redistribution=theft) run contrary to their attitudes, and that should cause us to be rather more modest in our claims.

A bit later, you point out that “Nowhere in Chrysostom’s explanation of taxation is any theory about the State providing for the poor to accomplish wealth redistribution or equity, or any other socialist idea.”  To be sure.  Chrysostom wanted the Church to handle all that redistribution--he was thoroughly socialist, actually, but he wanted an ecclesial, not a state socialism.  What I want people to realize though is that the reason no one back then envisioned the state involved in redistribution was because the state had not yet been Christianized.  When the State did increasingly get in the business of supporting the poor, taxing the rich, providing free education and healthcare, etc., the people who were the driving forces behind this were Christians, trying to fulfill gospel mandates in the political sphere.  A pre-Christian state would not be likely to think of redistributing to the poor; for a Christian state, such began to seem like a mandate.  I don’t mean to say that this was the right conclusion to reach--that these socializing Christians had the right idea, but it’s important for us to understand the genealogy of this development.  That’s why, for instance, I cite Martin Bucer, who encouraged aggressive intervention by the civil authorities to protect the poor and control the rich.  But you just breezed over Bucer, surprising, since as a Protestant, he would seem to be the most significant figure to you.

Now, you say some things about Aquinas.  For one, you say that Aquinas is a shaky source because he used Aristotle.  Ah!  But do you not realize that his use of Aristotle in his teaching on property is to moderate the radical stance of the early Church Fathers?  In other words, he uses Aristotle to establish a much more pro-private-property stance than that of the earlier tradition.  So it doesn’t work for you to say, “Oh, we can’t trust his negative attitude toward private property, since he was using Aristotle.”  Now, to be sure, Finnis attempts to make explicit what is merely implicit in Aquinas--or perhaps, to construct an argument out of building blocks that are in Aquinas, and we cannot be sure how much Aquinas would agree with his claims for redistributive taxation (for Aquinas, the Church would’ve been the most natural institution to be handling such things, not the state).  My point though is that the building blocks are there in Aquinas--Finnis isn’t just cooking things up out of thin air; and we as modern Christians need to reckon with Aquinas’s tremendously influential teaching here.

I’m impressed that you consulted Finnis’s book for your rebuttal, and would admire your thoroughness, but I think you were not sufficiently attentive on the subject of superflua.  It is a bit more complicated than this.  I’m running out of time right now, so I will just post the notes and quotes I had taken a few weeks ago on this section of Finnis:

There is a threefold distinction in Thomas between “(a) resources one needs for the very survival of oneself and one’s dependants, (b) resources one needs in order to fulfil one’s responsibilities for the support and education of one’s relatives and household, for maintaining one’s business or profession or other vocation, for launching one’s children in such ways of life, for paying one’s debts, and other such genuine responsibilities, and (c) resources which are left over {superflua} after one has made reasonable provision for both type (a) ‘absolute necessity’ and type (b) ‘relative necessity {necessitas conditionata}.  Then Aquinas’ theorem is twofold: (I) everything one has is ‘held as common (or in common)’ in the sense that it is morally available, as a matter of right and justice, to anyone who needs it to survive; (2) one’s superflua are all ‘held as common’, in the sense that one has a duty of justice to dispose of them for the benefit of the poor.”

I: those in life-threatening need can take whatever will relieve that need, and “this entitlement overrides anyone else’s otherwise legitimate title or property right.” II: Furthermore, if I am aware of someone in such strict need [go take a look at II-II q. 71 a. Ic], and there is no other who is available to provide it, I have a “duty of strict justice (not merely ‘charity’)” to help them, not merely out of my superflua, but out of what I use for relative necessity....when no one is in extreme necessity, property-owners may keep their property “just as far as their type (b) need to maintain themselves (with their dependants) in the form of life which they have reasonably adopted.”  All superflua should then be made available to those who lack the resources for their type b) needs.  “The poor have a natural right that the whole of this residuum be distributed in their favour.”  

In other words, your claim that Aquinas says that we are only responsible to give what is left over after we have tended to all reasonable needs and responsibilities is oversimplistic--that is only true if you know of no one in extreme necessity, and quite possibly that is true for most of us (though in an era of globalization, the question can be asked how far our responsibility extends to global neighbors).  Plus, I do not, I’m afraid, share your rosy reading of Christian America: “Now, that rather sounds to me like how most Christians today live – we pay for our expenses, and tithe, and give of what was left over to the church, to family, to friends, to mission work, and other things. Most people do not have much, if any, ‘superflua’ in this sense. After all, if you’re saving up for a house to provide for your family, that clearly falls under the necessities of life. If you’re saving up for a new car because the one you have is suffering, that’s clearly providing for your family, and in my case, providing for my livelihood since I drive to the businesses I meet with.”  My experience of Christian America (and I do not in any way exclude myself from this indictment) is that we convince ourselves that we “need” any number of little luxuries--a new article of clothing every couple weeks, several cups of coffee a day, an iPhone, a flat-screen TV, a rather large house, a rather nice car, a generous supply of junk food, etc.--and then, if all that is covered, we might reach into our pockets and call ourselves generous.  This is not an easy teaching, and I don’t pretend that it is; it’s given me a great deal of pause and hard thinking over the past few months.  

Is Redistributive Taxation Really "Theft"? (Pt. 2)

April 9, 2010

(See the first part in the previous post)

...Third, and most significantly in my mind, this narrative requires that we can legitimately regard the money that has been taken from us as “our money”--as in the Margaret Thatcher quote, “you run out of other people’s money.”  Now, I have already pointed out one sense in which this is oversimplistic--simply by being members of a society, some of our resources have to be pooled, and the decision over how to use them will not belong to us alone.  Nevertheless, it could still be argued that there are some uses of money by a society that are inherently unjust, that simply no society has any business using its members’ money for.  This, perhaps, is how to take statements like Wilson’s: with the implied distinction that while there are certain uses to which our government may justly put our tax money, uses that we should accept even when we think they are ill-managed, there are others which it cannot.  In the latter cases, since it is levying money from us for unjust purposes, one could make the case that it is unjust in levying the money, and thus the money still justly belongs to us.  To take what justly belongs to another is “theft” or “robbery” and so, in such cases, perhaps the accusation holds.  

In fact, Aquinas says as much: “If princes exact from their subjects that which is due to them according to justice for the preservation of the common good, this is not robbery even if they employ violence in doing so.  But if princes extort by violence something which is not due to them, they commit robbery just as much as the bandit does.” (ST II-II Q. 66 a. 8 ad 3; notice, by the way, that Aquinas uses the word “robbery” rather than “theft”--this points to another sense in which our modern critics have been careless, though I had not mentioned it so as not to seem petty: “theft” properly speaking refers to property taken in secret; “robbery” to property taken openly and by force.)

So the question here is whether there is any justice in taxation for things like welfare, healthcare, social security, etc.  Of course, these are all somewhat distinct phenomena, and so we might have to have an argument about justice in each case.  But I’ll try to simplify the matter into the single question: is it ever legitimate for laws to require that resources be taken from those who have surplus to help supply the needs of those who, for whatever reason, do not have enough?

Now, interestingly enough, on this point, the general consensus of the Christian tradition seems to be resoundingly “yes”!  Pope John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens says, speaking of society’s obligations to workers, says, “The obligation to provide unemployment benefits, that is to say, the duty to make suitable grants indispensable for the subsistence of unemployed workers and their families, is a duty spring from the fundamental principle of the moral order in this sphere, namely the principle of the common use of goods or, to put it in another and still simpler way, the right to life and subsistence” (par. 18; I will come back to this “principle of the common use of goods” in a bit).  

Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno states, “Yet when the State brings private ownership into harmony with the needs of the common good, it does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and thus rushing to its own destruction; it does not destroy private possessions, but safeguards them; and it does not weaken private property rights, but strengthens them” (par. 49).  

Martin Bucer, in his De Regno Christi, among many other suggested economic regulations, went so far as to say that the king ought to take land from the wealthy wool farmers and give it to subsistence farmers, that all might be able to provide for themselves and that the land might be better managed and populated.  

Thomas Aquinas, as I have recently posted about, argued that, as property was given first and foremost for common use, and only secondarily for private possession, insomuch as that served common use, it was a duty of justice that the property of those with surplus be used to meet the needs of those who were lacking.  Indeed, for Aquinas this meant that the man in great and pressing need could take from the one with surplus without it being considered theft.  (In case we should think Aquinas a radical in this, we should note with relief that he hesitated to go so far as the Church Fathers and say that the man with surplus who held onto his surplus was guilty of theft or robbery.)  Aquinas does not specifically treat of redistributive taxation, but renowned Aquinas scholar John Finnis connects the dots for us:

“He teaches that rulers have a responsibility to provide, for each of their subjects, whatever they would otherwise lack to sustain them in their respective conditions and status in life. [II-II q. 77 a.4c]  More clearly, he goes along with Aristotle’s clear and repeated teaching that it is appropriate for the state’s rulers and laws to make provision for the fair distribution of goods for use in consumption, so that that use be truly ‘common’. [I-II q. 10 a. 1 ad 1, q. 105 a. 2c and ad 3)  In Aquinas’ own theory this amounts to saying that the distribution by owners of their superflua is an appropriate subject for legislation to avoid backsliding, arbitrariness, and inequity.  So payment of taxes imposed for redistributive purposes will be a primary way in which owners discharge their duty of distribution.”  

(By the way, I think Finnis’s points here help to preempt any “Robin Hood” objections, along the lines of “Well, if Aquinas is right, then why can’t just anybody take from the rich to give to the poor?”  God calls different people to different responsibilities, and if you aren’t a total anarchist, you believe that he calls some people to positions of governance, responsible for overseeing justice and the common good.  These people may have a responsibility to ensure the common use of resources that any old private citizen does not have.)

The principle of the priority of common use articulated by Aquinas became a standard of Catholic moral theology, and, so far as I can tell, was long shared by most of Protestant moral theology (though I will defer to the expertise of others here); it is this to which John Paul II and Pius XI are appealing.  The idea is that since God only ordained private property in order to serve the common good, it naturally follows that someone cannot legitimately cling to their private property to the detriment of the common good, but should let the governors of society put it to use where it is most needed (e.g., giving it to someone who cannot afford healthcare).  There is no injustice in this reallocation; on the contrary, there is injustice when some members of their society cling to resources that others may be desperately in need of.  

Of course, I do not pretend that the Christian tradition has been unanimous on this point, any more than it has been unanimous on any other point.  Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, and Anthony Rosmini’s 1840s treatise Society and Its Purposes, for example, seem to regard such reallocations as matters of charity, not justice, and hence not the government’s business (see my previous post).  However, the grounds upon which both of them put forth their philosophies of property and politics are essentially Lockean, leading many subsequent Catholic thinkers to doubt them on these points.  

The crucial standard for us, of course, is the Bible.  For my part, at least, it is hard to see how the Old Testament laws did not require that resources be taken from those who have surplus to help supply the needs of those who, for whatever reason, do not have enough.  I have recently posted about this, of course, but so this post will be complete in itself, I will briefly reiterate some of the same points.  The gleaning laws seem like they would meet the modern conservative definition of “theft”--private property owners being required by law to let others have part of their resources.  The triennial tithe, and the requirement that the produce of the sabbath year be shared with all, seem like the same sort of thing.  The Jubilee law states that land must be taken from the current owner and given to the original owner.  And I could go on.

Of course, we cannot make simple one-to-one applications from the OT laws to welfare laws today; far from it.  Gleaning may not prove to be a legitimate basis for Social Security, for instance.  Indeed, some may even argue that none of these OT laws could be used in any such way because these weren’t really “laws,” simply moral decrees, binding on the individual conscience, but no more.  I confess that after six months researching this issue, that argument doesn’t make any sense to me, but I know it has been made.  So, I don’t mean to say, “Ah look!  The Old Testament requires us to impose Obamacare and all the rest”; but I do mean to say that one has to reckon with such texts, and with the strong consensus testimony of the Christian moral tradition, before one could begin to make an accusation like “Taxation for these purposes is theft.”  Such an accusation does not have any prima facie plausibility or force, as most of those making it seem to blithely assume; it may have some force after careful and patient argument, but not otherwise.  

And of course, this does not mean that there may not be many other grounds for objecting to much of this legislation, including Obamacare.  One might say, for instance, that it is inefficient, or ill-conceived, that it will not succeed in helping the common good, but will make problems worse, that certain particulars of it are unjust, that there was a failure of due process of law, etc.  But to say that it is straightforwardly “theft” is to declare any supporter of it, including many a Christian brother, an accomplice to a crime.  As a practical matter, this is hardly going to be helpful in moving the discussion forward, and, in any case, it seems that we ought to think twice before leveling such an accusation.  In light of the points I’ve raised here, it seems that we need to ask ourselves, are we OK with saying that Aquinas and Bucer advocated theft?  What about Moses?  If what we are now facing is something quite different from what Aquinas, Bucer, and Moses advocated, we need to spell out rather precisely what the difference and what the problem is, instead of simply assuming that, because some resources are being redistributed, they’re being stolen.