Popes Are Right on Wealth Redistribution

More than once I have argued the point that the Church does not prohibit a Catholic from opposing federal programs that purport to aid the poor, even though the social encyclicals make clear that society has a responsibility to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.



In our time, Rush’s and Gates’s great wealth is linked to their membership in a society where modern communication systems and wire transfers of resources through stock exchanges and money markets have become routine. They became wealthy by creating a niche for themselves in that system. Perhaps they would have been able to earn a decent living in Colonial America. They are men with talent and drive. But they would not be multimillionaires with incomes far above their neighbors’.

Moreover, it is likely that some of the strapping men on modern unemployment lines or changing tires at Sears would have been among the leaders in a society where chasing a deer through the forest or engaging in hand-to-hand combat were the attributes most admired in a man. Men able to do those things well in frontier America lived better than the merchants who ran the small shops inside the blockhouse gates. During a time of duress — an Indian attack or a severe storm, for example — we would expect the village elders at Boonesborough to order that these shopkeepers be given a portion of the game brought back by the community’s hunters, in the event that private charity was not forthcoming. We would expect a healthy community to order such a redistribution of wealth. It is as American as cherry pie.

The point? When a society reconstructs itself — through industrialization and technological changes — in a way that make it difficult for certain of its members to prosper, and for others to amass great wealth, it is entirely proper for society to make provisions for those left facing difficulties. The best thing a society can do is encourage those left in the lurch to take the initiative to retrain themselves and adjust to the new realities of the economic order. But for those who cannot easily adapt, some redistribution of wealth is called for, in the form of a progressive income tax, unemployment insurance, social security programs, Medicare, and the other social programs that Walter Williams considers immoral. The popes have it right.

James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.

(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)



We are morally entitled to argue that a given poverty program is wasteful or that the needs of the poor can be better served through private charities or state and local programs than by setting up another Washington bureaucracy. Indeed, such considerations are the essence of the Church’s teaching on subsidiarity. The Church does not condemn free-market theory. Anyone who contends that it does is either uninformed or a political partisan seeking to carry the day.

But that does not mean that advocates of free-market theory can’t go overboard. I wager I am not the only one who has heard someone growl, “I don’t care if the poor starve to death. It is their problem, not mine.” Such sentiments cross the line. They are examples of the Social Darwinism that the popes have labeled “economic individualism” in the social encyclicals.

In 1991, upon the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, summarized the Church’s position on the need for the state to intervene on behalf of the poor and the disadvantaged. He spoke of the danger of labor becoming “a commodity to be freely bought and sold on the market, its price determined by the law of supply and demand without taking into account the bare minimum required for the support of the individual and his family.”

When that happens, he called upon the state to intervene in the name of a “preferential option for the poor,” because “the richer class has many ways of shielding itself and stands less in need of help from the state, whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back on and must chiefly depend on the assistance of the state.”

The pope went further. He praised the social programs that free-market theorists frequently condemn as wealth redistribution: “unemployment insurance and retraining programs, social security, pensions, health insurance and compensation in the case of accidents.” He warned of “making market mechanisms the only point of reference for social life” and of the need to “subject” the market “to public control, which upholds the principle of the common destination of material goods.”

Some free-market theorists disagree; Walter Williams, for example. A syndicated columnist and professor economics at George Mason University, Williams is much admired by those who call for a greater application of free-market theory in the United States. I am among his admirers. He offers valuable insights when he points out government waste and examples of poverty programs that hurt the poor more than they help. But there are times when he becomes a proponent of the economic individualism condemned in the social encyclicals. In a recent column, he went so far as to maintain that it is “immoral” for the government “through the tax code, to confiscate the earnings of one American to give another American in the forms of prescription drugs, Social Security, food stamps, farm subsidies or airline bailouts. It’s immoral because it forcibly uses one person to serve the purposes of another.”

Williams is not a Catholic, so it is unlikely that he will be concerned to discover that the papal encyclicals speak favorably of the wealth redistribution through taxation that he considers immoral. So let’s take a different tack. Let’s illustrate in human terms, in economic language, through unaided human reason, why the Church has it right; why there is nothing immoral about using the state’s power to tax to redistribute wealth. Let’s cut to the chase: when a society redistributes wealth, all it is doing is redistributing wealth it has previously redistributed. Bear with me.

First of all, please don’t misread me. I am not saying that every redistribution of wealth through a government program is wise or just. Quite the contrary: It is best for the government to encourage those facing economic duress to retrain and take care of themselves. Each government social and poverty program should be debated on its merits. Some are unnecessary. Some are wasteful. Some grant the central government too much power. But they are not, as Walter Williams would have it, inherently “immoral.”

Here’s why: Those of us who possess wealth do not posses it solely because of our individual merit or some “natural aristocracy.” Our place in the economic pecking order — salaries, possessions, status — is the result of decisions made by our society, usually by the government, as much as the result of our individual initiative. Some of the wealthiest people in modern America would not be wealthy if they had been born in Colonial America. Or in a village in Gaul in the days just before Caesar’s invasion. Or as a Comanche. We could go on.

Try to picture, say, Bill Gates or Rush Limbaugh as a settler with Daniel Boone. Gates and Limbaugh are admirable men, who have given much to modern America, but they are not very imposing physical specimens. Families prospered in Boonesborough if the man of the family was a skilled warrior and hunter and capable of chopping, hewing and hauling the logs to build his own home, as well as maintaining his crops.

Can you picture Rush and Gates doing well in those roles? Isn’t it more likely that these modern movers and shakers would be school teachers or shopkeepers of some sort, living modestly from the fees they could charge the men of the village, the hunters and warriors who created and protected their society’s wealth? What other role could Rush and Gates have played back then? Seriously.

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