Posted by hoosiertoo on 04/21/09

The principle of subsidiarity is one of the key components of Catholic social teaching. Simply, the principle of subsidiarity states that nothing that can be done as well, or better, by a smaller and simpler organization should be done by a larger, more complex organization. As should be obvious, subsidiarity is a cornerstone of limited government and personal freedom and is diametrically opposed to the modern Welfare State.

Pope John Paul II criticized the modern welfare state in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, writing that the welfare state was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly into and depriving society of its responsibility, leading "to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.”

The U.S. Constitution was designed to leave most issues of importance in the hands of the citizens, and to the states. Under the Constitution, the federal government's role is (was?) to do only those things which the individual or states could not effectively do for themselves. The subsidiarity principle, insofar as it is firmly rooted in natural law, was at work in the foundation of our nation.

Subsidiarity applies to all human institutions, including the State itself. An example of a flagrant violation of the principle of subsidiarity is seen where the federal government usurps the rights and responsibilities of state and local governments, perhaps most famously in the form of unfunded mandates, leading to serious disruptions in the ability of the state to fulfill its obligations. Certainly confiscatory taxes and intrusive government programs interfere with the responsibilities of the individual and such institutions as basic to society as the family. No government has repealed the law of unintended consequences, as the state of the family at the beginning of the 21st century in America should make obvious.

Alexis de Tocqueville presciently predicted that democratic government would devolve into a huge, if possibly benign, nanny state "which would guide the individual in all of his affairs and insure that all of his needs were met:"

“For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

The principle of subsidiarity is thoroughly Catholic and thoroughly compatible with America's founding principles. Just so, it also applicable in economics. When government, as it did in the Great Depression and - God help us! - is doing today, skews the economy, producers and consumers are not allowed to bargain freely, prices no longer reflect meaningful information and become instead arbitrary dictates of a clueless, distant bureaucracy. Central planning, or the placing of price controls on everything from farm products to health care "limits the freedom of individuals by distorting the free market and takes away the power of decision from producers and consumers, entrusting it instead to government bureaucrats."

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Interestingly, the 10 Commandments are not communitarian; they are directed to the individual. The first four deal with the individual's relationship to God. The precepts of the last six of the Commandments are meant to protect him in his natural rights against the injustice of his fellows - from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

• His life is the object of the Fifth;
• the honour of his body as well as the source of life, of the Sixth;
• his lawful possessions, of the Seventh;
• his good name, of the Eighth;
• And in order to make him still more secure in the enjoyment of his rights, it is declared an offense against God to desire to wrong him, in his family rights by the Ninth;
• and in his property rights by the Tenth.

Life, liberty, property. Libertarian and Catholic to the core.

None of this is original to me of course. For more, visit the Acton Institute. I borrowed heavily from Fr. Bosnich's article The Principle of Subsidiarity in Religion and Liberty.

Posted by hoosiertoo on 04/21/09
Last updated 04/21/09

It seems strange that 30 years later we are still having a conversation about a disease that is easily preventable. And yet, due largely to a wholly inadequate response to the problem of AIDS, more people have died and many more have contracted AIDS than is necessary. It seems that sin does indeed make one stupid.

Dale O'Leary has written a provocative paper, provided by the blog Feminine Genius here that brings us up to date with the situation in Africa, and the picture isn't pretty.

In the wake of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Africa and the attendant brouhaha over O'Leary updated a 2005 paper, providing an overview of the various strategies for dealing with AIDS.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has caused immeasurable suffering, but prevention is possible. The disease does not strike randomly – we have identified the virus that causes AIDS, and we know the pathways the virus can take. The question for the people of Africa is: What is the most effective strategy for preventing transmission?

The protection of public health in the face of deadly epidemics has always required a balance between respecting freedom and saving lives. Governments are given three options from which to build a strategic response: risk elimination, risk avoidance, and risk reduction. Even the most devastating epidemics can be stopped if the government is willing to abridge its citizens' freedom by employing draconian risk elimination strategies such as mandatory testing and quarantine. Such strategies are normally only employed for deadly, fast-moving epidemics. Risk avoidance strategies prevent infection by motivating the public to avoid all possible sources of infection and enforcing public health regulations. Risk reduction strategies allow people to continue to engage in behaviors that could expose them to infection while encouraging a reduction – but not elimination – of the risk of infection.

Early in the epidemic, various nations made different choices with differing results. When Cuban soldiers returned from fighting in Angola, the government realized that some were infected with HIV. The regime responded with mandatory testing and quarantine. The epidemic was blunted.

The U.S. opted for risk reduction. Mandatory testing and quarantine were suggested but ruled unacceptable. Standard public health measures that were used to control sexually transmitted infections (STIs) such as syphilis and gonorrhea were also rejected. Instead, prevention focused on educating people on the ways in which they could protect themselves by using condoms. The result: twenty-five years after the threat was identified, over a half million citizens have died of AIDS and three times that many are living with HIV. In 2006 in the U.S. 56,300 people were newly infected – the majority of them being men who have sex with men. The U.S. strategy with some modifications has been exported to other countries as the preferred method for controlling the epidemic.

Africa’s leaders and those who fund AIDS prevention programs in Africa need to consider the full range of options available. The following is a review of what is known about how HIV is transmitted, standard public health strategies, the prevention strategy presented to Africa as the "scientific consensus," the agendas of those who created this consensus, the challenges to that consensus, alternative strategies, and the effect of the choice of prevention strategy on the culture.

Your tax dollars are being misspent in Africa. Be sure to read the full report.

Also posted at hoosiertoo.blogspot.com

Posted by hoosiertoo on 04/15/09

"...the State is the poorest instrument imaginable for improving human society, and that confidence in political institutions and nostrums is ludicrously misplaced. Social philosophers in every age have been strenuously insisting that all this sort of fatuity is simply putting the cart before the horse; that society cannot be moralized and improved unless and until the individual is moralized and improved. Jesus insisted on this; it is the fundamental principle of Christian social philosophy. Pagan sages, ancient sages, modern sages, a whole apostolic succession running all the way from Confucius and Epicetus down to Nietzche, Ibsen, William Penn, and Herbert Spencer - all of these have insisted on it." - Albert Jay Nock

Posted by hoosiertoo on 04/06/09

When discussing "liberty" and "freedom," it seems some clarification of terms is in order. The founders' vision for America was not about unfettered freedom, but, rather, a particular type of ordered liberty. "Freedom" without a strong moral basis is an empty promise. The founders - admittedly an ambiguous term, but for the purpose of this post can be described as the founding generation of the United States, steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition (if they weren't themselves orthodox, ie: trinitarian, Christians) and natural law - understood the problem of liberty quite clearly. The problem, stated simply, was how to keep liberty from degenerating into mere license. The solution, as many of the founders saw it, was to encourage the practice of religion among the American people under the assumption that the Christian religion helped make citizens fit for republican government. Meaningful freedom required the exercise of virtue on behalf of citizens and the connection between the Christian religion and virtue was obvious.

The problem inherent in a free society is that immoral actors take advantage of moral ones. If everyone quite rationally suspects everyone else of immoral behavior, then in order to protect themselves in any given transaction the value of exchange is necessarily undercut by the cost of self-protection. As actors become more immoral in their transactions, it becomes necessary to ease the expense of self-protection by enlisting the aid of government in the form of regulation, thereby undermining the entire libertarian idea. The key to breaking the cycle of immoral action and regulation is to change the nature of the actors. This not a new concept, as would-be social engineers and progressives of every stripe have been attempting this with various degrees of failure to show for their efforts for more than a hundred years.  The more virtuous actors in an exchange are, the less opportunistic their behavior, then the more trust all actors can have at the outset of exchange. With trust, the costs of transaction rapidly decline and the need for government regulation and enforcement eases also. Absent trust or government intervention, exchanges are only regulated by the relative strength of the actors, a situation that can be readily observed in criminal activity.

"Because the founders had the wisdom and imaginative power to predict what evil a man might conjure up with unrestrained liberty, they grounded liberty in the context of order. Prudence is generally scorned today, but in the days of the Constitutional Convention it was a highly regarded way of life. Mores and honorable social tradition constituted what it meant to be a liberated man. They held as self evident that when confronted with liberty ungrounded in order, men create a world of chaos with respect to themselves and a world of tyranny with respect to others. In contrast, some think today that unrestrained liberty constitutes what it means to be a liberated man. A deep reverence for the Founders' ideal of a liberated man, exercised through right reason, defines the proper relationship between order and liberty and altogether defines what it means to be a conservative." - Christa J. Byker

Religious social conservatives press for public policies that tend to increase social capital by improving citizens. The difference between what social conservatives and humanistic socialists are after in the transformation of the individual into a good citizen lies in the nature of their different approaches. The Christian sees the development of virtuous behavior as a "bottom up" enterprise, meaning that society is perfected as its individual members are, whereas humanists tend to work from the top down, defining the ideal and coercing the individual to its vision. True liberty lies in the freedom to do as one ought, that "ought" as realized by a properly formed actor.

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For more on natural law - http://www.acton.org/research/reading/research_reading_natural_law.php 

On Virtue - http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/civic-virtue.htm

On ordered liberty - http://www.isi.org/spotlight/essay_contest/order_liberty_05/2.pdf 

See also: Samuel Gregg's excellent book "On Ordered Liberty: A Treatise on the Free Society (Religion, Politics, and Society in the New Millennium)"
http://www.amazon.com/Ordered-Liberty-Treatise-Religion-Millennium/dp/0739106686
/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1239073034&sr=11-1

Posted 04/07/09 jtfische w, MO

You seem to forget one major point. Is that we have laws to protect people from violations of their liberty. Religion is not necessary and in some cases counter productive for moral behavoir. Religion cannot change or adapt in response to changing laws and attitudes of people. By its very nature it must re-enforce beliefs written down hundreds if not thousands of years ago that in many cases do not apply to todays world or are downright inmmoral in todays world. Christianity is no exception in this regard.

Posted 04/07/09 sweetliberty Saint George, UT

"Immoral" is not the right word. I think you mean "amoral" -- i.e. without moral, a moral being something that is good and valued as such. The founding fathers did believe in a certain type of freedom -- one which required morality; however, to restrict this morality to Christianity is like restricting a healthy diet to apples. Sure, apples are healthy, but apples are part of a larger picture. Christianity -- and religion in general -- is part of the larger picture called Philosophy. Philosophy is what the founding fathers studied and believed in. Philosophy is what they expected any man of Prudence and moral fortitude to willingly immerse himself in. Whether or not that man came to a Christian conclusion was irrelevant. Those who value "values" understand the concept of goods vs bads, and would therefore choose, through their own volition, goods. (As opposed to Christianity and religious dogma that guilts people into choosing goods out of a sense of fear of punishment in the afterlife, or carrot-and-stick rewards in the afterlife.) Certainly a system based on supernatural rewards/punishments cannot possibly be called "bottom-up."

Posted 04/07/09 rightsman Las Vegas,, NV

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, et al do not fit the description of a Christian. The ethic upon which this nation was founded has been called the Judeo-Christian ethic. It was the work ethic. Produce. Homeless people of that time, and there were homeless people at that time, were not homeless long. A family member, or some Samaritan, good or not, helped them out. A non-producer could not survive. It is the ethic that has kept the human race on the increase - until the latter part of the 20th century in that bastion of freedom called The United States of America. The producers' earnings are taken by force - some if not all IRS agents are now armed - and spent to provide for the non producers. That is against all laws of nature. I once was driving across the country and lost the brakes on my truck. I couldn't find a repair shop, so I jerry-rigged the brakes in order to get to a repair shop. I stopped in a little town in Kansas, and went to an auto supply store. They didn't do repairs, but recommended a man who could make the necessary repairs. He had one arm. His ex-wife had shot his right arm off with a 12 gauge shotgun. "She missed," he said. But it didn't look that way to me. He and his ten year old son repaired my truck. HE PRODUCED!!! Taxes were collected from him to provide a wheeled electric chair for an old lady that is too fat and lazy to get up and get some exercise. Let her die. Thank you, Robert Walker

Posted 04/10/09 hoosiertoo Rossville, IN

jtfische - Not the purpose of the post of course, but what is morality? Where do rights come from? Any casual perusal of the history and evolution of Catholic theology and doctrine belies your point on the unchanging and unchangeable nature of religion. sweet liberty - the founders were products of their time and place, and Christian because that's what the dominant religion was at the time, and had been for more than a 1000 years in Western Europe. Be careful not to conflate "moral" and "ethical." rightsman - re: the Christianity of Franklin and Paine: whatever their personal beliefs, the philosophies of the Enlightenment were based on Christian assumptions and ethics. The Enlightenment didn't happen in a vacuum.

Posted by hoosiertoo on 12/05/08

As near as I've been able to figure, auto execs flying to Washington, D.C. in private jets doesn't cost me a dime I that can't avoid paying by simply not buying their products. The cost of their private fleets are minuscule in the overall pricing of their products anyway.

The cost of the pinheads running the dog-and-pony-show in D.C. I can't avoid, and the show costs me a heckuva lot more than the flying habits of the CEOs of Chrysler, GM and Ford combined.

And then some.

And then some more.

It's probably a good thing I'm not the CEO of GM. I'd have told Pelosi & Co. to stuff their bailouts up their keisters and gone back to Detroit and filed bankruptcy and let the poseurs on Capitol Hill deal with the fallout, which is what needs to happen anyway. The auto industry can't get better until it reorganizes. Now is the chance.