2 Comments

David Nickol
May 2nd, 2012 | 12:02 pm

Regarding the Wall Street Journal piece on Paul Ryan, it seems to me (as a no-doubt biased Democrat) that what Paul Ryan and his Catholic supporters are doing is taking familiar conservative (and maybe even ultraconservative) political and economic ideas and trying to find ways to argue that—mirabile dictu!—although they were espoused by people like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman (an atheist and an agnostic)—such ideas have been in accord with Catholic Social Teaching all along. Part of Ryan’s argument seems to be that Pope Benedict XVI condemned reckless deficit spending, so therefore a budget that reduces deficits is a budget that is automatically in accord with Catholic Social Teaching.

As I point out occasionally, there are fundamental concepts in Catholic Social Teaching that are anathema to both American conservatives and liberals. Take the idea of the just wage (or living wage) in which, say, a father with three children taken care of by a stay-at-home mother is supposed to be given a salary higher than a single woman, equally qualified and hard working, because the father with the family needs more. Not only do most of us think of that as unfair; it is probably illegal.

In any case, it is unseemly for either liberals or conservatives to claim the mantle of Catholic Social Teaching. Nobody is going to implement, to any reasonable degree, Catholic Social Teaching in the United States. Catholic Social Teaching is just being used by both left and right to try to beat each other over the head with. If Catholic politicians of either side were serious about Catholic Social Teaching, they would start with it and see how it could be implemented, rather than starting with their own political philosophies and trying to twist Catholic Social Teaching to justify beliefs that they formed without taking it into account. It seems clear to me that for almost everything, political views are formed independent of religious ones, and then religious teachings are interpreted to justify the already-formed religious views.

Fred
May 5th, 2012 | 12:15 am

David, I’m not sure Ryan is saying that Catholic social teaching _requires_ his budget or something similar, only that his budget is _consistent_ with Catholic social teaching. You didn’t do it here, but your usual characterization of Ryan’s budget–that it is designed to cut benefits for the poor to provide tax cuts for the rich–is misleading and hyperpartisan. The intention of Ryan’s budget–whether it achieves that intention is another argument–is to reform the tax code to promote growth so that we can give the poor employment and the dignity of work rather than a handout and to reform entitlements so that they are available on a sustainable basis, which they are clearly not now, for those who truly need them. You seem to me distinctly uncharitable in your attribution of bad motives to those with whom you disagree politically. Again, whether Ryan’s budget will achieve his aims or whether there is a better way to do so is a conversation worth having, but it is one that we will never have as long as people insist, as liberals tend to do, that their interlocutors are stupid, evil, or both.