If the goal of Christian political involvement is to “create” a just society, then naturally the government will be THE crucial player, for among earthly powers only Leviathan can fool us into thinking it capable of creation.

If the goal is to ACT JUSTLY, in ways that do right by the poor and needy, as natural and divine law define right, then government will be only one, and not often the most important, player.

It is precisely the pretension of “creation” that is at the heart of the Left’s illusions: the idea that a complex society can be re-engineered from the ground up by a smart and compassionate elite, so that the outcome is some pattern of social and economic relationships arbitrarily described as “justice.”

Catholic concern for the poor and needy would be more impressive to many conservatives if it gave evidence of having thought through and consistently rejected the idea of “creating” a particular kind of society through social and economic engineering.

That means accepting that we cannot have it all, that the imagined perfect is often the enemy of the attainable good, that there are costs to all our actions, most of them unpredictable.

For example, are we allowed to entertain the possibility that we may not be able to do away with “income inequality” without doing away at the same time with income itself, impoverishing everybody but the powerful? Maybe the good that economic policy can accomplish is a rising tide that lifts at least most boats, even though some boats rise higher than others for no good reason that we can see.

The left today seems to have no actual plan for bringing in the Just Society, just an insistence that nothing less will do. That is why they would rather stagger on doggedly towards the abyss than think about Ryan’s very moderate reforms of entitlement programs that might keep them functional and helpful to needy people. Such reforms would make them imperfect in design from the point of view of the Left’s dream of “justice.” It would be better for all of us to fall into the abyss than just to help people without seeking perfection. That is the nihilism of the contemporary Left, what is left to them after the Left’s Century, the disastrous 20th.

I share the concern that the Right’s thinking has been overinfluenced by libertarianism since the end of the Cold War. But if Catholics want to lecture conservatives about the corruptions of libertarianism, they need to give evidence of having broken free of the illusions of the Left.

I find “libertarianism” as a fully-defined and -embraced “ism” to be morally repellant, and I did so before I became a Roman Catholic. But to simply assert that this “ism” has “taken root in the Republican Party” — without bothering to examine what or how libertarian thinking is influencing concrete Republican policy proposals — is shoddy.

[As an example, Mark Shea (and I believe Winters also) has condemned Paul Ryan because Ryan says he was greatly influenced by Ayn Rand. But neither Shea nor Winters has shown in what ways Ryan's thinking or acting actually has influenced Ryan -- what Ryan has actually taken from Rand, and used in his policy proposals.]

In Winters’ NCR post, he links to the “great article about Catholic teaching on the sin of income inequality.” The article consists of quotes, the first set from historians and economists, the second from popes and Vatican 2. Focusing on the second set, all agree that social and economic equality is unjust, and advocated, in the name of justice, a more equitable distribution of goods and services.

But surely the issue for most Catholics who think about these issues is not “the Church is wrong about more equitable distribution” but “what does ‘more equitable distribution means’” and “what are the best ways to achieve it?”

The quote from Pope Pius IX for example has this: “…the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless.” That seems to suggest that the pope saw that a key, perhaps the key, to this injustice lies in the fact that vast numbers are without property. That’s not something that I hear many progressives, especially progressive Catholics, talking about — what is the best way to ensure that the propertyless class joins the propertied class?

Paul VI’s quote focuses on the inequality of power even more than that of goods: insightfully so, since the perversion of crony capitalism, so evident in the favor-trading of both the Republican and Democratic parties, perverts the “blind eye” of the market to the detriment of the propertyless who seek to own property.

Finally, Winters talks only generally about “rising income inequality” without looking at specific influences or indeed at any numbers whatsoever. One area where this is, apparently, undeniable, is the striking rise in poverty for single-women-with-children. This seems to be a situation in which several currents are converging: the devaluation of marriage (and the implications), and of the positive relationship between marriage and income levels especially for women and children, the earnest and misplaced campaign to de-stigmatize single motherhood, and so on.

The complexity of that poverty nexus isn’t going to be solved by simply increasing taxes to increase transfer payments.

I think it comes from the European model of kings, which was used to create the papacy and corresponding structures. It becomes assumed that “good stuff comes from the king” rather than the American model of all power residing with the people.

I agree that humanism is a very present danger in hanging with Libertarians, although WFB was one throughout his very faithful political and Catholic life.

The cure for “income inequality” is generosity, not government programs. That Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became wealthier than I is not something that bothers me. My life is materially and emotionally better because of their contribution. Even spiritually, as I carry my bible and breviary on my iPad.