In Washington, DC, one cost of our expansive welfare state is the jockeying that happens outside (and inside) our federal agencies, where hundreds of Beltway Bandits seek to enrich themselves on the government’s dime. Access and proximity to those doling out public resources leads to eerily similar “exactions of the pardon-preachers,” as the Reformers described. But the poor, the fatherless, and the taxpayers deserve better than “crony Statism.”

Instead, as you suggest we need a biblically mindful, moral case for free enterprise—and public policies that promote personal opportunity, rather than State redistribution.

let me add: even if you may be right in some respects, the sentence about “sheer scale of human suffering” in southern Europe was just ridiculous!

I may think I am stupid, but I cannot have lived a quarter of a century in Italy, have hundreds of acquaintances and have never noticed such terrible situation…

is that concern based on your personal experience with the Italian health system? It just sounds like a general, abstract a priori statement.

I have a large extended family that has experienced all kinds of conditions and I never heard anybody being denied treatment because it was non-standard. But what do I know? Perhaps it happens.

All I am saying is that it sounds like you are talking about something of which you have no direct knowledge.

Schmitz’s point — that dime-store moralism in politics can run both ways — is entirely lost in Forster’s reply. There is something almost chilling about the reduction of christian morals to the Golden rule (a principle not at all unique to Christianity), to the exclusion of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the words in which we pray to be forgiven in proportion as we forgive our debtors, and even the ordination by the Lord of Hosts of years of jubilee.

I am perhaps more ready than Mr. Schmitz to give assent to Dawson’s implicit radicalism, which I’m aware is fairly strong stuff for this website. But I’d go even a little further, and suggest that the “sheer scale of human suffering” under which Southern Europe labors is at least comparable to the problems we have in this country (to take one example: an American’s life expectancy is lower than an Italian’s, Spaniard’s, or Greek’s). And I’d even imply that the bourgeois mind, with its gratitude to capitalism and insistence that debts always be paid, may even be part of the problem.

That said, neither do I fully share Greg’s view. Surely the answer is to hold these two impulses in tension.