“A duty not enforceable by human law”

A pint evidently lost on Charlemagne and the Frankish bishops in 778-779, when he enacted “Concerning tithes, it is ordained that every man give his tithe, and that they be dispensed
according to the bishop’s commandment.” Pope Leo III seemed unaware of this restriction, when he greeted Charlemagne’s capitular, extending the same law to the whole fiscal domains of the Frankish empire, with the cry of “Life and victory to the ever-august Charles!”

As the legal historian W G Black remarked, “From this time onwards, therefore, we may say the civil law superseded any merely spiritual admonitions as to the payment of tithes. Their payment was no longer a religious duty alone it was a legal obligation, enforceable by the laws of the civil head of Christendom.”

This remained so, until the dime was abolished by the French Revolution in 1789. During that thousand years, almost to the day, no Catholic writer protested against their enforcement; quite the contrary.

They believe that “Government must not be arbitrary, but it must be powerful enough to repress arbitrary action in others. If the supreme power is needlessly limited, the secondary powers will run riot and oppress. Its supremacy will bear no check.”

Hence, the insistence in the Declaration of the Rights of Man that “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.”

And this would be a fine definition, if the modifier “competent” is placed between lowest and possible.

What the last 100 years has taught us is that the lowest form of government is often the most competent.

The Federal government operates under the premise that all knowledge can be concentrated and centralized, yet even where this is most likely to occur; i.e. where the body of knowledge is largely the product of regulatory pronouncement-we find the Federal government failing-The Securities and Exchange Commission, the body that for 80 years has prescribed the rules that prescribe how we govern corporations and account for the results of their operations-is itself unable to get a “clean” opinion.

http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/650141.pdf

(from page 52)
During fiscal year 2012, we also determined that deficiencies in SEC’s controls over accounting for its property and equipment constituted a significant deficiency. We have reported on deficiencies in SEC’s controls over accounting for its property and equipment in prior audits and have provided SEC with recommendations to address these deficiencies.6 SEC has taken actions related to some of these previously
reported deficiencies. However, our work identified new and continuing deficiencies
in the design or implementation of SEC’s internal control over accounting for property and equipment as of September 30, 2012.

The reality is that social and economic arrangements are incredibly complex and rely upon individual actors operating with undervalued knowledge in the form of “local circumstances”.

Ms. Williams asks, “To state one aspect of the problem more pointedly, to what extent does cooperating with the government entail accepting the government’s priorities?”

The answer in the U.S., is that cooperation is more like subordination. Subsidiarity comports with the Tenth Amendment, but the federal government has clearly evaded this provision through “federal financial participation”. Hello states-do you want federal highway money? Sure you do, so either lower your legal DUI limit to .08 or you don’t get the money. So you local municipal police don’t want to work extra hours on national enforcement efforts? Well then you won’t get the overtime money and departmental grants we have for you. There’s no need federal control on this matter (unless of course your name is Allstate or Nationwide and you want to minimize lobbying effort in your attempt to lower claim expense-especially from those nasty drunk driving cases where the tools of high jury awards have been polished to perfection by the tort bar-you know-the ones with endless ads about justice- “hurt in an accident? we can help, just call 1-800-MAKM-PAY)

What needs to happen now, is that Subsidiarity needs to be understood to provide for the fact that many economic and social arrangements are too complex to be fully understood from afar, let alone concentrated and as such, competing jurisdictions (laboratories of democracy) where various issues can be tested in the real world (too bad we didn’t try this with Prohibition, to see the unforeseen side-effects before federalizing it) so that actual working application, rather than some politician’s passionate rhetoric become the yardstick by which ideas can be tested.

We will be forced to accept subsidiarity, even if the fulcrum of that change is an spiking interest rates preceding that worst of fiscal cliffs, an under subscribed Treasury auction that will catch everybody off-guard.

Since many assume and accept the misbegotten notion that the government’s priorities, since they are “public” priorities are synonymous for the public’s priorities or priorities conducive to true social justice and a common good. Thus, religious institutions are often painted and caricatured as selfish protectors of oppressive, superstitious curiosities–hindrances to “progress” that are better to keep their eccentricities between their embers than block the State’s just and righteous causes.

Nonetheless, we are wise to avoid the other social-pantheism, the absorption of society and the market. The market-centric vision of life is equally as disruptive on familial stability as the State-activist reduction–both voluntarism’s often work in the service of one another, while superficially and rhetorically opposing one another. Both are political forms of a voluntarist ontology that proves an inhuman and wanting substitutes for true, free social cooperation.

A true unity of order begins with one’s relation to God–the basic relation that provides the grounds for true human relations, from the most local to the most public ones. Absent a keen awareness of this constitutive relation, all other relations become utilitarian means for power-attaining ends.