It looks as though this was posted in the World News forum, and somehow closed without given a reason. I enjoyed it, and thought I’d see if it would survive in the Catholic News section.
catholicity.com/commentary/hudson/08442.html
Politicians being politicians. This seems to be an attempt to hide behind a feel-good buzz word instead of actually admitting that it’s basically an austerity measure. By saying subsidiarity, he avoids the negative connotation that austerity holds because of what happened in Europe. Sorry to burst everyone’s bubble.
I can see the reason behind some of those, but a couple are really out of left field. Outsourcing State Parks? Isn’t that an oxymoron? How can you privatize a State Park? Doesn’t it then just become a private park? So pretty he’s much dancing around the fact that they’re being sold (or they’re simply being privately run with public money, which doesn’t really change anything).
And how about “contracting for highway maintenance work, and outsourcing worker’s compensation claims and all pension, payroll, and benefit payments system”. What’s not mentioned is that highways maintenance and the others is that it will still be publicly paid for, but simply done by private companies instead of the public service. But I guess it’s ok if people in the public service get laid off because they all must be lazy overpaid fat cats and evil communists. You just have to forget for a minute that most of those people are relying on the paycheque from that job the same as someone in the private sector is.
Contrary to popular belief here, subsidiarity is not actually equivalent to laize-faire capitalism. For example, a State highway system cannot be handled entirely locally or privately because taken to the logical conclusion you’d end up with all toll roads (and I’m willing to bet that no one would be happy with that). They could contract out to local counties to take care of parts that fall in their area, but that’s about as low as they could go. Someone still has to manage the bigger picture (before someone says it, an association between counties to handle it pretty much puts you in the same place, a state government in all but name).
How about cities? Logically, if we’re going to the logical conclusion and lowest level then neighbour community associations should be handling the roads in their areas. But for some reason I don’t see anyone calling for a “neighbourhood tax”. Why? Because it’s ridicules. Sensible people would acknowledge that it’s better for a city to handle all it’s roads then go any lower.
The article quotes from the Catechism saying higher powers “rather should support it [lower powers] in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” A city is better at co-ordinating all road working within it’s boundaries then individual communities, just like a state is better at co-ordinating a highways system than individual counties. Subsidiarity doesn’t say “go to the lowest level at all costs”, but rather “go to the lower level when it is can be reasonably accomplished without interrupting the common good”.
Here’s another example. In my province of Saskatchewan, all people have one power company that is a crown corporation (owned and operated by the government, at arms length) called SaskPower (there are small exceptions, in one city the city opperates the power distributor, but they just buy the power from SaskPower and resell it at the same rate so it’s not significant). The reason is that there’s just over a million people here with most spread out in around 300,000 square kilometres. There are only a couple larger power plants here (there was talk about a nuclear one a couple years ago, which would in effect replace all power plants in the province and still leave enough left over to sell to other provinces) distributing power to the entire province (with a few significantly smaller ones in some places). Some RMs (rural municipalities, sort of like counties) have only a few hundred people living in them, so it would be inefficient to task each with providing power, and commercially it would be unprofitable to do except in bigger cities (effectively cutting off around 50% of the population). Some people might come back with the question “why don’t a bunch of RMs get together then?”, but again it’s essentially the same as asking “why doesn’t the province do it then?”. The province is supporting the RMs by providing the power at a central location (logically, because they’re coal fired and they’re in the part of the province with all the coal), and also co-ordinates the infrastructure (power lines) needed to get power out to them. The province is the lowest level that can effectively and efficiently do it.
