Is there any room in the Church for libertarianism?

[EphelDuath]

Suppose you support a tiny government, whose only role in society is civil and national defense. Provided said government keeps abortion illegal (and presumably, also cloning research and destruction of embryos), is it OK with Church teaching? Or is it immoral for not being close enough to Catholic social teaching (by not giving free health care or setting minimum wages, for example) and not keeping gay civil unions illegal?

 

[Zahmir]

Government not only cannot provide for all our needs, but must not. The more responsibility is taken off ourselves, the more the government can perform injustices against us. The more man loses the ability to pursue the common good on his own accord, the more man becomes a tool for the state, a thing to be used rather than a person capable of true love.

Unfortunately, men are not entirely good. And thus, there exists the need for some body to provide for the people what the people alone cannot provide for themselves. In other words, government of the people, by the people, for the people. Government must strive to keep man honest to natural law with as little civil laws and regulations as possible, though, of course, many will still be necessary and good.

What libertarianism fails to realize is that there is even a higher law beyond natural law. Government must be open to the demands of revelation. The beauty of America is that we are, inevitably, a Christian nation which holds dear to many Christian values. Though church and state remain separate, the two communicate back and forth. Both have a special role in the life of the individual and thus both must not be neglected.

 

[Tick_Dawk]

Of course there’s room in the Church for libertarianism. Look at it this way: libertarians will tell you that they believe everyone should be entitled to govern themselves. Sure, they’ll say that prostitutes can go be prostitutes or that marijuana should be legalized and all that, but what it comes down to is that we, as individuals, have to choose what we do. If one were to be a libertarian, one could easily say, “I believe prostitution and marijuana is wrong” and decide not to endorse or participate in either. It’s not like libertarians are saying “we’re relativists”; they’re saying that a person can choose to hurt themselves morally or even physically, as long as that person doesn’t infringe on the rights of others.

Our job as Catholics isn’t to tell other what to do, and libertarians don’t think people should have everything told to them. It just means more personal responsibility, which this country needs.

 

[Joe_Kelley]

Of course there’s room in the Church for libertarianism. . . .

Is it that little room on the other side of the screen from the priest.

 

[Hastrman]

As so described, as long as there is some regulation of the economy (antitrust laws don’t go over big with libertarians), there is indeed room in Catholicism for what you seem to think is libertarianism.

Only, of course, libertarianism is actually nothing like what you described. Libertarians are basically anarchists, who suffer from the fallacy of angelism–people have no animal nature. They believe that if you remove all restrictions from everything, especially the economy, people will magically all be happy and get along. Some of the smarter ones actually do acknowledge the legitimacy of private charities and self-regulation (i.e. not producing porn because one thinks it would be harmful), but all refuse to see that no rules get followed, by the vast majority of humans, unless there’s some penalty for breaking them. Sometimes they can be made to see the legitimacy of laws against murder (or honor killings), and theft (they’ve fetishized private property, although they don’t understand the philosophical basis of the right to it), but they otherwise seem to think everyone can be rich and self-reliant.

However, mandated minimum wages are not a part of Catholic social teaching, since they presuppose an inability on the part of workers to negotiate for good salaries on their own (if that situation does not exist, minimum wages do more harm than good). Nor, really, is free health care, since doctors do in fact have to eat. Whether they get paid by the government or a private charity or a group of private citizens (an insurance co-op) is actually a matter of prudential judgment.