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Unfortunate Encyclicals

Thread ID: 14288 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-06-22

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darkstar [OP]

2004-06-22 05:08 | User Profile

On the Actual Progress of Peoples

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

There are few things more frustrating than writing a book, and then being confronted with a ceaseless stream of arguments you’ve already answered while you’re waiting for it to be published. That’s what has happened, though, with Thomas Storck’s recent attack on my Lou Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics, which stirred some controversy and healthy discussion at the time but which was in general far better received than I could have expected. My book-length treatment of the subject will be available next year, but in the meantime I offer one last installment in the ongoing debate over Catholic social teaching and free-market economics.

Here is the point that my critics pretend to miss. It is all well and good for churchmen to say that churches should be built with the sturdiest materials in order that they might remain standing for as long as possible. But they go beyond their competence as churchmen and their ability to bind the faithful on pain of mortal sin as soon as they say, "The best building materials are A, B, and C, and the wisest techniques to use are X, Y, and Z." A churchman qua churchman has been vouchsafed no particular insight into such a question.

Storck thinks that my position, if applied to the social sciences generally, would entitle practitioners of those fields to whittle away Church teaching in the name of science, and that orthodox Catholics typically ignore such claims when social scientists make them. He writes, "When confronted, for example, with claims by psychologists or sociologists that the findings of their particular disciplines invalidate this or that teaching of the Church, we can know that their claims are not to be taken seriously." Storck claims that I am doing the same thing with economics.

But this is not a serious objection. For one thing, if a sociologist were to recommend abortion as a way to limit family size and make families more materially prosperous, that sociologist could not argue that since the Church, too, wants families to prosper, the Church should support abortion as well. Such proposals are immoral in and of themselves, and their basic immorality cannot be mitigated by an appeal to an alleged temporal advantage they might confer.

The point is that unlike the previous case, there is nothing intrinsically immoral about a worker and an employer reaching an uncoerced labor agreement; even Storck, I presume, is not a Marxist. One of the points I made in my lecture is that I can show that wages are increased by means of an economic order that respects property rights and in which no one’s gain comes at another’s coerced expense. Since, unlike abortion, there is nothing intrinsically immoral about the voluntary wage relation, surely I am free to recommend this morally neutral method (indeed morally preferable method, in that it involves no coercion or threats of violence, which surely must be resorted to only as a last resort) of increasing wage rates. Has any Church pronouncement ever said that it would be immoral, indeed a mortal sin, to advocate a free labor market?

No Catholic may support a policy that is intrinsically evil. The point is simply that when several morally licit policy alternatives are available, choosing between them becomes a matter of informed judgment and the proper exercise of reason. Pope Leo XIII once noted, "If I were to pronounce on any single matter of a prevailing economic problem, I should be interfering with the freedom of men to work out their own affairs. Certain cases must be solved in the domain of facts, case by case as they occur…. [M]en must realize in deeds those things, the principles of which have been placed beyond dispute…. [T]hese things one must leave to the solution of time and experience."

The Church herself says she wants the workingman and his family to be prosperous. This is a central theme of Rerum Novarum, and Msgr. John A. Ryan, the American priest who perhaps more than any other attempted to reckon with the question of labor and wages, himself acknowledged that men are "more susceptible to religious influence [and] can know and serve God better when they are contented and comfortable than when they are impoverished and miserable." Now if I can recommend a method for accomplishing that end that is not inherently immoral and that will be far more effective than any alternative that a bishops’ conference might suggest (every single one of which would make the situation worse), then I do not see anything especially subversive in my offering that suggestion, Storck’s feverish insistence to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Church may certainly say that someone ought not to do this or that with his wealth, or that he should be honest in his business dealings, and so on. She may not say that the state has to be employed to bring about better working conditions, because she is incompetent to pronounce upon the best way to bring about better working conditions, just as she is incompetent to pronounce upon whether, assuming their production involves nothing immoral, I should use aspirin or ibuprofen for my headache. (I contended in my lecture that state-enforced improvements in working conditions actually tend to worsen the condition of employees, and that if they realized this, those recommending this position would certainly cease to advocate it. It is a position that doubtless never occurred to the popes in the first place, as indeed it does not occur to most people, but I believe my argument on this point is persuasive.)

If things work a certain way, no Church pronouncement can make them work another way. That is the crux of my argument. "What was wrong with Catholic social thought in the nineteenth century," writes Fordham University’s Fr. James Sadowsky, "was not so much its ethics as its lack of understanding of how the free market can work. The concern for the worker was entirely legitimate, but concern can accomplish little unless we know the causes and the cures for the disease."

Father Sadowsky’s point seems perfectly obvious to me. My position, therefore, in no way involves the claim that the sciences per se, including economics, are exempt from moral evaluation. They are, however, exempt from technical critiques on the part of the Church, since churchmen may speak only as individuals on such questions and not for the Church as a whole. Thus if a certain medicine could be produced only by ripping the hearts out of living human beings, the Church should condemn such a thing, no matter how many doctors were in favor of producing the medicine. But if two kinds of medicines are suggested to treat a particular ailment, and no moral objection can be raised to either one, then in such an area the Church must defer to those who are schooled in that specialized science.

Let’s consider a real-life example: Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967). Here we have an official papal statement about the correct manner to bring about economic development in the Third World. Regrettably, every 1960s-era fallacy about Third World development is faithfully reproduced in this most unfortunate document. All of them have been spectacular failures. "Import substitution" policies have decimated Third World economies, though they are precisely what Paul VI recommended. Outside aid from the West and from global agencies, also recommended by the Pope as a moral imperative, has (as some tried to explain at the time) only served as an emollient that masked the destructive consequences of these governments’ interventionist policies. It is revealing that South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile, faced with a cutoff in US aid and therefore having little choice, ultimately embraced the free market. Naturally, they prospered.

The state-led development policies earnestly recommended by the Pope have proven so disastrous that even their architects have come to admit their mistakes. Since the 1980s the late development economist Peter Bauer, who for decades had warned of the destruction that such development strategies would wreak in the Third World, has been treated as something of a prophet, while even the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development have been heard to utter mea culpas.

I should not have to point out that such things are embarrassing. But they are also entirely avoidable. While the Pope is surely free to instruct the Catholic population of our responsibilities toward our fellow men, as Pope Leo suggested he has no right as Pope to baptize one economic approach as the one most likely to be effective. It should be obvious that the grace of state attached to his office no more gives him special insight into what the best strategy for economic development might be than it teaches him how to repair an automobile. By any standard, the issue of (for example) whether free trade or a system of protective tariffs is more effective for a developing country – obviously a matter of legitimate disagreement among Catholics – is not one on which the Pope may appear to make a morally binding judgment.

There is a larger issue at stake in all of this. Populorum Progressio recommended a course of action for less-developed nations whose results have been appallingly bad, and which fewer and fewer serious scholars continue to advocate now. Bauer himself warned that the Pope’s writing on the subject "promotes policies directly at variance with the declared sentiments and objectives of the papal documents." These are unpleasant truths, and it gives me no satisfaction to recall them. But I ask Storck and anyone else who wants to shut down debate on economic subjects in Catholic circles to answer a few questions. Were people who were aware of Professor Bauer’s analysis morally obligated to cooperate in development ventures whose consequences they knew perfectly well had to end in destruction and chaos, or at the very least do more harm than good? Recall Paul VI’s examination of conscience for the lay person: "Is he prepared to pay higher taxes so that public authorities may expand their efforts in the work of development?" Now that it is now more or less established – as Bauer was already trying to explain when Paul VI was writing – that the interference of "public authorities" in the work of development is precisely what has hurt so many developing countries, particularly in Africa, what is the status of the papal demand that people support state-led development? These are some of the very serious questions that arise from Catholic social teaching, and which will not go away no matter how hard Storck tries to condemn and silence those who dare to raise them. Not only are specific policy proposals all too fallible, but when enjoying the prestige of an encyclical they can unnecessarily trouble the consciences of good Catholics – whose disagreements are based not on any perverse desire to oppose the Holy See, but on specialized secular knowledge that they happen to possess. .... [url]http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods26.html[/url]

Walter Yannis

2004-06-23 10:52 | User Profile

Here is a reply to this article posted on [URL=http://chroniclesmagazine.net/cgi-bin/chronicles.cgi/Economics/The_Limits_of_Econo.writeback]Chronicles[/URL] by Scott P. Richert.

22 Jun 2004

The Limits of Economics

Over at LewRockwell.com, Thomas Woods has replied to Thomas Storck's excellent article, "Economic Science and Catholic Social Teaching," itself a reply to Woods' earlier LRC post, "The Trouble With Catholic Social Teaching." (Back when Woods first posted his article, I wrote a three-part response on my Rockford Files weblog; you can find those posts here, here, and here.)

Actually, to say that Woods replies is a bit of an overstatement; he cranked out 2,078 words overnight (a feat for which Lew Rockwell praises him), but very few of those words address the arguments that Storck raised. In fact, he includes only one quotation from Storck, which he uses to set up a straw man that he can knock down. The rest of the article avoids engaging Storck's very well-thought out critique. It is evident that Storck read Woods' article very closely and took Woods' argument quite seriously; the least Woods could have done was to return the favor.

Instead, Woods begins by complaining that people have taken his argument seriously enough to respond to it:

There are few things more frustrating than writing a book, and then being confronted with a ceaseless stream of arguments you’ve already answered while you’re waiting for it to be published. That's an odd statement for a writer to make; presumably, Woods published his essay when he did in order to stimulate debate and discussion. After all, his articles are not papal encyclicals, which, by their nature, are meant to limit (or, in some cases, even preclude) further discussion. If Woods didn't want folks such as Storck and myself to respond to "The Trouble With Catholic Social Teaching" until his book appeared, then there was a simple answer: Don't publish the essay. If he's frustrated because his book answers questions that his essay did not, then I'll be happy to review the pre-publication manuscript (and I'm sure Storck would be as well). In doing so, we might even be able to help him improve his book.

In this latest essay, Woods reiterates his earlier argument--the Church has no special competence in economic affairs, and, therefore, She should not make pronouncements about what should be done in the economic sphere--apparently believing that Storck and I and others didn't understand it the first time. The problem, however, is that we did; we simply disagree. (Readers might legitimately wonder why someone who received his degree in history has a greater insight on economic matters than a pope; apparently, as an advisor, the Holy Spirit is a bit more fallible than Lew Rockwell.)

Woods bases his argument on his belief that economics is a science, which, in this and in his earlier article, he has compared to architecture and mathematics (while, paradoxically, insisting that Austrian economists "criticize the attempt to fashion economics along the model of physics and the hard sciences.") He writes:

If things work a certain way, no Church pronouncement can make them work another way. That is the crux of my argument. "What was wrong with Catholic social thought in the nineteenth century," writes Fordham University’s Fr. James Sadowsky, "was not so much its ethics as its lack of understanding of how the free market can work. The concern for the worker was entirely legitimate, but concern can accomplish little unless we know the causes and the cures for the disease." Father Sadowsky’s point seems perfectly obvious to me. My position, therefore, in no way involves the claim that the sciences per se, including economics, are exempt from moral evaluation. They are, however, exempt from technical critiques on the part of the Church, since churchmen may speak only as individuals on such questions and not for the Church as a whole. But who determines what works, and--more importantly--who determines the criteria by which we determine whether something is working? That is the crux of this debate. Even Father Sadowsky, in the quote above, doesn't make the kind of absolutist statement that Tom Woods makes--Father Sadowsky criticizes 19th-century Catholic social thought for failing to understand "how the free market can work" (an ideal) not how it does work (a reality).

To illustrate the point, let's take an example from Woods' latest article:

It is all well and good for churchmen to say that churches should be built with the sturdiest materials in order that they might remain standing for as long as possible. But they go beyond their competence as churchmen and their ability to bind the faithful on pain of mortal sin as soon as they say, "The best building materials are A, B, and C, and the wisest techniques to use are X, Y, and Z." A churchman qua churchman has been vouchsafed no particular insight into such a question. Notice the artificial constriction of the role of "churchmen" and the concerns that they are legitimately (according to Woods) allowed to have. What Woods may not know, however, is that this example has a particular relevance. In certain ethnic Eastern churches (Catholic as well as Orthodox), there is a tradition of constructing church buildings entirely out of wood and fastening the boards with wooden pegs rather than nails. In recent years, some Eastern bishops have begun urging their parishes to return to this tradition; some, I understand, have even required it in their dioceses. Are they wrong to do so?

In Woods' worldview, yes, because all they can possibly be concerned about is "that churches should be built with the sturdiest materials in order that they might remain standing for as long as possible." Wood is clearly not "the best building material" for that task, nor is eschewing the use of nails "the wisest technique." The funny thing is, these church buildings not only serve their purpose quite well; many of the Eastern Christians who worship in them believe that they serve that purpose much better than church buildings that are built using better materials and wiser techniques. For one thing, they are a living monument to their traditional Christianity; for another, they take much longer to build and therefore represent a greater labor of love than the concrete block churches of the West that may last longer but, alas, are less likely to be filled.

(By the way, what purpose can Woods possibly have in bringing up churchmen's "ability to bind the faithful on pain of mortal sin" in this context, other than to set up a straw man? Since, in his article, church architecture is just an metaphor for the Church's social teaching, perhaps he can tell us which pope has claimed that one of his social encyclicals binds the faithful on pain of mortal sin. It's hard to take Woods' arguments seriously when he seems more concerned with winning points than with accurately representing the tradition--yes, tradition--that he's arguing against.)

This, in the end, is what it all comes down to: What is the purpose of the market and of economic freedom? For that matter, what is the purpose of government? The Church has, for 2,000 years, offered a very specific answer to both questions. Here's a hint: It's not providing the maximum number of goods at the lowest cost to the greatest number of "consumers."

(As always, we welcome your comments and discussion in the writebacks. Please, if you have the time, read both of Woods' articles, Storck's response, and the earlier discussion over on my weblog as well, and feel free to bring material into the discussion from those sources.)

darkstar

2004-06-23 17:14 | User Profile

'(Readers might legitimately wonder why someone who received his degree in history has a greater insight on economic matters than a pope; apparently, as an advisor, the Holy Spirit is a bit more fallible than Lew Rockwell.)'

Sounds like a bitch, doesn't he?

Walter Yannis

2004-06-24 06:34 | User Profile

Thomas Fleming's response [URL=http://forums.originaldissent.com/showthread.php?p=86394#post86394]here.[/URL]

Walter