The Baptism of Capitalism

Distortions rather than distinctions rule in a culture of death. We hear about "unused in vitro production" rather than "embryonic human beings with unique DNA" in the stem-cell debate. We learn about "dying with their dignity" rather than "protecting human dignity" in the euthanasia debate. We are asked to feel compassion for the victims of "homophobia" but never hear about the life destroying effects of a homosexual lifestyle. Our culture is awash in distortions.

The latest warping of ideas has to do with economics - the revisioning of capitalism as deeply Christian (see post bellow for an example). The Acton Institute, The Mises Institute and various neo-conservative Catholic thinkers and authors have set out to recast popular Christian thinking and history about capitalism to baptize it for a new generation.

In essence (and please forgive the generalizing), the new story goes something like this:

The roots of capitalism are not in the Protestant Reformation (and thus the fruit of shrugging off cramped and irrational religious authoritarianism), but the true roots are rather in the much earlier Catholic intellectual current of scholasticism and in the experience of monastic industry and scientific innovation. These early economic thinkers grew out of a Catholic understanding of Creation that was indispensable for the development of science, economics and capitalism. This view of Creation is one that it is ordered according to God's Nature as intrinsically Good. God is Good, so His Creation also is Good and so is reasonable, ordered, intelligible and understandable. These Catholic thinkers are the first to understand and articulate that the economy, like the other intelligible laws of Creation (i.e., gravity and motion), is governed by objective rational laws, and wrote about them. These include the natural right to private property, the price mechanism, the laws of supply and demand, etc.

Understanding that God is the author of Creation and thus the law maker, we understand that we are called to obey His laws, rather than try to rewrite them. We would no sooner try to impose our will on the law of gravity, than we would impose our will on the law prohibiting murder. Our job is to obey God's Laws.

So too, the laws of the economy must be obeyed, and not try to impose our will on them by fiat through various interventions. By observing and obeying the Natural Laws of the economy, we will best be able to promote the common good and lead to the economic flourishing of all.

Therefore, the thinking Catholic should realize that laizze faire economic policies (policies that allow the economy to operated according to its nature, without willful interventions) are just policies according to the Natural Law because they allow economic laws to operate. The just economic policies a Catholic should seek are the elimination of taxes and state regulation (such as antitrust, labor, civil rights, health, environment, etc.), the removal of trade barriers and market protections, and the necessary shrinking of government and government redistribution programs. When we remove these artifically imposed interventions on the economy and allow it to operate freely according to its natural laws, only then will the full extent of human freedom be unleashed in the economy with all the fruits that innovation, entrepreneurship and wealth creation bring to the common good. In short, the good Catholic is the capitalist Catholic who seeks the truely free (libertarian) market place for the good of all.

In response to critics who point out that capitalism tends to promote very anti-christian behavior, the answer is that the market can not operate without Culture and the Catholic's job is to create a very Catholic Culture in which Capitalists operate. Transforming the hearts and minds of men is the job of Christianity, but it is wrong headed to think that we will create a more humane society by rewriting the laws of the economy by imposing artificial regulation upon it. One doesn't solve the problem of lust by making it ok to fornicate, we have to obey the Natural Law of human sexuality as God made it, not as how we would like it. So too we have to obey the Natural Law of economics, and seek to change the hearts and minds of those men and women who work within it.

Obviously this is a simplification, but gets to the point and I hope points the careful reader to the distortion in this effort. The crack in this argument about economics and capitalism comes down to the difference between the laws of nature and the Natural Law.

There is a vast difference between the rational laws that exist in creation and the Natural Law that is written on the human heart. These Catholic neo-conservative apoligists of capitalism would like us to regard the principles of economics in the same vien as the principles of physics - objective and naturally occuring according to God's design. This is why some economists like to think of themselves as scientists studying nature.

However, all economic phenomena is contingent on the actions of men - this is not the case for the physical laws of nature such as gravity, motion, etc. Economics is contingent on human nature - a nature that is fallen and has free will. This is why the Economics Department was traditionally located under the Department of Ethics at Universities - economic activity, like all human activity, has moral dimensions and moral limitations and so must be understood within the feild of ethics.

But this view changed and indeed the current distortion encouraged by many Catholic neo-conservative capitalists is the error of "economism" - the view that removes the human person as a moral being from economic calculus and only looks at the material purposes of human labor.

Just open any economics text book and you will see the false anthropology of the human person that is employed. It is called homo-economicus - the rational material utility maximizer. But this view of the human person is really no different than that employed by Marx and other socialist thinkers.

When you do this you tend to see the laws of economics as naturally occuring and immutable like the law of gravity, rather than seeing this as a sphere of human freedom that men have a duty to circumscribe according to the Natural Law. It is the Natural Law, and not the laws of nature, that govern behavior in human relationship. The laws of nature govern physical objects that do not possess free will nor are morally culpable.

Where there are men, there are sins abounding. The liberals get the credit for advancing most of the planks of the Culture of Death, but the conservatives have their share of credit for doing so in the sphere of economics. Promoting error as good just doesn't fly whether you are talking about stem-cells, euthanasia, homosexuality or indeed capitalism.

You can not baptise a heresy and call it holy.