Ann Coulter recently published a book entitled Guilty. I have not read the book, but what I do know is that it has generated some controversy on at least two TV shows, namely, The View and The O’Reilly Factor. The essence of the controversy, at least as it was shown on these shows, had to do with statistics Coulter cited in the book about social problems and single mothers. It turns out that many if not most of social offenders, that is, criminals, delinquents, druggies and others, were raised by single mothers. The women on The View and an actress who is a single mother interviewed on The O’Reilly Factor seemed to be accusing Ms. Coulter of blaming single mothers for this social aberration of their children, as if they intended bad outcomes for their children. I do not believe that Ms. Coulter defended herself well verbally. That being said, let’s analyze the situation.

1. There is such a thing as statistical correlation. For instance, 95% of the time I hit my head when getting into my wife’s car. This statement is a fact (it’s really an estimate). The data correlates. If you took count of the times I got into my wife’s car, you would see that 95 out of 100 times I hit my head getting in.

2. Statistical correlation does not prove cause and effect. In the example of my wife’s car and my head, one cannot point to the cause of the hitting of my head merely from the data. More is needed.

3. Folks who talk about these things usually fail to make proper distinctions. To say that Coulter was blaming the single women for poor parenting skills is insufficient to be meaningful. Do some mothers (single or not) have bad parenting skills? Of course. Do some single mothers try their best to raise their children properly? Yes. Do all single mothers succeed in raising good children? No.

The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Are the children of single mothers more likely to become socially aberrant than the children raised by a mother and father both permanently present in the home?” Ms. Coulter’s data seems to say yes. But why is that true?

Firstly, children need the role models of both a male and female in the home. The mother and father show different complimentary strengths which benefit the upbringing of any child. In a single-parent home, half of this influence is missing.

Secondly, when children get to those difficult teenaged years, the mothers frequently have difficulty handling unruly children, where most fathers would have no problem, purely because of their size and temperament. Countless talk shows have shown that when teenagers get out of control, the mothers get physically intimidated by children who are having obedience problems. I was over 6 feet tall at an early age, and my mother was a skinny 5' 1¼". I was a good kid, raised by a mother and a father, but if it was my mom vs. me, there is no way she could stop me from going out, or whatever. Now my father was a skinny, athletic 5' 10" World War II veteran. Even though I was much bigger than he, he had no fear of anything, and I would not have succeeded in my plans.

Thirdly, being a single mother is one of the biggest causes of poverty. Men are the ones who pursue careers and generally get the credentials and experience to advance in jobs, which means in salary as well. Mothers frequently put off career and/or education to start a family. If the husband leaves, and especially if he is not paying proper child support and alimony, the mother has to go to work at low-end jobs. Children end up in day care or with babysitters who are not the mother. This is a further drain on funds, and on the bonding between mother and child. This might not be so bad if there were still extended families, where the mother could leave the children with her sister, or grandma, especially if the relatives shared the same dwelling with the mother and child in question. But these extended families are less prevalent all the time.

Fourthly, a big result of the sexual revolution is promiscuity and illegitimate pregnancies. There was an article in Newsweek years ago where black teenagers were interviewed about their illegitimate children. The boys were proud of fathering, not just a child, but children all over the neighborhood, of different mothers. Many of the fellows did not even care to be around the mothers or their children. The young mothers were almost as bad; they gave in to the desires of these men and to their desires to father children. It is almost as if the girls were so desperate for children at their young age that they would do anything to have them, and to heck with the consequences.

Lastly, the desire to have a man in a woman’s life does not die with the flight of the irresponsible father of her child. This leads many women to have serial boyfriends, many of them sleeping with her, and playing the role of temporary father. This produces confusion in the mind of the child, and frequently worse consequences, where the man is only interested in the woman.

It should be understood that many single women have heroically overcome these barriers, but the data seems to indicate that heroism, because it is heroic, is not that common. The actress who was on The O’Reilly Factor seemed to be saying that because she was successful, anyone can be. The fact that actresses are wealthy, while most single moms are not, pokes a big hole in her argument. Most single mothers obviously could not afford to give the time and care to their children that this actress could.

All of this points to the main issue here. God intended children to be conceived in love, by a male and female parent, both of which are committed for life. Falling short of the standard is a sad fact of life, but has been exacerbated by promiscuity, lack of understanding or even desire for monogamous marriage, irresponsibility, selfishness and heartlessness. To assert that this thinking will not be an influence on the children is foolish, if not outright stupid. Children need love and stability from their mother and father. Not adhering to God’s plan for families will produce aberrations, and the aberrations will be passed on from generation to generation, because the children will think that the aberration is the norm. This will produce misery for parents, children and the society at large, not to mention, put countless souls in jeopardy.

Many people cannot get the idea into their heads that society was not created nor is run by a single authority. Now someone objected to this idea once by saying that since God created everything, He is effectively the creator of society as well. That is true in a sense, but one thing I have insisted on, along with the late Pope John Paul II, is that God made man a co-creator with him. This applies to inventions, etc., but also applies to society and the market as well. Remember, John Paul II held that we humans have self-possession and self-governance which give us self-determination. Men are in control of their actions (assuming they are not a slave to their passions or public opinion, or something else), and therefore are responsible for those actions. This includes the setting up of institutions, usually occurring over long periods of time, and resulting from trial and error. These institutions serve the function of human flourishing. For example, look at the way universities evolved since the later middle ages. They went from monastic schools, meant for monks, to being open to others, to the great universities in the major cities, to the institutions we have today. Are they perfect? Of course not—nothing man does can be so. But one cannot argue that they have not been centers of great learning and progress for the benefit of the human race.

The same is true of the growth of markets. Agricultural inventions in the middle ages allowed more than minimal food to be grown, thus allowing people to travel. They traveled to the great trading cities and brought back things never available to people in the medieval non-costal areas before. These folks set up bazaars, which the people visited and bought things which enhanced their quality of life. These turned into towns when the patterns of trade became habitual. The towns became cities, etc.

The great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek uses the Greek terms “cosmos” and “taxis” to describe the difference of worldview between those who see the spontaneous order of society and the market and those who do not. Cosmos describes the self-governing order of things—like the cosmos. Did you know that the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy are on a collision course—and there is nothing we can do about it? This is an example of cosmos in the area of space. Think of taxis in the sense of hailing a taxi cab, and then telling the driver where to take you. In this case, you are directing the cab. In the first instance, the cosmos is self-directing.

Society and the market conform to the cosmos rather than the taxis. Both are self-generating by the billions of interactions between thinking human beings all over the globe and those interactions are based on the interactions yesterday and those are based on the interactions on the day before that, etc. No one controls this. This does not mean that large institutions can’t influence the society and market. But there is no control here. Even with President-elect Obama’s economic “stimulus” plan, no one is really sure how the market is going to react to it. How did it react to the original issuing of money to free up loans? Well, Donald Trump put it this way the other day: “No matter what your credit rating or your track record, you still can’t get a loan.”

The implications are clear. Those who say that they can fix this, that, or the other thing, in society or the market are blowing smoke. Even if they can influence things, this influence might not be for the better, because of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is founded on the fact that people will act in their own perceived best interest, regardless of what a government program will try to accomplish. This is why it is better to let the economy deal with circumstances than try to tweak it. It was that constant meddling with the economy which caused the problems in the first place. More meddling can’t remedy the results of the original meddling—at least if we are not in some kind of dream world.

PUBLIC CHOICE I—THE MEDIAN VOTER RULE

During the election season, many Catholics wonder why so many Catholic politicians do not vote according to their professed beliefs. It is disheartening to have one famous Catholic politician say publicly that he takes his faith very seriously and a woman’s right to choose abortion very seriously as well. The answer can be found in a relatively new school of economics called Public Choice. Since economics studies the actions of people in general, the laws of economics, logically, apply to the actions of persons in public office as anywhere else. In this case, we will study what is called the “median voter rule.”

A normal statistical curve looks somewhat like a camel’s hump with a line straight up the middle. That middle line is the average. Assuming that this is a curve of voters, 68.2% of all the voters fall within one standard deviation of either side of this average voter. This is the majority. Now, the United States, not being a Catholic country, cannot boast of the average voter agreeing with the most of the tenets of the Church on moral-political issues. So unless the candidate is from a state or district where the mean (or median) voter agrees with the Church on public issues, he will not be able to get majority support. This is why, at times, a candidate will speak to religious groups and assure them that he agrees with them, and then, if he happens to get elected, votes inconsistently—if he wants to keep his job. This politician might have gotten elected the first time by avoiding any controversial stands, so that even the median voter liked him. But in office, a stand must be taken on issues that appear in legislation. This becomes public record, and that is when we see a movement to the “center,” i.e., waffling on serious issues. After all, who wants to come home and tell his wife that after moving all the way to Washington, they now have to go back home and he has to get a real job?

PUBLIC CHOICE II—PUBLIC SERVICE

Now let us talk about the notion of public service—the idea that governmental people are in their jobs only to help others.

One of the basic premises of economic theory is that people generally act in their own interest. Contrary to what you may have heard, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If we did not act in our own interest, we would not be able to put food on the table, or go to the doctor when ill, or go to school, or marry the person with whom we are in love. The world would be topsy-turvy. We would work for no pay and starve to death; we would die of a curable illness, and our married life would be a living hell. This does not preclude working for others—as any legitimate occupation is automatically done for others, or no one would pay you for it.

But things change when it comes to working for the government, and especially on the margins. Self-interest leads men to produce products and services their customers need or want. In government, self-interest produces programs that some people want at the expense of others, with one main beneficiary being the one who administers the program for pay. In the market, when a product or service is no longer wanted or needed, people stop purchasing it, and the business fails, or produces another one that people are willing to buy. In government, if a program no longer works, it does not go away, but continues year after year, wasting more and more of peoples’ hard-earned money, and, in some cases, such as welfare dependency, ruining peoples’ lives. On the margin refers to when a politician gets stuck in a dilemma. Suppose a politician takes a strong stand in favor of issue A. Suppose then his district changes its views and generally opposes issue A. If he continues his strong stand, he will get voted out. This means he will have to change if he wants to stay in office, or he will have to waffle on it to make his stand acceptable to the new demographic in some way. This will lead him to make distinctions, subtleties, etc., which will make him seem to support both sides. His new stand will depend on how you read his remarks.

Why, then, do so many Catholics look to government as the solution for social problems? The answer seems to be that they have fallen for the “racket.” Politicians would not get elected if they admitted what they were up to, so they must persuade the population that they are out for the public interest. Since most of the people have never studied these things in any serious fashion, they believe the propaganda. This is not to say that there are not any sincere politicians out there, but, again, on the margin, they will be exposed.

I cannot tell you how many times Catholics have used “the common good” as an excuse for more government involvement in peoples’ lives and the installing of socialistic, “spread the wealth” programs. This version of the common good is the foundation for some people’s idea of distributive justice, but actually it is based on the “Robin Hood fallacy” of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.

How did I come to this conclusion? I did so merely by reading Aristotle and St. Thomas. Both of those great thinkers say that government must rule for the common good, but both of them oppose “common good” to the “particular” or “private” good. This means, as Aristotle writes, that any law must be good for not a ruler alone, or his cronies, or even the majority, but for the state as a whole. To use the analogy Plato makes in the Statesman, a physician gives a medicine to a sick person even if the sick person finds it distasteful. When he leaves the scene, he leaves behind a prescription containing his instructions. The instructions are not for his good, or the family’s benefit, but for the health of the sick person. BUT . . . nowhere in Aristotle or St. Thomas does it say that the common good is the exclusive or even main province of the government. They merely give a negative prohibition that the state cannot make laws which are good for only one segment of society.

The Church, as opposed to some Catholic writers, recognizes this. The Church holds to the principle of subsidiarity, originally enunciated by Leo XIII and actually named as such by Pius XI. Firstly, this principle states that nothing should be done by a higher level of society that can be done by a lower level. This means that, say, in my profession, the professor in the classroom is presumed to be doing his job unless some serious problem arises. His department chairman is not to be breathing down his neck and nitpicking his work. Certainly, the chairman’s boss, the dean, has no business butting into the professor’s work. If a problem arises, and the dean hears about it, he should ask the chairman to investigate it and take care of it, assuming the chairman has not done so already, which is an unlikely assumption. Secondly, the principle of subsidiarity says that nothing should be done by a government agency that can be done by a private agency. This means that government is a last resort, when all private possibilities are exhausted and the problem is a serious violation of justice or something that only a government can resolve, like an invasion.

Take a look at how Vatican II defines the common good: “The common good of society consists in the sum total of those conditions of social life which enable men to achieve a fuller measure of perfection with greater ease. It consists especially in safeguarding the rights and duties of the human person.” The fact that the Church does not have a list of specific positive programs here is that it is clearly stressing the notion that the common good is a “habitat” in which the human person can flourish. The onus is on the person to do the flourishing, with the assistance of the spontaneous institutions arising in a free society which are there for that purpose. On the other side of the coin, the onus is also on the individual to make sure that his fellows have that environment to flourish, with the government as a last resort remedy for that which individuals and social groups cannot do to provide that habitat.

Therefore, we can conclude with Bertrand de Jouvenel that a healthy society has many social organizations, and that the role of these groups should not be usurped by government. If government participates in this usurpation, it is rejecting the human person’s duty and ability to help himself and his brothers and sisters. Remember what we wrote about John Paul II and personal responsibility? (Maybe you should review it). Personal responsibility is founded on self-governance and self-governance leads to self-determination. Surely, self-governance of a social being like man leads him to take responsibility for the success of ourselves and of our fellows who cannot succeed by themselves, but it should never substitute for the action of the persons themselves. Neither should government. Nor should the citizens demand that government take over the responsibility for themselves or their fellows, except when they CANNOT succeed in doing so. Not only does this have dire consequences, which are not part of this essay, but—and this is the most important reason—it violates the person’s dignity.

The Catholic News Agency reported an exchange of letters between Catholic and pro-life Law Professor Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine University and Archbishop Chaput of Denver. In a speech, the Archbishop chided Kmiec and other pro-Obama Catholics for producing confusion among the faithful by supporting the radically pro-abortion Obama. By doing this, the Archbishop said, among other things, that these Catholics are confusing the “natural priorities of Catholic social teaching, undermining the progress pro-lifers have made, and provided an excuse for some Catholics to abandon the abortion issue instead of fighting within their parties and at the ballot box to protect the unborn.”

Kmiec responded in a letter made public that “the Archbishop’s approach to the abortion issue ‘will lead many in parishes around the country to neglect what they can do to build up the culture of life through the promotion of the social gospel in its fullest sense’” (emphasis added).

The key to Professor Kmiec’s view is seen in the emphasized words above, the social gospel. One can see his point. He is saying that the culture of life is broader than abortion, which is very true, and is very obvious. What he fails to see is that the killing of the unborn human person is the most serious and barbaric aspect of the decline of the culture of life. The term “social gospel” is generally never used by the Church. The reason for this is that traditionally the expression was used by those who saw Christ as a kind of divine social worker, and the only really purpose of the Church was to help the poor and downtrodden. This is a total twisting of the mission of the Catholic Church, unfortunately bought into by many Catholics today, thanks to the number of priests who received their training in the 1960s and ’70s.

The primary mission of the Catholic Church is to produce sanctity in people so that they can be admitted into the indescribable loving relationship with God that we call the beatific vision. St. James tells us that faith without works is dead, so Catholics show their love of God by showing love of their brothers and sisters in Christ. As Mother Teresa said, “Christ comes to us in distressing disguises.” God told St. Catherine of Siena that He owns the whole world, so that the faithful can not give Him anything, but our neighbor was given to us so that we could do for him what we would want to do for God. This is why Jesus said that what you do for the least of His brethren, you did for Him.

But while these two things, love of God and neighbor, go hand in hand, a clear moral and common sense principle is that the most serious problems have priority. The legal and systematic killing of innocent unborn children has a higher priority than that of taking care of the poor, which in the United States are not that poor compared to many parts of the world, seeing that the number of people living below the poverty line had drastically declined over the past two years, and government and private charities provide assistance to almost anyone who needs it. This is not to mention that over 90% of Americans have televisions, once considered a luxury item.

Anyway, who says that the government actually helps the poor in a meaningful way? Jesus did not say that anyone who gets the government to help one of these little ones does it to Me. He clearly said it is our personal responsibility. Pope Pius XII bemoaned the fact that the modern welfare state does not give personal aid to the poor as a private charity would. The government has “caseworkers” who take no personal interest in the people whose records they review. Private charities have trained social workers, who not only take a personal interest in the people they assist, but help them in other areas: moral, budgeting, psychological, etc., very much in the tradition of St. Vincent de Paul.

I have written elsewhere that this thinking that the government is the main vehicle to help the poor has derailed many Catholics into the party of abortion, and that this should create a moral dilemma for them, but apparently not in the case of Professor Kmiec.

While it is true that we all must work to produce a culture of life in every area, to neglect, or encourage the killing of the unborn is a grave evil. It is almost like saying that we should vote for Mussolini so that the trains can run on time. It is important that the trains run time, but hardly as important as basic human freedom. So, to come full circle, it is important to help the poor, but not to encourage the death of the innocent in the process.

FOR THOSE CATHOLICS WHO THINK THAT THE STATE HAS TO RUN THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS OF THE ECONOMY TO ACHIEVE THE COMMON GOOD--CONGRATULATIONS!  WITH THE ELECTION OF OBAMA, YOU GOT YOUR WISH!

The other day I had what I consider a disturbing conversation with another man regarding a passage of Scripture. It was about the passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus calls Matthew. Jesus saw Matthew at the tax collector’s table and said to him, “Follow me.” He did. In the next scene, Jesus is eating dinner with the much hated Matthew and his other despised cronies. The subject came up in our conversation as to where these people came from. My interlocutor felt that Jesus’ reputation was so great that Matthew probably invited him to come and invited his friends to a special dinner for the purpose of hearing Jesus’ words. While we really do not know how this dinner came about, I felt that this was highly unlikely. Folks like Matthew were despised by the Jewish authorities, and it shows when the Pharisees asked Jesus’ disciples why He was associating with these people. Matthew probably lived a less than admirable life and was not enthusiastic right away about Jesus, impressive as He was.

This is a talk I gave at "The Austrian Scholars Conference" in Auburn, AL on March 15, 2007.  It was for the 2007 Lou Church Memorial Lecture in Religiou and Economics.  In this talk, I address the subject of the crisis of Catholic social teaching on economics.   The talk is 52 minutes and 24 seconds.  Enjoy!

Many Catholic economists have wondered why so many Catholics are so ready to have the government take care of the neediest in society, while not stressing their own responsibilities.  So many Catholics are supporting pro-abortion candidates, not necessarily because those Catholics are pro-abortion, but because they see abortion as just one issue in a panoply of issues, the most important of which have to do with helping the homeless, poor and underprivileged. 

The fact that Catholics are notoriously stingy in giving to private charities is revealing.  They would rather have the state take everyone’s money and redistribute it (frequently ineffectively as countless studies have shown), rather than exercise their responsibilities and give to charitable organizations, or, God forbid, actually help the poor directly.  

This attitude is encouraged by a 2004 video and publication of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops entitled In the Footsteps of Jesus.  The program lists the following seven themes of Catholic social teaching:

1. The life and dignity of the human person;
2. call to family, community and participation;
3. rights and responsibilities;
4. option for and with the poor and vulnerable;
5. the dignity of work and the rights of workers;
6. solidarity;
7. care for God’s creation.

The problem is not with the list itself.  The problem is with the glaring omission—subsidiarity.  This principle, which has always been part of much Catholic political thought, was first stated by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, and then formally defined by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno.  Pius wrote, that as it is wrong to withdraw from the individuals and commit to the community at large [i.e., the state] what private enterprise and industry can accomplish, so, too, it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller bodies.” 

While the USCCB document, in the section "Call to Family, Community and Participation", does quote Pius XII saying: “The State must not absorb the individual or the family . . . .”,  the rest of that section focuses on the sacredness of the family and the duty of the Catholic citizen to be active in politics. In the section of Rights and Responsibilities, where one might think that the document might stress the duty of private action first, prior to state action in helping others, there is only one sentence on duties:  “The Church recognizes that with rights come responsibilities.  We each have duties to one another and to our families, to respect the rights of others and to work for the common good.”  There is nothing further on the subject, and I think that the reader would agree that this sentence is much too vague to mean anything to anyone, while the list of rights given is almost endless.

So what this booklet and film say is true, but the glaring omission of subsidiarity and its explanation, is productive of the status quo regarding Catholics supporting state action in every field, supporting political candidates who tend to agree with that, even thought they are anti-life, yet not lifting a finger to help those in need personally. 
 
In Luke 21: 1-3 we read:  “As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury.  He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins.  ‘I tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘this poor widow has put in more than all the others.  All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.’”