Libertarianism is not Compatible with the Catholic Faith

Last updated on: December 28, 2014 at 7:46 pm by Mark Shea

Libertarianism is not Compatible with the Catholic Faith 2014-12-28T19:46:49-07:00 Mark Shea

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Here’s a nice piece explaining why.

Libertarianism’s highest good is the personal autonomy of the atomized individual. The highest good of the Faith is union with God the Blessed Trinity in love and love of one’s neighbor as oneself. In Libertarianism as it is lived out on the ground, one can season one’s worship of the imperial autonomous self with a bit of religion if one is into that sort of thing (though, really, just between you and me, that’s for weaklings). But God is most certainly an *accessory* at best to the Libertarian vision of the person, whose personal autonomy–not his state as a creature whose entire being is entirely in a radical debt of love to God and in a radical debt of love to the human race–is the paramount fact about him. “You are not your own. You were bought with a price” is not something Libertarianism likes to dwell on much.

Likewise, its theory of the state is that the state exists merely to facilitate the personal autonomy of the individual and to keep this hive of independent monads called “society” from bumping into each other too much. The Ideal Man of Libertarianism is Ron Swanson:

It an intensely *male* sort of conception of relations with God and man and is a direct reaction to an intensely feminine conception of the State. Uncle Screwtape pegged the curiously gender-coded dynamic long ago:

The grand problem is that of “unselfishness”. Note, once again, the admirable work of our Philological Arm in substituting the negative unselfishness for the Enemy’s positive Charity. Thanks to this you can, from the very outset, teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them. That is a great point gained. Another great help, where the parties concerned are male and female, is the divergence of view about Unselfishness which we have built up between the sexes. A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the Enemy’s service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom Our Father has dominated completely; and, conversely, a man will live long in the Enemy’s camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day. Thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.

The bold text is the key principle. The Libertarian wishes to be left alone and to leave others alone. There is a place for this, in human affairs. But it is by no means the highest place. But because Libertarianism is a Christian heresy, it takes one piece of Catholic social teaching–subsidiarity–and expands it to insane proportions while ignoring almost everything else. But subsidiarity is only meaningful when we pay attention to the other three pillars of Catholic social teaching: the dignity of the human person (not “the individual”); the common good; and solidarity. Isolate subsidiarity from these other pillars and you get a demented vision of the person disconnected from God and neighbor.

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