At first glance, it sounds like another instance of President Trump standing up for the little guy. That’s okay, we all need a little help, and the smaller we are, the more we need someone with immense power to take up for us and give all those fat cats and oppressors of the poor and downtrodden what-for and tell them where they get off.
Or it might be better if we had our own power and didn’t need someone with immense wealth and influence to take up for us, because we could it for ourselves without having to go hat-in-hand to anyone. We could do that with the Economic Democracy Act, but we don’t have that (yet), so in the meantime, we might have to pray on our knees that Trump will prey on us and then thank him for it.
On second glance, however, it might not be all that much of a good thing. We refer, for instance, to the report President Trump has pardoned six Americans “for working on their own vehicles.” That sounds pretty bad, getting thrown into prison for tinkering with your own car. Or truck. Or armored personnel carrier. After all, you should be able to do as you like with what you own . . . right?
Well . . . consistent with the natural law principle known under various names such as “stewardship,” “the universal destination of all goods,” “rule of law,” “responsibility,” and so on, it’s kind of accepted in all of human society for all of human history that, no, you can’t do what you want with what you own if it harms other people, the common good, or even yourself.
Admittedly, this can be carried to extremes by authoritarian regimes and nanny states, but that does not invalidate the principle. Take, for example, the effect breaking a law and getting away with it has on the common good. At first glance, it sounds pretty harmless to, say, go a bit over the speed limit or run a stop sign when there is no one around. After all, who is hurt? And you’re late for work.
And, so what if you’re late for work? After all, you can stay five minutes after if you’re five minutes late, right? Who is harmed?
Father William Ferree
Individually considered, no harm, no foul, right? There was no injustice, because no one was hurt . . . right?
On the contrary, both individuals and the common good were hurt, and when the common good is hurt, everyone was hurt. This is because the common good is (as CESJ co-founder Father William Ferree pointed out) our “medium of life” within which we subsist and find the meaning and purpose of life.
The common good is built of institutions, and institutions are “social habits,” just as virtues and vices are individual habits of doing good or evil. Speeding, running a stop sign, and being late to work once doesn’t build either an individual or a social habit, but do it again, and then again, each time getting away with it, and you build an individual habit, a vice.
Vices have consequences. Speeding a hundred times may cause no direct harm, but it creates the habit of speeding and finally having or causing an accident. Running a stop sign is the same. You can get away with it many times, but then someone is killed because you decided the law doesn’t apply to you.
Being late for work? People who relied on your being on time so they could get their work done have to wait on you. They must stay late to finish, and the office or factory must incur additional costs to stay open. People’s home lives are disrupted because they can’t be home as scheduled, so they miss dinner with the family or that important celebration or event; children are disappointed and lose trust: “But you promised!”
And that’s just the individual level. At the level of the common good, the damage becomes even greater. First, disobeying any law, regardless how silly or even evil, builds disrespect for all law and sets a bad example for others to follow suit until it pervades the entire society. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was an evil law, and people were (at least in our opinion) morally obligated to disobey it . . . but it still built the habit of having contempt for all duly constituted authority; it legitimized John Brown’s rebellion at Harper’s Ferry in the eyes of many, and — along with a few other things — helped bring about the Civil War.
The Volstead Act was essentially a silly law, an effort to impose questionable individual moral standards on everyone. Silly, yes, but it almost brought down conventional government in places like Chicago and gave organized crime a gigantic boost. In some respects, it led to wider public acceptance of the draconian features of the New Deal than might otherwise have been possible as people looked to government to solve all social problems instead of maintaining the common good.
It's a slight diversion from our main point today, but we note that ironically, Keynesian economics — the theoretical basis of the New Deal — is ultimately an irrational, secular faith-based philosophy. It is grounded in assertion and an unwavering confidence in the power of government to solve all problems, individual and social. It is justified by logical fallacies, utopian fantasies, and self-delusion, as has been noted on this blog many times. To take only one example of each (there are many):
Self Creation Paradox
· Logical Fallacy: All production is financed by savings (true) and savings consists solely of consuming less than is produced (false). If all production is financed by savings, and savings consists solely of consuming less than is produced . . . where did the original production come from to finance the first production? Nothing can precede itself or bring itself into existence; this is the “Self-Creation Paradox,” a form of circular reasoning: “So far as I know, everyone is agreed that saving means the excess of income over expenditure on consumption. . . . therefore, the amount of saving is an outcome of the collective behaviour of individual consumers and the amount of investment of the collective behaviour of individual entrepreneurs, these two amounts are necessarily equal, since each of them is equal to the excess of income over consumption.” (John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), II.6.ii.) [This fallacy, on which the whole of Keynesian economics is built, appears first in the book that made Keynes’s reputation, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), 2.iii, when he declared, “The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.”]
· Utopian Fantasy: If the State is allowed to control money and credit, even to “re-editing the dictionary” to change the form, substance, and value of money at will, then the economy will operate for the benefit of all: “The State, therefore, comes in first of all as the authority of law which enforces the payment of the thing which corresponds to the name or description in the contract. But it comes in doubly when, in addition, it claims the right to determine and declare what thing corresponds to the name, and to vary its declaration from time to time — when, that is to say, it claims the right to re-edit the dictionary.” (John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Volume I: The Pure Theory of Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930, 4.)
· Self-Delusion: If we lie to ourselves for at least a century and insist that what we know is true is really false and what is false is really true, then Keynesian economics will work: “For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.” (John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), republished in his collection, Essays in Persuasion. London: Macmillan and Co., 1931.)
So, we can take it as evident that breaking the law is bad for the individual and the whole of the common good. This extends to any law, for any reason, good or bad, wise or silly, and includes violating the precepts of the natural law as well as breaking the strictures of human positive law.
That does not mean, however, we are without recourse. That is, unless we are trapped in either individualism or collectivism and resist personalism based on a more perfect concept of the human person than can be found in either individualism or collectivism.
Only in personalism and the completed theory of social justice can we find a way to resolve the problem of the presumed conflict between being a good person and being a good citizen that suffuses a world that has all but succumbed to the res novae, the “New Things” of socialism, New Age, and — especially in this instance, the “species of moral, legal, and social modernism which [Pius XI] condemn[ed], no less decidedly than [he] condemn[ed] theological modernism.” (Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, § 61.)
And that is what we will address in the next posting in this series.
#30#
