Page 15, 15th July 2011

15th July 2011

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Page 15, 15th July 2011 — The radical economists who scorned Christianity
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The radical economists who scorned Christianity

The Austrian School saw Christ as a dangerous early socialist, says Piers Shepherd
The Church and the Libertarian
BY CHRISTOPHER FERRARA REMNANT PRESS, $40 (£25)
Many on this side of the Atlantic may not be familiar with a debate that has been raging among certain orthodox and, in most cases, strongly traditionalist Catholics in the United States. This is a debate that concerns the Church’s social teaching. The contending actors are those who support the principles enunciated by the popes in encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno and those who contend that the popes knew little or nothing of such things as economics and that these are not matters of faith and morals and can therefore be ignored or disregarded.
Christopher Ferrara’s book, subtitled “A Defence of the Catholic Church’s Teaching on Man, Economy and State”, is a spirited and well-researched work in defence of the traditional social teaching of the Church. The target of his attack is the school of thought known as Austrian Libertarianism.
This philosophy has its origin in the writings of two economists of the mid to late 20th century: the Austrian Ludwig Von Mises and the American Murray Rothbard. Their thought has found its most fertile ground in the United States where it is primarily represented by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute at Auburn University in Alabama. Not a few of its foremost adherents claim to be traditional Catholics.
So who were Mises and Rothbard and what did they believe? Central to both men’s thinking was a radical belief in the free market and the idea that the market is not governed by any moral principles.
Mises saw economics as a valuefree science. He regarded all human action as economic action. The only purpose of government is to pursue economic prosperity. He was a utilitarian whose only value judgment was a belief in the greatest good for the greatest number, Mises was strongly anti-Christian. He branded Christ a “socialist” and proclaimed that, by resisting liberalism in the 19th century, Christianity had become a “religion of hatred in a world ripe for happiness”.
Rothbard was Mises’s greatest student but, unlike the former, he rejected utilitarianism and attempted to set the Austrian philosophy on a basis of Natural Law. Nonetheless, Rothbard regarded religion and morality as matters of private opinion and reduced man simply to an individual with certain rights.
In Rothbard’s mind two rights stood before all others. The first is the absolute right to self-ownership: each individual owns their own body and can do with it as they wish. Thus any attempt to restrict such things as abortion, suicide, drug-taking or illicit sexual behaviour was described by Rothbard as “immoral”. The second is the absolute right to private property and to dispose of one’s property in any way one wishes.
Ferrara has detailed the shocking conclusions that have been reached by certain Austrian thinkers who have followed this thinking. Walter Block, who teaches at a Catholic university, has written, for example, that a mother has the right to “evict” an unborn child from her womb; the child is merely a “squatter”.
Ferrara’s primary target in this book is his fellow traditional Catholic and best-selling author Thomas Woods, with whom Ferrara had previously co-authored a book on the modern Church. Woods has dedicated a large part of his writing career to attacking the papal social encyclicals, in particular, papal teaching on the just price and just wage and usury. Woods is a staunch defender of the unrestrained free market and insists that the just price is always the market price.
The Austrian defence of even the worst abuses of the free market has reached perhaps its most extreme manifestation in a series of articles by Lew Rockwell, president of the Mises Institute and a practising Catholic, defending Ebenezer Scrooge as the ideal businessman. Bob Cratchit, after all, freely accepted his wage.
While the Austrians defend capitalism and free enterprise against state intervention, Ferrara notes that capitalists have always sought the intervention of the state to defend their own interests. But Ferrara, following the popes, does not endorse socialism or completely condemn the free market. But he states that “free market outcomes are good if they correspond to the objective norms of justice the Magisterium enunciates according to the Gospel, and bad if they depart from these norms”.
He describes the ultimate consequences of a marketplace divorced from morality as the widespread promotion of such evils as abortion, contraception and pornogra phy that we see today. As a remedy to the twin evils of socialism and unrestrained capitalism Ferrara offers the system known as Distributism, a third way strongly advocated a century ago by writers such as G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc but today widely ridiculed as a Utopian “back to the land” movement. But, says Ferrara, “anyone who owns a home-based business ... is already making distributism a reality. Small business in general is distributism in action.” Human life needs to be restored to a human scale.
Applying Catholic social teaching to the circumstances of the modern United States would, Ferrara claims, lead to, among other things, the reduction or abolition of income and inheritance taxes, an enhanced role for private bodies and the legal protection of the moral order and religion.
Ferrara’s book is a fine exposition of Catholic social teaching and a convincing refutation of the libertarian position. He may be a little harsh on the likes of Thomas Woods, who for all his faults has written much in defence of the Church, but his intentions cannot be faulted.
Politically incorrect gems as “to the extent that man has natural rights ... he has them only as correlatives of his duties under the natural law” are in such sharp contradiction to the spirit of the modern world as to be a joy to read.




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