Justice is not charity and must come first

How do you feel about that old but newly revived assertion that the government should not enact programs that help the poor because that undercuts the charity that all religions encourage their members to practice? If Washington or Trenton were to take tax money and direct it to people who, not because they are lazy but because they have some special need, such as blindness or muscular dystrophy or old age, the government would be overstepping its bounds and infringing in religion’s private preserve.

While smaller government would mean smaller taxes, it’s seldom we hear the blind or MS patients or the elderly call for it. They would dearly like to earn or to have earned a decent living unaided, paying taxes accordingly. But they have limitations that others do not have. So it comes as no surprise that Catholic social doctrine perennially has called for government to intervene in what it says is a government responsibility, without worrying about any displacing of charity, not worrying about Caesar meddling in the realm of God. The church at the same time urges all to donate to charity independently of what government provides. It sees no conflict between justice and charity.

Here I think is the problem. The temptation for smaller taxes moves some to substitute charity for justice, especially since with charity there is no pay-this-amount. How much should we donate? There is no such uncertainty about how much we should pay in taxes, the justice amount. Charity leaves it to the good-heartedness of the donor. And wouldn’t you know, studies show that the poor and middle class give proportionately more than do the wealthy, as with taxes. In this time of recession, most gifts are down. Even “compassionate conservatism” is so 90s.

It seems that those who want to eliminate social programs benefiting the needy want to have the same ability to set the limit of help to be given them.That way, they would have the freedom to make a large or small gift. Thus, no big government would dictate a certain amount. But history shows that before our eminently successful Social Security, which was and is still wrongly being called socialism, half our elderly lived in poverty. Only about 10 percent do now. Unbelievably, some want to cripple it. This means that charity long before our jaded and selfish present era failed royally to take care of our own.

A socially aware person might find it hard to see how people could turn their backs on those up in years, but a rugged individualist fears socialism more than the hunger that goes with poverty. It’s fine to trim social programs that have proven to be failures, such as busing to achieve integration. It was well intended, but after all the disruption it was found that racist attitudes at home undid whatever good was gotten by children studying together. Ask Hillie Holbrook of “The Help” about popular racial mindsets. She conducted a gala fund-raiser for the poor starving African children while holding in contempt her African-American employee. But the socially alert believer knows God is not pleased with tokenistic pretenses at charity when justice has not preceded it. First justice, then charity even if the latter is the more noble virtue.

An upstate Pennsylvania coal mine owner underpaid his non-unionized miners, subjecting them to unsafe working conditions, even forcing children to separate coal from slate. He had no problem with this. He worshipped each Sunday and imagined God was pleased with him, especially since every Thanksgiving without fail, he had turkeys and food baskets brought to the house of each employee. First justice, then charity.

Catholic social doctrine teaches that government exists for the people, especially the disadvantaged. This in itself puts our teaching at variance with the strident calls for less and less government exclusively because it costs money that is some of the resources God intended us to share and not to hoard. Only government is big enough to see to the minimal care of all. Scandinavia has cradle to grave social care. It has much higher taxes than we do, but people report being much happier than we do here. Of course, they choose not to have the mammoth defense empire that we choose, but that’s another column.

All this is fine away from election season. But with the campaign circus heating up, fig leaves are appearing to hide the hypocrisy of the less than socially minded. They need to be removed.