Providing for the common good, a duty of government

Coming from any source other than a pope, the following teaching on the common good risks being dismissed out of hand by a society as ruggedly individualistic as ours. Even at that, I read recently that the Catholic left generally ignores the written guidance of popes while the Catholic right scrupulously studies it to see how well it conforms to the right’s agenda. But with the hope that the mainstream Catholic readership will consider Pope John Paul II a reliably authentic teacher on social justice, I offer these citations from his Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The technical definition of the common good appears in paragraph 1909: “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” It has three essential elements: respect for the person, the social well-being and development of the group itself (with civil authority seeing to the universal availability of “food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on,” 1908), and finally, peace, defined as “the stability and security of a just order” (1909).

Technical this is. It means that besides the personal good to which every person, rich or poor, is entitled, there is something beyond that which considers what people deserve in community, whether that community is one’s hometown or nation or world citizenship. Further, “it is in the political community that its most complete realization is found. It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society, its citizens, and intermediate bodies” (1910).

Pope John Paul saw government as the means of attaining the good of the community. It is to be a servant, not an overlord. It exists for the people, not vice versa. Lincoln famously described the ideal as being of, by and for the people. He saw a great usefulness of political governance to preserve the union, threatened by divisive calls for the purported state right to enslave. If ever there were an instance of economic individualism run wild, this was it.

Did you notice the list of civil rights above? It borrows from the 1948 United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States and most other nations ratified as the minimum to which everyone is entitled. They are very specific rights which governments must work to deliver. Legislation and the attendant taxation to fund it are duties of governments on all levels. But since taxation has to be progressive, with the richest paying proportionately more, they tend to resist empowering government to do its most basic job, providing for the common good.

This makes us ask whether Jesus meant this when he said that the rich have a decided disadvantage, given the narrowness of the needle’s eye. The inherent danger of greed is to clutch onto resources to which the rich no longer have title because of the prior right of the poor to minimal living standards. This in turn makes individualists, when discussing things like universal health insurance, for instance, draw parallels between the common good and communism, perhaps because of the word similarity. But communism calls for the elimination of private property while the common good demands respect for each person’s own property, something clearly demanded above.

In point of fact, western Europe has long espoused many government-supplied services, like health insurance, unknown in the U.S. The average taxation to pay for this is a breath-taking 45 percent on average. We, however, are used to 28 percent on all levels—federal, state, county and municipal together—of our income. I do not suggest that we have it easy, especially if we are saddled with medical bills that we have to pay on our own, without European-style help. In the past I have occasionally suggested that we redirect the huge percentage given to national defense toward more socially useful goals, like those above. But whatever party controls whatever branch, we Americans demand that our mammoth military govern the world. And hegemony costs a bundle.