A Catholic newspaper could be expected to speak occasionally about the capital sins. The problem is that many readers balk, fearing that “capital” means Washington. After all, we must not mix religion and politics. So let’s go at it in a non-partisan way, impaling neither the elephant nor the donkey. Different temptations face the two ends of the political spectrum: liberals contend with sloth while conservatives wrestle with greed.
Traditionally liberals like big government because there is nothing else so powerful in a democracy as national or state or county or municipal government when you want to get something done. Legislate it and it happens. It might be a massive program to encourage parents to send children to college for the betterment of the whole nation by granting them tax credits for the tuition they pay. Or it might be a public option office that pays medical insurance for everyone who does not have it, given the huge cost of staying healthy, and the bizarre, broken system we currently have that bars pre-existing medical conditions.
Each instance would cost billions. Who would pay? The taxpayer would be expected to foot the bill on the grounds that not just parents or sick people benefit. In theory, everyone would. The problem, of course, is that some would pay more than others since we have a graduated tax system. If you make more, you pay more. If you make less, or are unemployed, you pay less or nothing at all. If we had to rely on private initiative to pave roads or to assemble an army or to entertain us every four years with mud-slinging political commercials, we would have to do without a lot that we like. So to some extent, we need government of some size to do really important things for us. Privateers would not make the grade.
The temptation is to get lazy and expect government to do everything, an inviting prospect if you pay small taxes. The rich, separated by a gap as unbridgeable as that between Lazarus and the rich man in the Lord’s parable, would be seen by the poor as getting their comeuppance, especially if the rich got rich from the sweat of the poor. Historically the widespread occurrence of this caused unions to form.
Conversely, conservatives want private enterprise to do what liberals want government to do. American moxie and hustle are proverbial descriptions for the inventive spirit and entrepreneurship of American industrialists and inventors, businesspersons and market magnates. If they take the risk, they get the reward of successful business endeavors. All government does is pass laws to restrict the activity of the marketplace, claiming that abuses of the powerful on the consumer or the worker are the eggs you have to break if you want scrambled eggs. At least that’s the way comrade Lenin put it, in a slightly different context, of course. So small government is better: we need it to do only those few things that are simply too cumbersome to do privately, like defending the nation. Yet Blackwater, the private security force that the Pentagon employed to aid our troops in Iraq, suggests that even this could be done on a contract basis.
One incentive here is saving on taxes. Small government would mean smaller taxes. Thus more could be kept by citizens for personal enrichment, especially if they are already paying a lot in taxes. But when this is taken to excess, it is called greed. Notwithstanding Gordon Gecko of the 1980 film “Wall Street,” it isn’t good. It’s a capital “sin,” i.e., a root tendency deeply lodged in one’s psyche that pulls one into the freely chosen act we traditionally call the moral of sin properly so called. Caricatures of this would be Mr. Gecko, or Ebeneezer Scrooge, of 19th-century fame, thanks to Charles Dickens.
So name your poison. Neither liberal nor conservative is immune from temptation.
By now, moral commentary on politics should be seen as appropriate since politics sometimes starts the fight by doing something immoral. When this happens, morality is impugned and religion comes to its defense. If this is unacceptable, we should stop objecting to abortion, an enormously political issue.
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