But the church’s social teaching is no less an official teaching for allowing room for disagreement on its policy implications. And for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions.
That explanation rests, I think, on three ideas. First, that when it comes to lifting the poor out of poverty, global capitalism, faults and all, has a better track record by far than any other system or approach.
Second, that Catholic social teaching, properly understood, emphasizes both solidarity and subsidiarity — that is, a small-c conservative preference for local efforts over national ones, voluntarism over bureaucracy.
Third, that on recent evidence, the most expansive welfare states can crowd out what Christianity considers the most basic human goods — by lowering birthrates, discouraging private charity and restricting the church’s freedom to minister in subtle but increasingly consequential ways. (Source)
This Catholic case for limited government, however, is not a case for the Ayn Randian temptation inherent to a capitalism-friendly politics. There is no Catholic warrant for valorizing entrepreneurs at the expense of ordinary workers, or for dismissing all regulation as unnecessary and all redistribution as immoral.
Regarding number one: Capitalism has never had a productivity or innovation problem, but it has always had a very serious distribution problem. Its productivity has made some people very rich, its innovation disruptive to traditional societies, their values, and ways of life often immerserating them. GDP per capita is a poor way to measure wealth. Free-market capitalism as it has evolved, especially since the last half of the 19th century, has created new kinds of poverty and slavishness that simply did not exist before.
Regarding number two: I mostly agree; there should always be a bias for the local and voluntary. But subisidiarity also recognizes that the Feds have a responsibility to intervene when the locals are incompetent, incapable, or unwilling to deal with problems that negatively affect its citizens on the local level. The Feds did the right thing when Eisenhower sent the troops into Little Rock, and they should have done a better job when Katrina hit New Orleans. If the Feds were serious about improving educational achievement, they wouldn't be pushing on local communities ridiculous top down policies like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Common Core. They would be finding ways to intervene to mitigate the toxic effects of poverty in the lives of children who grow up in it.
And this brings us to the last of his points, so regarding number three: Does Douthat really think that the U.S. is any in danger of becoming one of the most expansive of welfare states? As for crowding out, please. I understand the point, but we're not living in stable ante-bellum communities where everyone knows who you are and when a stranger arrives in town it's a big event.
Conservatives get all nostalgic in their complaining about how bureaucracies have replaced face-to-face relationships, but that's the price of number one: the disruptive, innovative power of capitalism. I don't like bureacracies either, and as I suggest in my response to number two, there are places I think the Feds should keep their noses out of. But the scale of the social and economic disruptions that follow from number one is not "subtle". It requires by the logic of number two that it intervene to do the mitigating welfare work of number three. And the huge scale of the problems, alas, requires bureacracies whose scale is equal to the suffering. There's still plenty of room for the churches and other local voluntary organizations so that they need not feel subtly or grossly crowded out. But they are not competent alone to deal with the huge scale of the problems modern market capitalism has created.
The pope gets this, and Douthat, good Catholic that he is, won't go all Rush Limbaugh on him. He wants to find the middle ground, and good for him. And he's right that there isn't anything substantively different in what Francis is teaching that contrasts with his predecessors. His is, rather, a matter of emphasis. And it is a matter of a pope embracing a prophetic role, his papal bully pulpit, but this time as one who speaks as the first pope from the southern hemisphere, and who knows concretely the kind of suffering that follows from Douthat's abstract neoliberalism.