For God, Family and Republic

In my time, I've run across an increasing number of Christians who fancy themselves as advocates of what they call social justice. For example, Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition chief even mentions it as a laudable goal in his book Active Faith. According to Wikipedia, social justice advocates may concern themselves with The redistribution of wealth, power and status for the individual, community and societal good. The pious phraseology social justice has become a virtual synonym for economic and social equality.

Aristotle opined: "All men believe that justice means equality in some sense... The question we must keep in mind is, equality or inequality in what sort of thing." Nineteenth-century classical liberal conceptions of equality saw equality before the law as the only ideal to be sought after. The pursuit of equality of condition, however, is untenable and incompatible with human nature. Men had "different and unequal faculties of acquiring property," reflected Madison in the Federalist. The diversity of those faculties, and the inherent inequalities by virtue of nature, was why it is important that "the protection of those faculties is the first object of Government." The task of government was thus to set inherently unequal persons into a system of laws that would, as proximate as possible, equal their rights while allowing their innate differences to express themselves. As Jefferson observes, "There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents." (Jefferson drew a distinction between an artificial aristocracy, which was really an oligarchy. Aristos was a Greek word simply meaning the best.) This was a vision for a meritocratic America, or a career open to the talents. In a meritocratic society, individuals as of right should enjoy the fruits of their honest labor and toil, and use whatever faculties and providential blessings to rise as high as the can, insofar as they do not acquire by means of force and fraud. A meritocratic society does not punish success, but allow people to fulfill their talents in the marketplace of ideas, skills and labor.

The insurgent egalitarian ideology underestimates the reality of human inequalities, and never seem to learn the lessons of history raised by equalitarian tyrannies, whether of the Jacobin, Jacobite, or the Leninist variety.

Whereever the pious phraseology social justice rears its head in public policy formulation, it is usually some ideological cover for social engineering and wealth redistribution by the state. As economist F.A. Hayek notes, "The modern tendency to gratify this passion and to disguise it in respectable garment of social justice is developing into a serious threat to freedom." Where social justice has emerged in foreign policy formulation, it has lead to needless foreign aid. Foreign aid and IMF loans really only prop up Third World dictators and kleptocrats that use the aid for their spoils system and to prop up a statist system. Such aid only represses capital formation and stifles the development of free-markets, and undercuts its idealistic and noble purpose.

Where social justice emerges in churches, it has led to the advocacy of an errant Social Gospel. Churches infatuated with the Social Gospel inevitably lose sight of the true mission of the church, in their misguided humanitarian mission. Also, adherants of the Social Gospel could not content themselves in their humanitarian mission with their own resources, so they began advocating redistribution by the heavy hand of the paternalistic state. As H.L. Mencken says, "The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace."

A reflective political thinker should discard extol for social justice. It is an inherently ideologically leftist term, and the parlance of certain liberal Catholics, Progressives, Greens, Social Democrats, Marxists and other assorted leftists. Christians that esteem social justice, the brainchild of Karl Marx, ought to turn their focus onto a more Biblical doctrine of charity and Wilhelm Roepke's idea of the humane economy. I am not talking of charity through ideological lens of liberation theology, but what charity means commensurate with the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul. Charity is not accomplished by collectivist ponzi schemes, charity is not committed at gunpoint, and charity is not accomplished through coercion.

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