Comments for Catholic Conservatives and the Common Good at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 15 out of 15 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Fri, 24 May 2013 16:39:23 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-11183 You're completely wrong and inaccurate..try reading William F Buckley Jr. - noelle Wed, 02 May 2012 12:56:50 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-7096 Just out of curiosity, since when is the "creative power of markets" a principle/aspect of Catholic social teaching? It may be true, but I would need some convincing that is an aspect of the social teaching in the same way that the the common good, subsidiarity, etc. are. - Teej Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:10:02 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6954 The national debt that occasions this discussion is of a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend. How big is a trillion? Consider this. If we were to pay down the debt at the rate of $1 million per day it would take c. 2750 years to reduce it by only $1 trillion! But the real national debt, usually said to be c. $14.4 trillion, actually might be as much $100 trillion when the costs of interest and unfunded obligations are included. Even if it grows as it must, the economy cannot survive unless spending is curtailed and the entitlememts are restructured . In their present form Social Security , Medicare and Medicaid are demonstrably unsustainable. If we allow those entitlements to collapse and take the entire economy with them , we can predict that "the weakest among us" will surely suffer the most and the longest. Let us pray that our elected leaders ---liberals and conservatives alike---will be blessed with the honesty, political courage , wisdom and understanding required to deal effectively with this very dangerous crisis. If economic disaster is to be averted they must work together. They and the public must come to understand very soon that this crisis is almost certainly the most dangerous threat facing our nation. Will the needed political cooperation happen? It is difficult to be optimistic. But we must remind ourselves that with the Lord all things are possible. - Edward Maillet Tue, 31 May 2011 16:52:38 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6944 The responses reflect exactly the "quasi-libertarian and quasi-socialist positions" that Stephen White mentions in his article. I definitely struggle with the "quasi-libertarian" tendency and openly admit it in discussions with friends and family. I still can't get past our current system of progressive income tax as anything other than "state-sactioned theft" - how's that for a "quasi-libertarian" position! Jesus' said "love your neighbor as you love yourself" and went on to define "neighbor" with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Who was neighbor to the person robbed and left for dead? The Samaritan who acted out of love. There was no government bureaucrat or functionary calling attention to the innocent person in need and demanding the Samaritan "do his fair share." I think it was a "quasi-socialist", jsmitty, who may be pointing us in the right direction in looking for a solution (provisional at best) to our current dilemma - "go back to the New Deal" and start untangling the knot from there! - chris ramsey Mon, 30 May 2011 05:23:39 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6941 bob, Having worked within the Medicare 'system' (i use the term loosely) for 20 years, let me assure that Mr White is not "of course, completely wrong." What an arrogant statement. The fact is that Mcare has been in the process of revamping itself for several years now. WHY? Because of the gross greed/graft and corruption that is inherent with any gov't run program. It finally reached a level that couldn't be ignored any longer. Newsflash: the days of Entitlement Programs are waning because the 'progressives' who put them in place & support them also neglected to have enough progeny to fund them. So, instead of pointing fingers at Mr. White, you might more productively be about privatizing your own coverage. That's the way we're headed. The demographics speak for themselves. - gtb Sun, 29 May 2011 10:07:13 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6934 Mr. White is, of course, completely wrong. Comparing welfare to Medicare is a bizarre use of 'evidence' since the real evidence is Medicare itself. Medicare is successful. It meets the needs of seniors, and there is NO evidence that privatizing it, as Paul Ryan suggests, will be successful at reducing costs. In fact, since his policy requires seniors to cover more and more of the cost, this amounts to seniors subsidizing insurance companies with the long term result that seniors will, eventually, not be able to meet the costs of healthcare. At the opposite end, Ryan takes the money being paid by seniors, and uses it to give ANOTHER MASSIVE (30%) tax cut to the rich. This supply side approach to the economy does not work. It was NOT 'entitlements' that bankrupted our economy, but the technical abuses (collateralized default swaps, inter alia) by Wall Street, and the other elites Mr. White implicitly defends. If Wall Street is not being asked to share in the pain of the shrinking economy, why should the middle class continue to subsidize THEM AND pay for our OWN problems? This is a form of 'entitlement' for the wealthiest, which DID lead to economic collapse. - bob Fri, 27 May 2011 02:58:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6931 Well IDK Achilles. We certainly have moral problems...But...if our problems are all moral rather than monetary then why are we talking about entitlement reform at all hmmm? The piece was about the conservative Catholic answer to the problem of the financial strain caused by the current shape of social insurance programs--not about the moral problems of society. So frankly I don't see the relevance of your observation except to dodge the basic issue at hand that the Ryan plan espoused by the author is not likely to have results that square with any conception of social justice. Granted it is a short piece, but the only argument put forth by the author at all for the Ryan plan is that a wholly different sort of reform of the AFDC program was passed in the 90's and turned out better than its critics warned. Ergo we should support the Ryan plan today which proposes totally different reforms to a totally different entitlement program that affects a much, much broader segment of the population than did AFDC..not too mention a program that is widely popular unlike welfare which the broad majority of the public knew was screwed up. Sorry, but if conservative Catholics are going to make a play for the social justice mantle they are going to have to come up with far better arguments than these. ANd they are going to have to come up with a more concrete vision of what they have in mind that would replace the current pretty well-established social arrangements which go back to the New Deal. - jsmitty Thu, 26 May 2011 13:15:56 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6930 I am absolutely impressed with the quality of the discourse here at The Catholic Thing. I have found myself in disagreement with only jsmitty, who also makes a rational argument, however flawed it might be (and I could be wrong). I especially appreciated the comments of Achilles; I think he gets to the root of the matter. - Billy Bean Thu, 26 May 2011 12:16:24 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6928 I wonder Jsmitty if we might have things a little out of perspective. Scientifically placing more of a tax burden on the richest may give the appearances of solving all our problems. Mistaking roots for fruits is our biggest problem here. Our problems are not money problems, they are moral problems that happen to be very expensive. Further immorality because it appears to solve our money woes will only lead to greater and more costly problems in the future. The fact is is that we reward vice and punish virtue. It all comes back to the family and our core values, if not true Catholic Values, our society will corrode, wait, I mean corrode further. Our ideas have become so disordered because we have lost sight of the proper order of what it means to be human and our relationships have become idolatrous. We are meant to be agents of Truth and servants of Christ. We have become agents of self interest and slaves to our appetites. We will reap what we sow and these considerations of politics will remain only the signs 3 generations removed from first principles. P.S. I thought Mr. White's essay was excellent! - Achilles Thu, 26 May 2011 09:25:20 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6927 A breath of balanced air! As Peter Kreeft has stated: Conservatives tend to have a hard head and a hard heart, while liberals tend to have a soft head and a soft heart; and that as followers of Christ we are all challenged to have hard heads and soft hearts. Political partisanship can often times have a clouding effect that inadvertently compromises the Church's effort to hold fast to the many Gospel paradoxes. As followers of Jesus we must be careful where we 'rest our head': "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head" (Matt 8:20). - William O'Brien Thu, 26 May 2011 08:42:30 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6925 I'm unconvinced by Mr. White's arguments. The Ryan plan wants to cut the top marginal rate back to 25%. Since this massive tax cut will not be revenue neutral the additional revenue will be made up by massive cost shifting onto the upper middle class and middle classes, who not only will pay much more of their medicare costs but higher taxes as well. By what theory of social justice (Catholic or otherwise) does this serve the common good? I would like to see you write a piece explaining that! I agree that we need entitlement reform but it is just dishonest to attach right-wing tax reform ideas to the whole package. That makes it a political and moral loser from where I sit. - jsmitty Thu, 26 May 2011 08:22:28 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6924 As Talleyrand (Bishop of Autun, you recall) observed “governing has never been anything other than postponing by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the mob will string you up from the nearest lamp-post, and every act of government is nothing but a way of not losing control of the people” If we want to curtail welfare spending, are we ready for a repetition of the June Days of 1848, following the closure of the National Workshops? Then, the Liberals secured a victory over the Radical Republicans, but at the cost of 1,500 dead in combat and thousands of summary executions of prisoners. The Assembly, one recalls, welcomed the surrender of the last barricade with cries of “Long Live the Republic!” What they got, inevitably, was Napoléon III. Nowadays, when governments depend for their legitimacy on media coverage and the cult of personality, it is pretty generally recognised that welfare cheques, drug-dealing and cheap alcohol are indispensible guarantees of the political order. - Michael Paterson-Seymour Thu, 26 May 2011 06:10:02 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6923 Mr. White has given us a refreshingly distinctive and persuasive essay, the type of which we readers of the Catholic Thing could use more. Bravo! - John McCarthy Thu, 26 May 2011 01:53:18 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6921 While the above discussion is excellent, it will become increasingly academic as the Federal and State governments slide increasingly toward insolvency. When you realize the number of people in the Mid-West who have no insurance on their homes because they can't afford it (the tornado reports are revealing this), one knows we are in desperate straits. Even the taxing of life insurance proceeds is now being considered to shore up State revenues. These have NEVER been taxed. - Manfred Thu, 26 May 2011 01:14:37 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/catholic-conservatives-and-the-common-good.html#comment-6920 This is an excellent article and elevates public discourse considerably. But I wonder whether in our own time the Christian will be able to think more prayerfully about his political decisions before he comes to realize that we spend too much time talking and thinking about politics in the first place. You would not know from even most Christian discourse on politics in our time that neither man nor politics is the highest thing. Ideas turn into ideology precisely when the intense questions and aporia that naturally occur in our communal life are not seen to implicate things greater than and prior to politics. But this doesn't (or needn't) contradict what White is saying here, because thinking hard on the common good of our community ought to lead us to reflection upon the final common good to which it is ordered: God. - Bill McCormick Thu, 26 May 2011 00:31:53 +0100