Detnews.com: 'Social Justice' is a complex concept
A column by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, a Catholic writer for the Washington Post, makes the claim that "Catholic social justice demands a redistribution of wealth." He went on to say that "there can be no disagreement" that unions, the government and private charities should all have a role in fighting a trend that has "concentrated" money into the hands of the few. In this conjecture Stevens-Arroyo confused the ends with potential means.
What Stevens-Arroyo is promoting is an attenuated and truncated vision of "social justice" that has fostered a great deal of injustice throughout the world. This path, he should know, has been decisively repudiated by the Church.
He also betrays a strange split in thinking common to those on the religious left, who are quick to denounce the profit motive and commercialism. Yet, they seem to think that the key to happiness is giving people more stuff — by enlisting the coercive power of government. This perverse way of thinking holds that "social justice" demands that we take money from those who have earned it and give it to those who have less of it. That's not social justice; that's materialism.
A friend and colleague, Arthur Brooks, a social researcher who is now president of the American Enterprise Institute, has shown that what makes people truly happy is a system that "facilitates earned success among its citizens and does not create disincentives to achieve or squash ambition." That's the market economy.
The incredible growth of economies in places like China and India isn't happening because wealth was being shifted around, but because wealth is being created....
His point about the implicit materialism of the left, and many religionists, is important. While condemning consumerism they say that justice is poorer people being able to buy more stuff. Human beings are not so many cattle to be fed and sheltered. People were made for stewardship, for being participants in an interdependent community of production, trade, and generosity.
