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In Praise Of Bernie Sanders (Again)

One of the things that we have to recognize at a minimum is that "real" socialism--where a central government controls all aspects of economic life--doesn't work. It doesn't work--and is morally defective--partly because it denies the existence of private property as such; that the prudential decisions of what one individual determines, up to and including his material needs, and those of his or her family, are not to be subordinated and denied for the sake of the State and its self-preservation. The first part of that, you'd get wide agreement, I'd imagine. One of the problems of various totalitarian regimes ostensibly devoted to socialism, especially in the last century, is that they acquired enough power that the rights and duties of individuals were ruthlessly crushed, and subsumed. As seems to happen, the regime apparatchiks never seem to struggle to find food, and frankly, a lavish lifestyle. Anyway, numerous people on the "Right" in countries around the world have made plenty of hay out of this.

Left unaddressed of course, is the justice of capitalism, or lack thereof. Since I was born at the end of the Cold War, and I'm an American, I know the strict binary: It's either Soviet communism, or capitalism. We were right, and we're better, because we don't have gulags. It's really that simple, for many people. In reality, though, we have to think abstractly, that is, at the level of principle, to get where I'm going. Is it true that all economic transactions are morally neutral? Is it true that government as such exists, or ought to exist, solely to protect property rights? Is it true that the regulation of severe economic inequalities by government is per se illegitimate? Sorry to barrage you with questions that are actually statements, but my answer to all these questions is "no."

The only person I heard talking in moral terms about wealth, whether its scale or purpose, was Bernie Sanders.

Now, don't get me wrong; he might be leading us incrementally back to the failed experiments of the statist past; I don't know. And the mind of the Catholic Church on this question is nuanced, to say the least. I do know that to say the Doctors and saints and popes would be ambivalent about capitalism is grossly understating the matter. Even if Anthony Esolen isn't ready to accept that. I digress.

Still other people look at the Senator's alleged hypocrisy as reason enough to reject all of what he says. That might be satisfying, but that's not an argument, either.

As for me, I'm a Catholic, obedient to the Magisterium. So I find myself unable to be an obedient American. Americans have "dogmas," too. Problem is, they aren't true.

On a personal note, I have the privilege of seeing what happens when we treat the government--who has primary responsibility for the common good in all its facets--as a necessary evil. We leave people behind. People who have as much dignity and right to exist as anyone else.

By the way, you don't have to vote for Bernie, or anyone else in particular. But we'd better start listening. We can't build a better country until we start rejecting false choices, and articulating better ones.

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