Catholic Social Teaching, For Catholics

H/t D29:

The Church has long taught that defrauding a worker of his wages is one of the four sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance (CCC 1867). In his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII echoed the words of St. James:

Doubtless, before deciding whether wages are fair, many things have to be considered; but wealthy owners and all masters of labor should be mindful of this – that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. “Behold, the hire of the laborers… which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.” Lastly, the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down the workmen’s earnings, whether by force, by fraud, or by usurious dealing; and with all the greater reason because the laboring man is, as a rule, weak and unprotected, and because his slender means should in proportion to their scantiness be accounted sacred. Were these precepts carefully obeyed and followed out, would they not be sufficient of themselves to keep under all strife and all its causes?

Again, Pope Pius XI took up the cause in Quadragesimo Anno. He made an important distinction, however, when it came to those businesses which themselves were deprived of enough revenue to pay their workers justly:

[I]f the business in question is not making enough money to pay the workers an equitable wage because it is being crushed by unjust burdens or forced to sell its product at less than a just price, those who are thus the cause of the injury are guilty of grave wrong, for they deprive workers of their just wage and force them under the pinch of necessity to accept a wage less than fair.
OK, so that's a lot of backstory. We know the Church believes this. So what?
First, there is the problem of working for the Church herself. There is no surer path to financial insolvency than for a hard worker to direct their energies towards some form of full-time Catholic apostolate, or to slave away for long hours as a Director of Religious Education, or to teach at a Catholic school.... This becomes a particular problem if they embody the Catholic ethos of “oppenness to life” and have a large family.

I suspect few individuals have ever had aspirations of becoming wealthy while working for the Church, but by the Church’s own teaching, the worker in a Catholic apostolate or school should expect to “be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family.” (QA 71) It is inexcusably hypocritical that the same clergy who wield the Church’s social teaching as a weapon against the titans of industry — often claiming that this is a non-negotiable moral imperative — often fail so completely when it comes to applying this standard to those under their own employ.
Emphasis added. This is a good point. Some religious orders require a vow of poverty, but a large part of the work is done by people who do not labor under such vows. How much stronger the moral argument would be if it were joined to practical example.

47 comments:

E Hines said...

This seems to assume that businesses are welfare organizations and are somehow obligated to pay more for an hour's labor than the produce of that hour is worth. As Bastiat described it, that's plunder, not a fair wage.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

Are you really going to appeal to authority vs. Jesus? :)

Grim said...

I mean, in your personal life, you can certainly say: "I don't agree this reading of Jesus' remarks, and the larger Biblical context behind them, is the right way to understand our duties; my conscience is more persuaded by the classical liberal economists." You also have every right to say, "As a Muslim, I am not bound by the Catholic Church's teachings on anything."

As an argument against the Vatican living up to its own teaching, though, neither freedom-of-conscience nor freedom-of-religion are available. In this context, I can't see the point of appealing to Bastiat's teachings.

E Hines said...

You should know by now that I don't appeal to very many authorities at all. When I cite an old, dead guy, it's because he's already phrased a point or part of a point I'm trying to make better than I can.

But let's go back to the point: is a business obligated in any way to hire a man at all? Is that also the church's position?

Additionally, it's my understanding that it's the Christian position, generally, not just the Catholic Church's, that our obligations to those worse off are individual obligations, not collective ones, for all that individuals universally honoring their obligations will accumulate to a substantial outcome from the mass of them.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

I'd be happy if we could just figure out whether poverty is good and wealth bad, or vice versa.

Grim said...

Both are good, Tex, at least in the Medieval Catholic theology with which I am most familiar. Everything that exists is good, because it was made by a good God and blessed by him as being good. There may be a question about which is better; and things which aren't as good as they could or ought to be can even be thought of as evil, though they are still better than a truly evil thing (which would not exist).

But the poor are blessed, both because Jesus tells us so and because the rich have some additional spiritual dangers to face.

Eric,

If the description that you think better than your own is "plunder," I'm not sure I agree with your judgment that it's especially well-put. Otherwise we end up suggesting that the Church teaches that employers should be plundered, which is obviously not what they think at all.

In any case, Bastiat's point -- if I recall correctly -- has to do with (as you say) paying more for the labor that produces a product than you can get in profit. Material profit is not the business of the Church, although I suspect the institution would 'profit' in the spiritual sense by living up to its own tenets. It might also become a stronger organization by drawing on the range of people who would love to work for the Church, but who feel strongly their duty to provide for their families as well.

Grim said...

Oh:

... it's my understanding that it's the Christian position, generally, not just the Catholic Church's, that our obligations to those worse off are individual obligations...

I know what you mean here, and I think it holds in general: an individual's soul will be saved or damned, and therefore it is the individual and not the collective (e.g., the corporation) that is accountable for wrongdoing. That's the same thing we were talking about the other day re: "Sovereigns." Corporations may be people in the legal sense, but they don't exist in the same way as individual people.

However, I can think of an exception from specifically Catholic theology. It's one of the more controversial differences between Protestant and Catholic theology, in fact: the justification for indulgences. These rely on something called a 'treasury of merit,' whereby punishment for a forgiven sin might be forgone in memory of some other member of the church having undergone horrible physical torments they did not deserve.

Still, in general, while a collective isn't damnable, we can judge it by its effect on the individuals who are. If its form is such that it tends to lead individuals to do immoral things, it can be judged to be a bad form. It doesn't bear responsibility, but we can sensibly say that it is wicked and should be avoided.

Texan99 said...

If both are good, that does make economic policy easier.

douglas said...

Hmmm, I'm going to see what my father thinks of all this. He'll have a pretty good overview as he worked as a diocesan auditor for about thirty years. Most parishes have awfully tight budgets, and pastors have to make extremely difficult decisions- it's not some simple good vs. bad decision dichotomy. I'll also point out that some jobs aren't meant to be primary breadwinner jobs- The article mentions making $30k as insufficient compared to the $55k median household income nationally. Some areas are much more expensive to live in, making national averages not very good for local comparisons, and as a second income job, $30k might be very good, and have a household making far more than the median.

Similarly, my wife volunteered untold hours at our public elementary school - and that cost us in potential income, but it was a decision we made to have her more in touch with our children's education and the community they were immersed in, and I think it's paid off, despite the economic hardships.

It's also fair to ask, I think if the market for charity and the realities of the world we live in aren't also legitimate players in deciding which avenues of ministry are the most worthwhile- the church has to deal with the realities of markets and people and the charity they will give or not. If a ministry is deemed important enough to warrant a full time paying job, then it ought to get reasonable pay- but maybe the problem is if someone is willing to take the supposedly underpaying job, then the position is worth having, but if it were to cost more, it's value would no longer be justifiable. At that point, the person working that job has to question how important they think that vocation is.

E Hines said...

while a collective isn't damnable, we can judge it by its effect on the individuals who are.

But how can you judge something that doesn't exist? The thing, after all, is no more than its individual members acting more or less in concert. Or so I've understood your position to be.

I, on the other hand, am perfectly happy to judge a business, or other entity, on its--it's, not that of the member men who are acting more or less in concert--economic prowess--which I do in my investing efforts--and on its moral performance--including whether it is paying what the job is worth and no more, which just incidentally lets it stay in business and keep the men it employs employed and earning at least something.

If the description that you think better than your own is "plunder," I'm not sure I agree with your judgment that it's especially well-put. Otherwise we end up suggesting that the Church teaches that employers should be plundered, which is obviously not what they think at all.

Now you're taking, apparently, the Church as a separate entity and not just the collection of men and women who are members and, as specific members of what we refer to as the institution acting more or less in concert. That aside, the author you cited in OP said this: by the Church’s own teaching, the worker in a Catholic apostolate or school should expect to "be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family."

Now if the Church wants to hold itself to that, I say go for it, but it should expect to hire fewer with the resources available, which it already does, but the shortage is exacerbated by insisting on paying a liveable wage rather than what the labor actually is worth--and so deprive another man even a little income because the Church can't afford to hire him at all. The Church thereby denies one man in favor of others on apparently arbitrary grounds. But that's the Church's choice. However, if the Church seeks to impose that standard on other businesses, as I understood the cited author to mean, that's plunder. That may not be what the Church wants or intends to teach, but that's the outcome.

A small point: Bastiat's point -- if I recall correctly -- has to do with (as you say) paying more for the labor that produces a product than you can get in profit. Bastiat's point was a little broader than that. His concern had to do with paying more for the labor than could be recovered in the product's sale; he didn't demand an outright profit.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

But how can you judge something that doesn't exist?

Well, from what I said earlier, if it really doesn't exist it's evil! Medieval ontology is very complex, and it's directly tied to this idea of goodness. Aquinas says that goodness and existence are almost the same thing, except for a shade of priority in the meaning of the terms. (ST I 5.1-3) So in a sense, you judge a thing's goodness by its degree of existence.

A lot of this has to do with the actualization of goods. A potential good is obviously less good than an actual good. But there's more than that: as we are a creation of God in God's own image, we are even more potentially good than any human creation could be. So the organization is less real than the individuals, even if the individuals aren't as really good as they potentially might have been (and should have been).

So it's not that the collective doesn't exist at all, which is impossible. It's that it doesn't exist in the same way. We can say that a collective is a person for legal purposes, but that doesn't make it a person actually. It lacks a soul, will, and that direct connection with God's image that exists in the individual human being.

...paying a liveable wage rather than what the labor actually is worth...

Again, the Church's business is not material profit. What is the labor 'worth'? In economic terms, something like its exchange value. But what is it worth if it saves a soul? Mt. 6:19-21.

Bastiat's point was a little broader than that. His concern had to do with paying more for the labor than could be recovered in the product's sale; he didn't demand an outright profit.

Interesting. But of course the owner must be fed too: there must be some profit for him. And the Church doesn't intend that (in an ordinary business, not the Church's own workings) owners should not make profits. Indeed, they don't even ask that you pay a livable wage if you are prevented from doing it by some form of externally-imposed hardship. They just ask that, if you are not externally constrained from doing so in accord with a fair profit, you pay your workers a livable wage.

E Hines said...

...of course the owner must be fed too: there must be some profit for him.

Now we're getting into accounting terminology. What the owner takes out in order to feed himself (and presumably his own family) is a part of his own wages--a cost. Profit is what's left over after all costs have been covered. But that's a wholly irrelevant aside.

With Bastiat, profits are an unvarnished good. For me, profits are a tool, nothing more. Their goodness or badness comes from what a man does with them. A business might retain profits (what FDR cynically called excess profits and "capital strike" when businesses held onto them longer than he deemed appropriate) because there's nothing better to use cash on than to sit on it, or because it's accumulating against an anticipated large expense, or just because it feels like hoarding. A man might retain profits for much the same reasons. Another reason to retain profits is to accumulate them into a greater sum with which greater charity might be done, often more so than had the profits been sent to charity as soon as they were reaped. A man might have one more reason: to leave his children, and ideally their children, better off at the end of his life than they might be had he spent everything, even on otherwise good causes, by the time he died.

Eric Hines

E Hines said...

What is the labor 'worth'? In economic terms, something like its exchange value. But what is it worth if it saves a soul?

How much labor can a man do if he can't get a job; all potential employers having used up all of their resources paying economically excessive wages? What is the worth of a man's labor--economically or to his soul--if he can't do it?

How much good are those potential employers doing any of the men who cannot get work because those employers have used up their resources paying economically excessive wages? They're hiring markedly fewer men than they could had they paid the economically sound wage to each.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

How much labor can a man do if he can't get a job; all potential employers having used up all of their resources paying economically excessive wages?

Perhaps he can work for one of those being paid 'excessive' wages. Presumably they have some money to pass around. Even if 'excessive' really means 'able to support a family,' that implies plenty of work: children are expensive, but society requires them if it is to survive from generation to generation.

E Hines said...

Perhaps he can work for one of those being paid 'excessive' wages. Presumably they have some money to pass around. Even if 'excessive' really means 'able to support a family,' that implies plenty of work: children are expensive, but society requires them if it is to survive from generation to generation.

In this context, "excessive" is the difference between a living wage and what the labor is worth economically. So if one employee is getting a living wage, he has no money to pass along; it's all consumed by what he needs for himself and his own family to survive. "Able to support a family" implies no work at all at a wage, because there is no money with which to pay. The man can't even take in the unemployed man (much less his family, too) as a free boarder as that living wage already is fully consumed feeding the mouths he already has.

On top of that, what labor has the employed man to offer out, even at an economically sound wage, much less a living wage?

This is why demanding any sort of minimum wage, even one touted as a "living wage," is counterproductive. To the extent that there's "always room for one more," or there's "always some fat" that can be cut out of spending, it's always better to pay the economically sound wage than the living wage: more men can get employed and have a chance to be that "one more" and to cut "some fat" out of his own spending--spending that only with employment becomes possible.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

"Able to support a family" implies no work at all at a wage, because there is no money with which to pay.

I'm not sure what you intend this statement to mean. He doesn't work for a wage... because he has to support a family... which doesn't imply a need for income? There's some ambiguity here.

It sounds like you're committed to an ideology that doesn't take account of human nature. I'm sure that's not right, because your authority was a thoughtful person; but we do actually have to raise families for society, and thus the economy, to survive. Doubtless he understood that at some level.

The claim here isn't extravagant. It's not that workers should be drinking coffee, and smoking big cigars. It's that they should be able to do what we as a society need them to do, which is to survive and raise the next generation. If we can't afford for them to do that, there's a huge problem somewhere.

E Hines said...

I understood you to mean that a man being paid a living wage, and so able to support a family, must himself have work to offer the unemployed man: Perhaps he can work for one of those being paid 'excessive' wages. Presumably they have some money to pass around. Even if 'excessive' really means 'able to support a family,' that implies plenty of work....

I'm simply suggesting that the living wage is fully consumed by the employed man and his own family; he has no money left over to pay a wage to another--thus, he has no work to offer for wages. This has nothing to do with nature, it has everything to do with limits of resources.

Free markets make the most efficient use of limited resources, including labor and the money--or kind--available to pay for it. Free markets also are the most moral, for the reasons I've argued before. Mandating a minimum wage, whether a hard number or some guess at "living," destroys that free market.

It is the case that when men are free to see to their own wants and needs, goods and services will appear for trade; competition will hold prices to their natural level, which is the cost required to produce the good or service for exchange; men are free to negotiate their own labor and wage exchange; and overall prosperity rises. It's certainly true that there will be, even in this regime, some men who cannot see to their own wants and needs, but the overall prosperity generated by the free market will produce the additional resources with which to take care of these few.

But what is a man's true need for a living wage? That's for him to decide, not any central authority: the actually required living wage will vary from man to man and from circumstance to circumstance for a particular man, and only that man, or those men, know what their need is from time to time. The wage mandate takes away that flexibility, and each man's judgment. It's the mandate that denies human nature, not its lack.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

I understood you to mean...I'm simply suggesting that the living wage is fully consumed by the employed man and his own family; he has no money left over to pay a wage to another--thus, he has no work to offer for wages. This has nothing to do with nature, it has everything to do with limits of resources.

Oh, I see. The problem comes from the changing of terms. We've spoken of the same wage as a 'livable' wage and an 'excessive' wage. The two terms imply different things. Excessive implies excess, which suggests there will be some extra to spend on the business of raising children.

Although, really, maybe the gap is not so great. Even if the man's 'livable' or 'excessive' wage is only so large as to raise his family, there will still be a lot of consuming involved in doing so versus a wage that would only allow him to support himself. Kids eat a lot of groceries -- around here, we're going through several gallons of milk a week!

My point isn't so much tied to whether this represents a 'living' or an 'excess.' It's that we need the man to raise the kids if this train ride is to carry on another generation. Otherwise... what's the point? If we're just doing this for the one generation (if, as Keynes said, 'in the long run we're all dead'), why work at all? We could get by for a single generation on genuine plunder, just living off the seed corn left us by the last generation.

E Hines said...

It's why I defined "excessive" a bit above (which I should have defined as "excess;" the two terms have different meanings, and "excess" is what an economist most often talks about). I've also been tacitly assuming "liveable wage" meant enough to support a family, which may be the single man alone; a man and his wife; or a man, his wife, and however many kids they have.

It's that we need the man to raise the kids if this train ride is to carry on another generation.

Indeed. But if this is to be achieved through a mandate for a living wage, then why must the man work at all? Just give him the money. Until the money runs out, which it is certain to do if the money given exceeds the economic value of whatever labor he does. It's just been my contention that a market very few fetters--including in this context, no wage mandate--is the market most likely to help the most people to raise the healthiest kids for the greatest number of generations.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

But if this is to be achieved through a mandate for a living wage, then why must the man work at all? Just give him the money.

There's a mandate that covers this problem as well. :)

Unlike the American government, the Church is interested in the virtue of its members. Working for your living is good for the soul, and idleness is really not. Charity is good for the soul, but it's dangerous for the recipient.

That concern with the virtue of the poor ought to be particularly important in a Republic, in which the poorest vote as well as the richest, and thus their virtue is of tremendous interest to us. (Also, a democratic form of government is where you are likeliest to run into the danger of people voting themselves largess from the public treasury, so you want a population virtuous enough to want to earn its living honestly instead.) However, when you found a state on the freedom of conscience, you end up losing the capacity to have a state that is interested in the virtue of its citizens. You've made it none of the state's proper business what they think virtuous, or whether they live up to the standards they set for themselves, or if they bother to set any such standards at all. You can define crimes, but not sins; harms to others, but not vices.

The slow crumbling of our society's morals is little more than the unfolding of that idea. More and more, the courts tell us that our opinions on virtue and vice simply have no place in the law, and we must let people do as they please.

Texan99 said...

"when you found a state on the freedom of conscience, you end up losing the capacity to have a state that is interested in the virtue of its citizens"

Or, we have a society that is interested in the virtue of its citizens, but trusts the citizens more than it trusts the state to decide what virtue is. We can remain interested in what someone does without asserting the right to control it. We can concentrate on a few areas where people have to agree on virtue in order to live peacefully together (no murder, theft, etc.), and then we respect people's decisions about their own moral quandaries whenever we can do so without courting violent anarchy. An important part of finding that balance is that, as much as possible, we resist the temptation to rescue people from the consequences of their bad choices, before they've even had a chance to register the connection and resolve to try something different from now on. That is: repentance, then mercy--the order of events matters.

If we discover that people find prosperity and fulfillment without resorting to fraud and violence, but we still think they're lacking in virtue, then either we're mistaken about what virtue is, or we're describing a spiritual problem that's outside the sphere of politics. It's not the job of government to maximize people's chances of a good interview at the Pearly Gates. We have other institutions for that, but we don't give them a police force.

E Hines said...


Charity is good for the soul, but it's dangerous for the recipient.

My understanding of the position, maybe because the understanding comports so well with my own position, is that the danger is not in the receiving per se of charity, but in becoming dependent on the charity. That's also the danger of delivering charity: the benefactor becomes as addicted to the beneficiary's dependency as the beneficiary can to the charity itself. Neither of which argues against charity, only that it be done with care.

The slow crumbling of our society's morals is little more than the unfolding of that idea. More and more, the courts tell us that our opinions on virtue and vice simply have no place in the law, and we must let people do as they please.

The one is the failure of our education system, led by the laziness of parents. The other is a failure of We the People, who continually elect representatives reluctant to impeach judges who violate their oaths of office. Neither are a failure of government not mandating this or that moral system. It isn't government's role to protect us from ourselves.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

Or, we have a society that is interested in the virtue of its citizens, but trusts the citizens more than it trusts the state to decide what virtue is.

Well, except that it doesn't trust the citizens either: popular referenda on questions of virtue that touch 'free expression' aren't permitted either. So it's not just that the state can't try to craft and enforce a code of virtue, which is probably for the best. It's that the state will enforce on communities an incapacity to set standards touching virtue and vice.

The one is the failure of our education system, led by the laziness of parents. The other is a failure of We the People, who continually elect representatives reluctant to impeach judges who violate their oaths of office.

I don't know that I agree. I think it may really be keeping their oaths of office to uphold the principle that freedom of conscience means not telling people what their conscience has to hold, nor imposing any attempts to force them to obey the reasoning of others' consciences. It just may be that our society will not survive the full force of that principle's application.

E Hines said...

Or, we have a society that is interested in the virtue of its citizens, but trusts the citizens more than it trusts the state to decide what virtue is.
Well, except that it doesn't trust the citizens either.... It's that the state will enforce on communities an incapacity to set standards touching virtue and vice.


You're conflating the state with society.

I think it may really be keeping their oaths of office to uphold the principle that freedom of conscience....

It's not judges upholding (this) principle, it's the rulings judges use to uphold it. A New Jersey state judge, for instance, upholding the right of a man to rape his wife because Sharia authorizes it. A Federal judge holding that a man's thoughts are regulable under the Commerce Clause, at least when those thoughts turn to Obamacare. A Supreme Court CJ rewriting Obamacare to insert a tax into it where Congress had explicitly rejected and removed the tax from it. A Supreme Court Justice holding that the Constitution is a living thing, but it lives through judicial "creative interpretation" from the bench as opposed to living through Article V. And so on. These are all judges claiming to support in one way or another that freedom of conscience. And mechanically violating their oaths of office in the doing.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

"Well, except that it doesn't trust the citizens either"--No, we don't have one system or the other, we have a competition among a lot of visions. But you're painting a picture of going to an extreme, so I'm pointing out the other end of a spectrum.

I agree it's possible, especially through muddle-headedness, to end up with the worst of both worlds: people who undermine society's ability to impose order by asserting that no moral judgments are possible, combined with people who undermine freedom of conscience by arrogating to themselves the right to make all moral judgments for everyone. Most people, in my experience, believe that the state should obviously make some moral judgments but just as obviously should butt out of others.

The big difficulty comes when we find that lots of us don't agree where that dividing line is. I'd try to draw the dividing line so that the state butts into moral judgments only when they pertain to physical violence and fraud. Others would concentrate on moral judgments about how other people should be forced to share more, or to take care of more people voluntarily, or avoid sexual infractions, or adopt sound views of the Trinity, or stop home-schooling their kids, or give up eating meat, or build green, or be faithful to one's spouse, or embrace polygamy, or quit drinking, or go to church more, or not write pornographic novels.

The one thing that's clear to me is that you can't take the whole concept of a moral judgment out of government; people who think they've done so just have a definition of "moral judgment" that's confined to the religious precepts they reject, usually about things like sex and drugs. Nevertheless, not all moral judgments are alike, and I think some are more amenable to a centralized uniformity while others are better left to private consciences. Sometimes that's a messy process of separation that involved equal parts (1) compromise to avoid outright civil war over thorny moral disputes and (2) compromise to avoid bloody anarchy where everyone's at the mercy of the best-armed pirates in the neighborhood.

Grim said...

Mr. Hines:

I agree that those are bad rulings, even preposterous ones, but excepting the Shariah one I'm not sure I see the tie you see with freedom of conscience.

State and society are distinct for Hegel, but mostly we treat them as having at least some overlap. For me, the overlap comes particularly at local levels where the officials of the township or county are drawn from among the community, the elections are small and you really know each other. These hybrid state/society organs interact with purely social institutions, like churches, but they don't fully lose their character of being social by being a part of the (very small, very local) state.

Higher levels of organization, however, seem quite distinct. At the point that you need a bureaucracy to carry out your function, rather than perhaps a secretary, you're not society any more. That can happen at very low levels in urban areas, which is one reason those areas are so unpleasant to live in: there's not that smoothing level in which we are all friends and know each other socially, and approach problems with the intention of working them out somehow.

Tex,

I agree that you can't take the concept of moral judgment out of government. It seems as if there might have been a happy medium between "You must have this view of the Trinity to hold office" and the weird place we are now. We seem to have hit upon the idea of not having community laws from which you could move away if you did not like them, to having a constant screaming match about what's right, what's offensive, and hadn't you better shut up and apologize?

I prefer freedom of movement coupled with a liberty for communities to set local standards. The more communities are constrained, the more you can't get away from the screaming, and the more the moral ground seems to slide away like sand from under the feet.

Texan99 said...

Liberty for communities to set local standards on what speech content would be restricted? Wow, that's about as far as I can imagine from anything I'd tolerate without active rebellion. A community that behaves that way is my deadly enemy; I'll undermine it with the last ounce of strength in my body, and I won't mourn it when it decays into dust. But if the communities want to set decibel standards on how loud people can scream their outrage over an idea that offends them so much they think no one else has a right to express it, that's OK with me. "Time, place, and manner" restrictions often can be imposed without stifling discourse unreasonably.

If moral standards slide away because people are too free to express dangerous thoughts, and by expressing them they convince a lot of people to agree, well, I'll find a way to live with that. It beats laws against heresy.

Grim said...

I'm sure you can find a community in America that wouldn't set any such restrictions. On the other hand, I like zoning laws that won't allow strip joints to open near churches or playgrounds or day cares. That's setting a local standard on something SCOTUS considers an act of free speech and expression, but I wouldn't be opposed to a community saying, "Actually, just no strip joints at all in the county limits."

There will still be strip joints in America, and if they're an important part of your life you can move closer to them if you want. Nobody's going to be denied access to strip joints who really wants to spend time in them.

I'm not sure how many of these people there are, but more in some places than others, and that's fine: that's what it means to have a community, with community standards. Athens, GA, permits them but has only one in the whole town as far as I know (having never set foot in it). Atlanta was overrun with them.

E Hines said...

State and society are distinct for Hegel, but mostly we treat them as having at least some overlap.

What you mean "we," Paleface? [g] Government is, everywhere and always, a hireling of the people. Not even at the local level is government Rousseau-ian; government and the people most assuredly are not one and the same. In a free society, at any rate. It may be entirely true that the members of the local community and the men of the community's government generally are friends or at least friendly, and that does certainly facilitate working out problems, but the community's government remains separate from and subordinate to the members of that community. There is no middle ground there short of tyranny.

The ruling that a man's thoughts are regulable by government utterly destroys freedom of conscience. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for a very long time. Roberts' Obamacare ruling was just an extension of my argument that judges rule in violation of their oaths of office with too much impunity; it had little to do, directly, with freedom of conscience.

Eric Hines

E Hines said...

...zoning laws that won't allow strip joints to open near churches....

I'm not sure I agree with this one. I grew up in an era and an area where the reverends and priests were sufficiently arrogant that they demanded the sinners come to their churches; they refused to visit the bars and brothels and... where the sinners were. A strip joint opening across the parking lot from the church would come very close to satisfying those priests' demand to come to them.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

What you mean "we," Paleface? [g]

I mean that Hegel is pretty much alone among political philosophers in spending a lot of time on civil society as strictly distinct from government. Usually when people write about what they expect 'us' to do 'as a society,' they really mean that the state will do it. But that's not the only option: there are a whole range of private social clubs, churches, and so forth that 'we' can use to do things.

But these things are governed too, you know. They're not the state, but they may follow Robert's Rules or some other system of governance to make decisions, elect officers, and so forth. The distinction between the state at the lower levels and civil society blurs: a homeowner's association may levy fines, and will have the state backing it up in doing so. A church may excommunicate, which if you are a sincere member may seem a fate worse than prison, since it endangers your immortal soul and not merely the body you inhabit for this brief life.

So the hard distinction you want to draw seems very Modern, which is appropriate because your inspirations are 18th century. Still, I think there's not a bright line between society and the state: the HOA example makes clear that the two run together in important ways at the lowest level of formal governance.

Grim said...

I'm not sure I agree with this one.

That's the beauty part of the system I'm proposing: I'm not asking you to agree with it! By all means, seek a community that accords with your values.

Texan99 said...

Were you talking about strip clubs? I thought you were talking about freedom of speech. In any case I thought I made it plain that "time, place, and manner" restrictions can be safely applied as long as people don't get used to the idea that they're entitled to combat bad ideas by declaring them heresy, rather than by refuting them.

E Hines said...

..church may excommunicate, which if you are a sincere member may seem a fate worse than prison....

It seems to me that if you were a sincere member, you wouldn't have done the thing the drew the excommunication, but that may be for another thread.

Your HOA example is a very good illustration of the danger of blurring the line between society and government. Your example is the better for its generosity: many HOAs have foreclosed on homes and been upheld by the courts. It's become shockingly routine, too, for HOAs to fine residents for flying the US flag; although here the blurring works in our direction: more often than not, public outcry forces the HOA to relent. Better to keep the line sharp and bright.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

Were you talking about strip clubs? I thought you were talking about freedom of speech.

What I meant to be talking about is freedom of conscience, which is the much broader freedom that embraces freedom of religion, but also a general freedom to decide for yourself what is right and wrong. We have a kind of Millean principle that this should be a private, individual decision except where a certain kind of demonstrable harm can be shown. What I think is that this is too strong: a community ought to have more say about what its standards are, provided that we are free to leave if we don't like them.

It seems to me that if you were a sincere member, you wouldn't have done the thing the drew the excommunication, but that may be for another thread.

If you like, although I'm thinking of cases -- more common in Medieval history -- when the excommunication was more politically motivated than justified.

Your HOA example is a very good illustration of the danger of blurring the line between society and government.

OK, but then how does the HOA enforce its rules? Or should they not be allowed to have enforceable rules?

E Hines said...

Some of its rules the HOA ought not to be allowed to have. In no case should it be able to act as a government in enforcing the rules it does have. Or should a canasta club be allowed to claim a home for a violation of a rule?

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

I have less difficulty that you, perhaps, in drawing a line between the state and an organization with governance. There is no organization to which I can appeal if the state gets out of hand. Might excommunication be more unpleasant to someone than prison? Maybe, but I don't care. I'd rather go to prison than lose my husband's good opinion--does that mean I've blurred the lines between my marriage and the State? It's not about whether we will sometimes suffer from how people treat us, it's about the special dangers of a state.

I wouldn't personally cede to a church the power to resolve all issues of conscience for me, but if I did, I guess I'd be saying I acknowledged its right to impose a penalty on me that I'd almost hate worse than death. The thing is, I wouldn't get to make that decision for my neighbor. So by all means, defrock heretic priests, excommunicate unruly Church members, and fire people from your PETA chapter when they defend animal torture: I have no objection. Where I draw the line is at laws against expressing ideas of a particular content that can be enforced by police who can confiscate my property, imprison me, or even kill me. I didn't sign up for that deal, implicitly or otherwise; in fact, I was raised with the solid assumption that my citizenship package includes a Constitution protection against it.

I had a Constitutional law professor who liked to make provocative arguments. He said that the church claims confession is good for the soul, so why is it wrong for the state to convict people on the basis of confessions extracted by torture? The distinction between the church and the state--both of which involve governance--was left as an exercise for the student.

Texan99 said...

"What I meant to be talking about is freedom of conscience, which is the much broader freedom that embraces freedom of religion, but also a general freedom to decide for yourself what is right and wrong. We have a kind of Millean principle that this should be a private, individual decision except where a certain kind of demonstrable harm can be shown. What I think is that this is too strong: a community ought to have more say about what its standards are, provided that we are free to leave if we don't like them."

A community ought to have "more say"--more than what? I advocated giving the community all kinds of say over behavior involving violence or fraud, regardless of what the perpetrator claims his conscience tells him about violence and fraud. Beyond that, there's a lot of gray area. I'm sure a community would like to impose all kinds of standards, and communities traditionally have imposed all they could get away with. Flog an escaping slave, regulate the size of billboards, burn a heretic who opposes tithing, prevent littering, subject a Jew to a pogrom, impose house arrest on an unchaste woman. In choosing which of these impositions goes too far, I think we need a better standard than "the community should have a say."

Anyway, calling it a "community" obscures the point: the people living nearby certainly can refuse to deal socially or professionally with someone who acts outside their standards. The question is whether they should be able to set the sheriff's dogs on him.

Texan99 said...

HOAs are tricky, because theoretically they're entirely voluntary contractual arrangements rather than governments. The problem is, they're not really that voluntary, most people have no idea they're subjecting themselves to a contract, and the contract--which virtually no residents understand--calls for something that's very hard to distinguish from a government. (And not just any government, but a real old-fashioned unlimited tyranny.) It's a confusing mess. I rather like the approach of some states, in which an HOA that acts too much like a government automatically has a variety of state-like due process and equal protection requirements imposed on it. But in the end there's hardly any substitute for community ethics that prevent little Nazis from completely taking over the pseudo-government.

Grim said...

The question is whether they should be able to set the sheriff's dogs on him.

That's the bright line distinction we have with church and state, which I think Mr. Hines is drawing on in his attempt at bright-lining a division between all sorts of social organizations and the state. The reason it makes HOAs a good example is that they're voluntary organizations that apply governance to the community, but that can appeal to the state for violence if its rules are violated. (By violence I mean seizure of funds, property, arrests for 'trespassing' if they seize your home, etc.)

But of course, other organizations can do this too. Your canasta club -- I'm not sure I know what canasta is -- might be able to throw you out and, if you should claim to be setting up an independent branch, appeal to the state to force you to stop using their logo. They could even do appeal to the state to force you to stop speaking, insofar as your speech claimed associations with them.

I suppose you'd say that fits your criterion of fraud, but in religious terms it seems like you could run into cases of genuine belief (i.e., the person was not fraudulently claiming association but believed his claim to be the truth).

In any case, I share your disdain for little Nazis. Even local government -- even non-government governance -- can be tyrannical and deeply annoying. I just think there's sometimes a place for things like zoning laws that restrict, even completely, some forms of 'free expression' that your 'freedom of conscience' might tell you are perfectly appropriate, but that the town or county can't abide. Strip clubs are a handy example of free expression that is deeply unwanted by a lot of communities, for reasons that seem perfectly respectable but that really are declarations of morals that are theoretically covered by freedom of conscience.

E Hines said...

...HOAs a good example is that they're voluntary organizations that apply governance to the community, but that can appeal to the state for violence if its rules are violated.

Except that HOAs that give that sort of organization a bad name don't appeal to the state--they apply their violence themselves. I'd have a lot less problem if the HOAs did appeal to the state, but they do their best to avoid a jury's judgment. "Little Nazis" is an entirely appropriate characterization for HOAs generally.

Canasta is a variant on rummy. Like bridge, though, it can be an excuse to gather for socializing or a means of making money.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

Except that HOAs that give that sort of organization a bad name don't appeal to the state--they apply their violence themselves.

How does that work? HOA guards show up at my house and forcibly evict me? I call the police, and they tell me that the state can't take sides in the dispute?

Canasta is a variant on rummy.

Ah, that explains why I had a vague mental association between it and Bugs Bunny. :)

Texan99 said...

The HOA itself doesn't trouble to evict you. It gets a lien on your house via the deed restrictions (a/k/a covenants) and then uses a violation of some part of the bylaws to create a claim against you. Sometimes that's a fine or penalty, or maybe an unpaid fee. Most often there is a legal dispute, and they turn their lawyers loose to run up fees as you argue about it. The covenants and bylaws provide that their lien secures all claims including their legal fees. Then they foreclose the lien, and that's how you lose your house: the sheriff evicts you on the basis of a court order. This isn't a rare pattern; in Houston there were thousands of such foreclosures. A friend of mine made a hobby of tallying them all on a website. I was involved for homeowners in more than one such case in court. Luckily, in the last 10-15 years the Texas legislature has cleaned things up a bit, but an HOA is still nothing to mess with. People should be very careful about who gets a lien on their homes, but I found that homeowners mostly didn't understand what the word "lien" meant, and very often couldn't be made to believe it meant something that could result in a foreclosure.

Legally these cases are very hard to combat. Politically and socially they should be less difficult: if the residents of the neighborhood are disgusted, they have only to throw out the board, fire the lawyers, and drop the lawsuit. Unfortunately, most HOA bylaws, in my experience, contain only laughable protections of the franchise and guarantees of fair elections. I saw some ugly situations. I would not live in an HOA.

E Hines said...

I found that homeowners mostly didn't understand what the word "lien" meant, and very often couldn't be made to believe it meant something that could result in a foreclosure.

This is the other side of my We the People mantra: I have little to no sympathy for folks who refuse to trouble themselves read the contracts they're signing before they sign. "Fine" print is too small? Get a magnifying glass. Language is hard to understand? Concentrate, and/or get a friend or a (gasp!) lawyer (my experience is that T is typical; it's the shysters that are the rare ones) to help. Still can't understand the document? Walk away. There just isn't any excuse for a grown, adult human being signing something they haven't troubled to read or to understand. As well sign a blank sheet of paper and hand it to a guy in a checkered sport jacket and polka dot tie.

Dali did that, but he was insane, and his "nurse" took advantage of that.

Eric Hines

Texan99 said...

It sure surprised me, but I'm often surprised to find what people think about how the law works; it's been so many years since I became a lawyer that I've forgotten how I thought it worked way back when. I don't expect a lot of technical expertise from an ordinary consumer, but it didn't occur to me that the term "lien" would be such a widespread mystery. But I went door-to-door in my neighborhood in a successful campaign to be elected president of the civic club, and had that conversation with more people than I can count. Many people confidently told me an HOA couldn't foreclose. They may have been relying on folk wisdom about the relatively strong restrictions on foreclosing a homestead in Texas, but there is an exception for liens that predate your title, and covenants qualify. Maybe people know what a "mortgage" is, but "lien" is more unfamiliar. Well, I was shocked, too; before 2000 I had never heard of HOA foreclosures, though they'd been going on for some time.

People were also absolutely certain that an HOA, insofar as it sort of acted like a government, must be bound by all the restrictions that tie a true state entity's hands. They believed that things like equal protection under the laws were some kind of free-floating right rather than specific protections in a specific document that kick in only in the case of "state action." More generally, like a lot of people, they had trouble distinguishing between what is so and what should be so.

I was proud of my neighborhood for rising up, but the whole experience still was a big factor in our decision to move out here. There were too many people there eager to trade their liberty for the ability to control their neighbors.

Grim said...

They do, though, then appeal to the state for the violence? It's the state's courts that they'll ask to issue the order that will cause the deputy sheriffs to show up and evict you? That's the point I was trying to make about the overlapping of governance and government at the lower levels: the purely social governance of the HOA ends up being enforced by the state, even though the rules aren't the state's rules but the 'social' rules.

I lived in an HOA neighborhood once, but we were renting at that time. Also, the guy who ran it was a WWII vet. Everyone but me and my wife hated him, but I never once had a bad experience with the guy.

Texan99 said...

It's true that HOAs in my experience do not hire thugs to rough people up. The harm they do is through enforcing bad contracts. Generally I'm not that sympathetic to people who sign bad contracts, but I'm not entirely against some kinds of consumer protections where abuses have been demonstrated and there's a big enough mismatch of sophistication. Nevertheless, I'm much more comfortable with trying to persuade people to boycott the arrangements to start with, because it's a slippery slope when the state starts telling us what kind of contracts we can sign, for our own good.

Some states attack the problem by construing all ambiguities against the HOA, as the drafter of the document. I think that makes good sense. Texas doesn't use that approach, as I recall, because the legislature passed a law a few decades ago intended to help neighborhoods whose covenants had lapsed get them back into effect. It was kind of aimed at Houston's no-zoning culture, which really irritates Austin; covenants were supposed to substitute for zoning boards. While they were at it, the legislature decided that HOA boards should have tons of discretion so they could make neighborhoods' dreams come true without anyone joggling their elbow, so the law provided that grants of unfettered discretion to boards would be broadly construed. Really terrible idea. Covenants routinely provided that boards should basically be allowed to do anything they hadn't been specifically forbidden to do, and by-laws usually gave them the right to root out anything they believed in their sole discretion was a "nuisance." Very Mommy-Knows-Best. It was a different time, and a different legislature.