Robert Barron - Why Too Much Power in One Place Is a Bad Thing
When, let's say, one corporation or a conglomeration of corporations monopolizes an aspect of the economy, it's bad. They can set prices at their whim. They eliminate competition. They exclude people from free participation in the market. They drive prices up. All that is seen as unhealthy within a capitalist system. A feature of Catholic social teaching that I think is often overlooked or at least misunderstood is a certain animus against the concentration of power within a society. Catholic social teaching wants power distributed as widely as possible, which seems fairer and actually more efficient. Now, we can see it maybe most readily in the economic order, but this obtains, too, in the political order and the cultural order.
Hyper-concentrations of power, Catholic social teaching thinks, is a bad thing. Let's look at it now first economically again, maybe the most obvious. When, let's say, one corporation or a conglomeration of corporations monopolizes an aspect of the economy, it's bad. They can set prices at their whim. They eliminate competition. They exclude people from free participation in the market. They drive prices up. All that is seen as unhealthy within a capitalist system. Go back now to the early twentieth century and Theodore Roosevelt's trust-busting.
Well, it was against that kind of monopolizing within the economy. Or think today, just very recently in Congress, there were moves against Google and Facebook and some of the big tech conglomerates. Because the same thing: there was too much power economically being concentrated in one place. I know when you talk about, well, therefore you're calling for the redistribution of wealth, it makes people nervous because they think right away of the government doing that. Well, Catholic social teaching does indeed think the government can do that to some degree. Take trust-busting as one example; minimum wage requirements; limitations to the workday; other ways that the government can regulate the economy. Taxation itself is a kind of redistribution of the wealth. But Catholic social teaching also holds that the natural rhythms of a market economy can accomplish this.
Think of John Paul II in "Centesimus Annus," which says that profit-making itself is a way of redistributing the wealth. Now, why? Well, because if you're noticing, look, that guy's making tons of money in that segment of the economy, that means I can get involved. There's money to be made. I can maybe propose a more efficient product. And the healthy competition that ensues is a way of distributing wealth and power within the economy. Again, the ideal is to avoid these hyper-concentrations, which can become tyrannical. So that's the economic order. But it's also true in the political order.
Now, obviously the case in certain forms of dictatorship, think of the oppressive tyrannies of the twentieth century, think of certain theocracies on the scene today. When there's a hyper-concentration in one party or one perspective, that can lead to forms of tyranny. But if you think, "Oh, that's all just kind of distant business. It doesn't really apply to me". I don't know. Look at my home state of California. Try running as a pro-life politician in California or Illinois or Massachusetts. I think you'll see what the hyper-concentration of political power looks like. When there's a state or city that's been governed by one party for decades, that's almost a formula for political corruption.
So Catholic social teaching wants in the political order power to be more widely distributed. A wide variety perhaps of political parties, political perspectives. Maybe things like term limits: not allowing politicians or certain parties to dominate a system. So again, spreading out, in this case, political power. We can also see it in the cultural order. Again, extreme examples: look in the twentieth century in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Russia, when there was one form of art, one form of pictorial representational art, that was deemed acceptable. Socialist realism in Russia; the Nazis had their own very particular form. Every other type of artistic expression was censored or pilloried. This sort of thing, too, is a hyper-concentration of cultural power in one way.
Now, again, lest you feel like, "Oh well, those are weird things that happened far away and long ago". I don't know. Look at Hollywood today. Look at the TV shows and movies, very often coming out of a very singular and restricted ideological perspective. Is there one type of art in other words, one ideological aesthetic perspective, that’s seen as legitimate? Well, that excludes all sorts of people from participating in the cultural realm. It's a hyper-concentration of power. Catholic social teaching is against this sort of thing. It wants power, economic, political, cultural, to be widely distributed. Again, it doesn't mean this has to happen through state "diktat". There's all kinds of means by which this sort of distribution can occur. And in fact, one of the most basic forms of justice affirmed by Catholic social teaching is called distributive justice.
So to take the goods of the world, which have a universal destination, by the way, they're designed really for everybody, and to make sure they're distributed as widely and humanely as possible. What comes to mind here is one of my intellectual heroes, the great G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton back in the 1910s and 20s was advocating an economic theory that he called distributism. Now, it's coming from this idea, this Catholic idea, of distributive justice. Chesterton was uneasy obviously with the forms of socialism and communism that were ascendant in his time, but he was also very uneasy with a sort of undisciplined, unconstrained capitalism or free market economy that also provided for a hyper-concentration of wealth. What he liked very much was a more local, widely distributed political and economic situation.
Just recently, I was reading a very good commentary by the great Chesterton commentator Dale Ahlquist, and he suggested that the term distributism has never really caught on. And it is a little bit odd, unless you see the connection to distributive justice. But he suggested as an alternative the term localism. And not bad, because Chesterton was against these kinds of great conglomerations of power at the upper level, economically, politically, culturally, and he liked what was closer to the ground, widely distributed within a society. So distributism, localism. By the way, if you want to see it on vivid artistic display, go get "The Lord of the Rings" movies.
What you see in the Shire, because of course, Tolkien was very influenced by Chesterton, what you see in the Shire is the hobbits living in simplicity, close to the ground, people running their own small businesses, making their own tools, etc. And notice Tolkien's great animus against Sauron, these people who had these great sort of industrial complexes. Well, that was his commentary against the kind of industrial capitalism of his own time. So again, Catholic social teaching, I think so often misunderstood and underappreciated, cuts against both the extreme left and the extreme right. Calls for the universal distribution of goods, as well as private property; wants power, which is seen as legitimate, power is not a bad thing because God's all-powerful, but it wants power distributed politically, economically, and culturally as widely as possible.