In this episode, Trent sits down with Reason TV to explain why Catholics can’t be socialists.
Reason TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Zwg9gA5T8
Transcription:
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. I was recently invited onto Reason tv, their libertarian channel here on YouTube to discuss Catholicism and socialism. But in today’s episode, I want to share a clip from our interview where we discuss one of the hosts, Zach has been noticing more and more of his libertarian friends are Catholic and he’s not Catholic. So we wanted to learn more about the Catholic faith and whether libertarians should become Catholic. Now, he and I, as you can see in the interview, we have very different views on particular moral issues, but he was very open-minded, asked really great questions, and it was a great opportunity to share the Catholic faith with a libertarian audience, many of whom are probably not religious at all. So I hope you enjoy this interview and that you can share it with other people. There is no such thing as Catholic economics per se, so there’s no such thing as Catholic economics.
There’s no such thing as Catholic medicine. It’s not like Catholics discovered, actually we have our own way to do heart transplants and all the other non-Catholics do heart transplants a different way. No, it’s just one kind of medicine, much the same. Economics is a science. It’s the science of studying the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited demand or however you want to define it. The law of supply and demand isn’t owned by any religion. It’s just the law of human nature. But there is Catholic medicine in the sense of, hey, there’s some so-called medical procedures that Catholics recognize are not moral elicit like abortion, for example, because it directly takes the life of an innocent human being, or Catholics recognize some economic arrangements, like some wages can be unjust even if two people freely agree to them because there are extenuating circumstances that result in a person agreeing to all a wage that is incapable of providing him the basic dignities of life or something like that. So I think that’s always important to recognize When it comes to Catholic economics, there’s no science of economics is the science of economics. The Catholicism, like with other sciences, provides moral principles, basic ones, and then people might disagree on the finer points of application.
Zach Weissmueller:
There are no Catholic economics per se. I wonder if there are Catholic politics or if there, I guess the reason partly why I wanted to have this conversation is just the mere fact that I have noticed that a lot of libertarians seem to be Catholic. A lot of libertarians around me, a lot of, we mentioned Liz here,
Liz Wolfe:
Just surrounding usac. This is all, it’s a conspiracy to proselytize, which Catholics don’t really tend to do that much of. But John and I have joined forces.
Zach Weissmueller:
There’s others on staff. There’s some prominent libertarians like Tom Woods who’s a very devout Catholic. Have you noticed some sort of overlap between libertarians and Catholics, and what do you think explains that?
Trent Horn:
Well, I think what can explain it, and we do also have to keep in mind, I think there’s probably a greater number or percentage of non-Catholic libertarians, and so often heads can butt in that regard. But I am noticing more vocal individuals who are proposing economic commentary and solutions to economic problems who are Catholics often tend to look at libertarianism or be very sympathetic to other libertarian thinkers while trying to tweak some of the things that they’re saying. I think deep down it comes to, I think many libertarians, even if they’re not Catholic, even if they’re not Christian, they do have a correct understanding of human nature. I think that socialists often fail because it assumes that human nature is better than it really is. That people will naturally be altruistic. They’ll naturally work hard or extra hard to be extra productive, but to only receive back what society thinks that they should have and that they’re just naturally going to work for the common good of society.
And this goes back, I think, to Rousso who basically took the Christian ideas and inverted them, which is the idea. The Christian idea is were born in original sin. We’re born with a tendency to sin and it’s society, the family primarily, but also society at large. It’s that job to mold us into people who go against our selfish tendencies, our desire to sin, to serve God ourselves and our neighbors, to grow in virtue. So born, not born bad or not so good, not totally bad born bad society makes us good family, primarily the first society. But Rousseau and others would say, no, no, no, no. There was a first innocence, the myth of the noble savage that human beings are born good, and really it’s society that deforms them. It’s society that makes them materialistic and evil. To fix people, you have to fix society.
That’s the two groups. One group says to fix society, you have to fix people. Another group says to fix people, you have to fix society. Now, there can be unjust social structures. If a society enslaves a group of people based on their race and you belong to that race, it’s very difficult to flourish as a human being until you change that law to allow you to flourish. That’s preventing you from doing so because it’s an evil law. But really the problem is ultimately in the human heart. And so I think libertarians for a variety of ways, maybe it’s religious or maybe it’s just pessimism from just looking at the world as it is. My co-author Catherine Lic, and I call that Christian realism. We have Christian ideals, but we see the world as it is that you see, you know what? People aren’t always reliable. People care more about themselves than others. People, they drop the ball, they sin, they’re scandalous. And so libertarians, even if they’re not religious, they have a natural desire to want to diffuse power because of lack of trust in other human beings. And that kind of overlaps a bit with Christianity, understanding our sinful proclivities in that regard. So I think there can be a little bit of, I don’t know if that overlap makes sense of it.
Zach Weissmueller:
That does make a lot of sense. This is central.
Liz Wolfe:
This is very central to, I think, how I look at things and how I’m able to reconcile my Catholicism and my libertarianism. I think to me, it’s always very intuitively made sense that I believe man has fallen. And I don’t think that that is a hopeless thing. I think there’s accepting that as the starting point of man has fallen, and from the sort of more libertarian perspective, that man acts in his own rational self-interest. And then from the libertarian perspective, working to create systems that build that in and have that as the underpinning as opposed to altruism or benevolence as the underpinning. Just assuming that people will behave in their own rational and then in the realm of Catholicism, seeing okay, man has fallen. And so the means of salvation and the means of overcoming that is through the moral influence of the family and society and the church around you, and through turning toward God and toward prayer and toward confession to attempt to over the course of a lifetime better yourself and bring yourself closer to God.
But again, it’s not a, I think Catholicism seems very dark and cynical to people, but the idea that we are made in the image of God, the idea that we have access to confession, that we can repent and atone the fact that we can better ourselves and make ourselves more aligned with God and what he wants for us. To me, this is like a very fundamentally hopeful message. In the same way that with libertarianism, okay, just because we’re behaving in our own self-interest and that sometimes it means bad people are doing bad things, we can build a system that allows people to use that self-interest to guide them to be productive, and then we can engage in all of these voluntary transactions and build good things from that. To me, both things start from a really dark place, but they go to really hopeful places. And I think that that’s something that for whatever reason, a lot of my socialist friends or my non-Catholic friends don’t quite get where I think they have a fundamentally opposite starting place
Zach Weissmueller:
Sense.
Liz Wolfe:
Does
Trent Horn:
That make sense you? Oh, absolutely.
Zach Weissmueller:
Yeah. What’s interesting to me is it’s specifically Catholic.
Liz Wolfe:
Not even
Zach Weissmueller:
You’re right to point out Trent, that of course there are libertarians of all sorts of different faiths, or very commonly no faith because objectiveism is a big strain of libertarian thought, which is explicitly atheistic. But I don’t know, I haven’t done any surveys on this or anything. You just
Trent Horn:
Notice it.
Zach Weissmueller:
My impression, yeah, is that the outspoken religious libertarians seem to be Catholic. Is there something specifically Catholicism versus other variants of Christianity that you think for some reason aligns with this political philosophy?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I’d have to think about it more. I guess I do wonder why we don’t see more evangelicals, because there was an older thesis that Calvinists, for example, were the heralds of capitalism. That was Max Weber’s thesis, right? Why do we see Protestant countries more industrious, for example? And one theory was that, oh, well, in Protestant, in some forms, Protestantism was, especially Calvinism, you don’t know if you’re among the elect, right? God decides who’s the elect. He saves people, and you can’t lose your salvation. So it’s like, oh, well, how do I know I belong to the elect? Oh, we got to show it that your action. Well, how do you show that? Well, typically if you were Catholic, you would show it through acts of piety, say your rosary, you go to daily mass. But the Protestant reformation did away with that. So how do I show that if you’re Calvinists, we don’t have a lot of acts of piety in church.
Oh, well, I’ll be industrious and show that to other people, and I’ll work really hard though. I’ve heard other competing theories that one reason the industrious industrialism took off more in Protestant countries than versus Catholic ones in Europe was just their colder. And in the winter, you’d rather just be in a factory or a kiln. And whereas in southern Europe where it’s a lot more Catholic countries, it’s natural during the summer you have a siesta in the afternoon to deal with the heat. And in the winter months, that’s the time to enjoy yourself if you don’t have to harvest anything. So there’s different theories about that. But when it comes to Catholicism and Christianity, I do think it’s interesting that when people think of capitalism, oh, it’s just about selfishness. No, it doesn’t have to be about that. In fact, if it is about that, you end up not being able to have fruitful transac.
What makes a capitalist system work great is when it benefits both people. If your business only benefits one party yourself, it’s not going to stay in business long unless there is an external agency like the government that props it up and keeps it in business and continually funds and subsidizes it. So I mean, you look at what Jesus said, right? What’s the greatest commandment? Love your neighbor as yourself. So what’s interesting here is Jesus is saying, look, as a baseline, you will naturally love yourself. You will naturally provide for your self-interest. The greatest command is to love your neighbor, to develop virtue and to make an act of will, to do something that doesn’t come natural, but to do that to your neighbor, what you naturally do to yourself when it comes to providing for your self-interest. And Liz, I agree that it’s interesting when you’re talking about self-interest in a system where we serve one another while serving our own interests. That is the genius of free markets. It’s the famous quote from Smith. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Interest.
Liz Wolfe:
I have two theories on point as to why there are a lot of libertarian Catholics out there, though we are obviously just going entirely off of anti data here. We don’t actually have data that
Trent Horn:
It’s vibe. Okay, this is a vibes cast.
Liz Wolfe:
Now it’s a vibes cast, but I think one is libertarians and Catholics, I think both place a really high premium on consistency. We care about making sure there’s no holes, and sometimes that takes us to really crazy places. But the consistency, it’s like this extreme obsession, this fixation on internal consistency of the framework. And I find that to be really satisfying about Catholicism and really satisfying about libertarianism to many people. But that’s how my brain works. And then I think the other thing is Catholics and libertarians, I think both value and think a lot about humility. And I mean, we were even talking about Hayek and the knowledge problem earlier. And there’s a little bit of this sense within libertarianism of some of the folly of the state exercising so much power over us is that they will simply not know everything. They won’t have perfect knowledge.
And it is in fact very hard to understand what’s going on in all of the different sectors of the economy and then to ensure that people with aligned incentives are acting to manage each of those. And so libertarians recognize the fundamental foolishness of that endeavor. And I think humility is actually very central to libertarianism. And I think that’s dissatisfying to some people, right? Because some of the appeal of lefty socialism is a sense that we actually can fix all of the problems that a us, and actually we simply need to appoint the right people to positions of power. And actually pretty much all of these things can be managed and optimized, and yet that’s not really how it plays out in practice. And so I think Libertarians look at those historical examples and say, wait a second, we actually can’t really do this. And I think by the same token, humility is a significant part of Catholicism, and even the act of having faith and growing in your faith requires a certain amount of, I think for many people, a little bit of a jump of I am not going to be able to prove everything in a way that perfectly satisfies Christopher Hitchen’s objections.
But there’s still something deeper that is pulling at me that I know to be true on this very fundamental deep level. And I think with Catholicism, at least for me, the more I’ve tried to strengthen my humility, the deeper I found my faith to be,
Trent Horn:
If that makes sense. I have one last, yeah, I have one last theory popped in my head. I think that the Catholic commitment to natural law, I think also might explain why you see more Catholics who are outspoken among libertarians, even versus Protestants or many Protestants. Their ethics often come from a biblical perspective, but that’s difficult. When scripture was written at a time 2000 years ago when economies are just completely different. You can’t apply it one for one today, but you have a rich intellectual tradition within Catholicism of natural law and of following principles, first principles in metaphysics and reaching them to their natural conclusions in different situations. This would also explain why there are so many Catholics in the Supreme Court or in the judiciary. I mean, you could read articles going back to different Supreme Court nominations and some people saying, are there too many Catholics on the Supreme Court?
Why are there so many Catholics in the federal judiciary? Honestly, it’s the same reason why there’s so many Jews in law, why there’s so many Jewish lawyers, Judaism and Catholicism both have a rich legal tradition, right? Jews follow the rabbinic laws. And these are very analytic, well faceted systems that have been developed for Jews to memorize and have that kind of analytic legal, if that branching tree thinking and Catholics use something similar. So I think, so for many Catholics, when they approach and look at economics, we talk about natural law like in ethics or human anthropology. It applies very well to economics that if you do this as a government intervention, a business intervention, this is liable to happen. And I think the Catholic mind can graft onto that in a special way. So I think that, I don’t know, that might be another thing to look at. Could you
Zach Weissmueller:
Explain what natural law is? I am sure this is a complex topic, but I don’t know if you can boil it down a little bit for us.
Trent Horn:
Sure. So a law is basically a directive or a command that is issued by a competent authority. And so Catholics actually recognize four different kinds of laws. So we recognize the eternal law. The eternal law is just what God says, I made the world. Here’s how I want the world to be. I’m all knowing, all powerful, all good. So I made the universe, I want it to be this way. That’s his eternal law. The natural law is described as the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law. So if you were able, capable of reasoning, you can say, oh, there’s ways I’m supposed to act there, that I’m not just merely an animal driven by instinct. I was created with a purpose to act in a certain way. So for example, the most fundamental part of the natural law would probably be do good and avoid evil.
Okay? You can’t just stop there though, because you get what is good, what is evil. You got to branch out and figure out what all of that is. So natural law, when we recognize that there are moral commands embedded within nature that we can recognize. So Paul talks about this in Roman ones and Romans one and Romans two, that there is a law written on the human heart that you have a rational mind, even if you’re not religious, even if you’re on North Sentinel Island with not contact with the outside world, you can recognize this universal moral law. You’re supposed to participate in it and act in a certain way. And that is why many socialists would go against that say, ah, no. There is no such thing like that. We just decide what is most pragmatic and what will work best for society. There is no law above us that we have to adhere to or to follow.
And that’s why Marx and classical and communists have been so opposed to religion because they want to be the ultimate foundation of the moral life and take God out of that equation of the natural law. So that’s why similar with Nazi Germany and the Nuremberg trials say, look, there is a law even above nations by which nations can be judged. So that’s the natural law, and that we see that in virtue and vice and how we relate to one another. And from the natural law, then we get things like positive law. So we get human laws, we pass laws to govern society. We have laws in the church, civil laws, but even if you read Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from a Birmingham jail, and people are saying, why are you doing this? The law says you can’t eat at this lunch counter. Why can’t you respect the business owner’s? Right? To say that that’s the law. And what Martin Luther King Jr said in the letter to Birmingham Jail was, and he quotes St. Thomas Aquinas in the letter, he says, an unjust law is one that does not correspond to the natural law, the law of God. And so he said that these human laws that are unjust, well, they’re not really laws at all. They don’t command authority or obedience from us.
Zach Weissmueller:
I like that theory for the genesis of the Catholic Libertarian. It explains a lot to me. It makes me understand where Liz is coming from a bit more perhaps. And also you mentioned the Jewish representation and law. It’s interesting. There’s a lot of the libertarian luminaries are also Jewish thinkers, MEUs and Freedman and Rothbard. I wonder if there’s a similar explanation at play here, but yeah, you really
Liz Wolfe:
Managed to take, there are a lot of Jewish lawyers concept and bring that home and make that actually very salient and relevant. Frequently, people go to very dark places from the starting.
Zach Weissmueller:
If
Trent Horn:
You look on the internet, I am half my family’s Jewish. Interesting. My surname is actually Hornstein, and my grandfather changed his name after the war. He got beat up for being a Jew. So if I had kept it, I would’ve had a great law practice, Hornstein and Hornstein or something like that. Why
Liz Wolfe:
Aren’t you a Messianic Jew? I’m confused.
Trent Horn:
Well, because what I believe is that Jesus established, he established one church, one universal church. And so while you can be ethnically Jewish, what I just recognize is that in Jesus who is Jewish, Paul who is Jewish, they established just God’s covenant that was once just for the Jews has been expanded into the new covenant, has been expanded for all people. But I brought that up to say, yeah, when you look on the internet, there are people who say, not so nice things about me when they know that fact. But I like to turn that around to say, why are there Jews in so many of these places? It’s not necessarily something sinister. It’s that, well, that’s just a rich tradition, and just this idea of valuing the intellectual life or valuing the fact of wanting to understand not just even natural law, but just how does the natural world function.
So the word scientist, that word was coined just a few centuries ago in the Middle Ages. People often think of Aquinas and medieval Catholic theologians only talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. That’s not true. They actually practice what we call science today. They call that natural philosophy. And Albert the Great and others would catalog what we call scientific discoveries. They catalog that as natural philosophical discoveries. And so you have people like the Augustinian among Gregor Mendel, who is the father of genetics, and the Mendelian laws of inheritance, Monsignor George LaMere, a Catholic cleric who discovered what was later called the Big Bang theory. And so I think that within Catholicism in this reverence for God created the world with an intricate set of laws, metaphysical, ethical, scientific, a desire, and also many Protestant traditions say that we are so sinful.
The human mind is darkened. Its reasoning we can’t even know God without, by faith alone, basically. Well, no Catholics don’t have as dim a view of human nature. We don’t have as bright a view as the socialists do, but no, we can use our minds to discover the world God created. We can use our minds to know the evidence in the universe that God does exist. And so when all that’s put together, it would also e... Read more on Catholic.com