In this clip from Trent’s appearance on Pints with Aquinas Trent breaks down some elements of his socialism debate with Sam Rocha.
Welcome to the Council Of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council Of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And today, I’m pleased to share with you my debrief of my debate with Sam Rocha on the question can a Catholic be a socialist? This is a special excerpt of an episode of Pints With Aquinas with Matt Fradd.
So Matt and I were talking about socialism and communism, but we recorded the podcast the morning after my debate with Sam. So Matt asked me a bunch of questions about it. And so I thought, “Well, let’s do our debrief right here and now.” So here’s an excerpt of that episode. If you want to hear the whole thing, be sure to go to Pints With Aquinas, to be able to subscribe and hear our entire conversation.
But for now here on today’s episode, I’ll share with you the debrief where Matt and I talked about the debate and the points that I made there. Also, if you’re a Patreon to Matt Fradd, you’ll be able to get the conversation he and I had about distributism. So be sure to go to check out Pints with Aquinas and without further ado, here’s my debrief on the Sam Rocha debate with Mr. Matt Fradd.
A professor, I think, at the University of British Columbia, commented on my book, Can a Catholic be a socialist? And he disagreed with the thesis. I said, “Well, would you like to debate the thesis?” I’d actually been looking for a Catholic socialist to debate the subject because I wrote the book on it. And I had critiqued previous people who had written articles or published in America Magazine or the Catholic Herald that were defending Catholic socialism.
And so I had reached out to these individuals and said, “Hey, do you want to do a formal debate? Can a Catholic be a socialist? So we can hash this out?” And they declined. So Sam was actually the only person who’s accepted that challenge. So then we-
Matt Fradd:
Was it hard to find a Catholic socialist? Are there many out there who have prominent positions in academia?
Trent Horn:
Well, there’s not a lot of people who are … None that are in academia who are actively writing in major publications. I was looking for people who had been published, at least even in the popular press whose ideas had gotten circulation. So for example, one person I approached was Dean Dettloff, who, a few months ago, published the Catholic Case For Communism in America Magazine, which was an incredibly controversial article when it came out.
The editor of America even published an article with it saying why we published a Catholic case for communism in America Magazine, which is a very prominent Jesuit publication. And I reached off to Dettloff but he declined.
And so Sam was willing to defend Catholic socialism. And so I proposed a resolution or a thesis. He asked me to argue the affirmative, which I’m happy to do. It always depends on the topic. And so I chose the affirmative quoting Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI verbatim. And that is, “No one can be at at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”
And so that was what I set out to defend. And yeah, Matt, I’ve done podcasts on this as well on my Council of Trent podcast so I’d encourage your listeners to go there. They can go back, search the debate tags. And I’ve talked about doing debates before because I don’t know too many other Catholics who go out and do debates. The only other one I really know who does a lot of debates is, I think his name is William Albrecht. He’s a Catholic apologist. I’ve seen him do audio and radio debates, but I haven’t seen a lot of other Catholics do debate.
Matt Fradd:
It’s really hard. I mean, me and Cameron Bertuzzi-
Trent Horn:
Yeah, you just had one.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah, we’re doing … Your camera just flickered, but it’s back on. Yeah, we’ve been doing these kind of debates, but they are just behind the paywall of Patreon, but they’re much more friendly. It’s more of a discussion where we both take up opposing views and ask each other questions. But yeah, it’s really difficult. You’ve got a real gift there. I’m not good at thinking on my feet. When someone asks me a question, it’s very easy to get flustered. What’s that like? Because you’re a lot more likely to say something you regret.
Trent Horn:
Totally.
Matt Fradd:
Or to look stupid in a debate. What’s it like looking back on past debates and maybe seeing where you messed up? How humbling is that and how do you live with that?
Trent Horn:
You just have to always not let your pride get in the way. And I feel like God has called me to defend the teachings of the church and I’ve done a lot of different debates. I’ve done debates on atheism, on the person of Christ. I debated Dan Barker on does the Christian God exist?
Matt Fradd:
I was there. I was in the front row.
Trent Horn:
I debated him twice. You were there, that was my very first formal debate.
Matt Fradd:
Debate with Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, my very first.
Matt Fradd:
It wasn’t your very first. Your first one was with that dude who wore a cowboy hat and said he studied philosophy on his own time. Remember?
Trent Horn:
I think I do remember that.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah. That was prior to Catholic Answers. I’m here to correct your memory. You’re welcome.
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah, yeah. That was my first Catholic Answers debate. Yeah.
Matt Fradd:
It was so good. I just flew in from some talk I gave somewhere and got directly into an Uber and drove to the … It was the university of San Diego, where we did that?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. That’s where we hosted … We did. Yeah, you were all there in the front.
Matt Fradd:
That was so much fun. Then we all went out for drinks afterwards. Anyway, sorry.
Trent Horn:
It was fun.
Matt Fradd:
It was a great night.
Trent Horn:
But I will, when I look back, I mean that was over a dozen debates ago. And even now, when I look back on those, I say, “Oh yeah, I was pretty green.” What’s hard with debates, I mean, you can do mock debates with people to prepare, but it’s really not the same as just getting out in the field. And so you only learn by experience. And so the learning curve is a very public one.
Trent Horn:
And so because of that, it’s the same as if you’re doing your podcast, you look at Pints with Aquinas. What you’re doing today is going to be way different than the first 20 episodes you were doing. And you look back and you’re like, “Oh, I really would have done that differently.” But you only learned through experience.
Matt Fradd:
But I can go back and delete them. Whereas if you’ve debated with somebody it’s also on their YouTube channel. You can’t cover up.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, but in the end for me, I would feel like that would be my pride coming forward.
Matt Fradd:
Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
Instead of serving the kingdom. If I were to say, “I’m not going to go out and debate and defend the teachings of the Catholic church, because I’m worried that I will look bad.” Now, if I have a reasonable view that if I get into this debate, I am absolutely going to fail and look bad and make the church look bad. I’m not going to agree to do it in the first place.
So if it is a rational fear or concern that I think … Because there are topics that I won’t debate because they are simply not my wheelhouse. Nobody can be an expert in everything.
Matt Fradd:
Jimmy Akin. Totally.
Trent Horn:
Even Jimmy. Even Jimmy would tell you that there’s certain things that he wouldn’t debate. Or, Matt, there are certain debate topics that wouldn’t be really fruitful because you don’t have common ground with the other person. And so it just wouldn’t be a fruitful topic.
For example, if you were to debate something like the Bible proves Mary was assumed into heaven. For example. I wouldn’t debate a topic like that because I think the resolution is too strong to say the Bible proves this doctrine. Because many of the doctrines we believe are not explicitly found or quote unquote “proved” from scripture. We also believe in sacred tradition. So I’m not going to box myself into a resolution that I feel like is a losing resolution.
Matt Fradd:
Right which is why your resolution was so nuanced in last night’s debate. Right? You’re not saying no Catholic can be a socialist. You’re not even saying no good Catholic can be a socialist. You’re saying no good Catholic can be a true socialist. So it’s very nuanced.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And so that was what Sam went after in his opening statement and the argument he made, that I think by his closing statement he tried to say, this is the one thing I hadn’t responded to, which I certainly had, was that he had quoted several blesseds like blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati-
Matt Fradd:
Pier Giorgio Frassati.
Trent Horn:
And two other blesseds or venerables who had made statements that were positive towards socialism saying things like, “Justice is my socialism.” Or, “I take from socialism and preach the gospel.” But what I pointed out-
Matt Fradd:
He also said that they were associated with socialist groups. It was more than just that they had given lip service to socialism.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, but so is Dorothy Day and Dorothy Day mixed freely with people of all stripes, whether they were anarchists, whether they were self-proclaimed socialists. You can work with all different kinds of people to achieve a common goal. So if your common goal is to alleviate poverty, you may very well mix with true socialists often.
I will, when I’m fighting abortion, I mix with five point Calvinists all the time. You know? And so what I pointed out there is that we have to talk about what socialism is. Now, some people may accuse me, and I think I’ve seen one person say this online, that the way the resolution was framed and the way I was arguing that I was committing the no true Scotsman fallacy. Yeah. And so that’s the idea-
Matt Fradd:
Explain that for our listeners.
Trent Horn:
Yes. So no true Scotsman goes like this. Someone makes a statement, no Scotsman eats haggis. No Scotsman hates haggis, let’s say. Boiled sheep stomach. But my uncle McDonogh, he hates haggis. Ah, yes, but no true Scotsman hates haggis. He’s just not a true Scotsman. And the no true Scotsman fallacy emerges when you have a set of things and say something doesn’t belong there. And clearly, we find something that belongs there and then you create an arbitrary subset in order to save yourself. So it’s about making an arbitrary subset.
However, that’s not what I was doing because the reason I added the qualifier true was to stay faithful to the language of the magisterium. I believe there’s a very deliberate … If you read Quadragesimo anno, what Pope Pius XI says about socialism in that encyclical, he’s very deliberate when he says, “No good Catholic can be a true socialist.” Because in other parts of the encyclical, he says, There are people who claim to be socialists and there are just and true and good demands in socialism that are not foreign to Christian thought.” So we can just be Christians. We don’t need to be socialists.
So he acknowledged there were even people in his time who were Catholic, who claimed to be socialists, yet what they were arguing for were Catholic social teaching. They just called it socialist.
Matt Fradd:
Oh, I see.
Trent Horn:
So Sam’s argument seemed to be … And this is where the debate, where it really hinged, what is a socialist? I gave a definition.
Matt Fradd:
Which he never … He never gave a definition to that, which was very … Oh, my camera’s, there we go.
Trent Horn:
There you are.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah, he never gave a definition of socialism to grapple with. Did he? Or did I miss it?
Trent Horn:
No, he didn’t. And I followed him and tried to press him on that, to ask him to provide us with a definition. In my opening statement, I provided the standard definition of socialism, citing socialist thinkers.
Matt Fradd:
What is that for our listeners because obviously we get a mix of people. Some people don’t even know what socialism and capitalism mean. So just to back up a bit.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, this is a typical one. I mean, this is the devil in the details approach that people argue and disagree about. But when you go to literature, when you go to dictionaries of economics, to economists, socialism, traditionally, is the view that property is not owned by individuals or firms, but that the means of production or property, that which generates wealth, goods and services is owned communally.
So the idea is that socialism is that businesses, things that produce goods and services and wealth, these things should be not owned by an individual. There should not be a person or even a group of shareholders who own company X. Rather, company X should be owned by the community as a whole.
And so we all own everything that generates wealth. We, the people, own these things. And so therefore, the wealth doesn’t go just straight to the owner of that company. It goes to everybody who owns it. And so if we all own these things as a community, then people believe that’s more equitable and prosperous and things like that.
Matt Fradd:
On this definition of socialism, can people own private property like houses so long as they don’t generate things to sell?
Trent Horn:
Well, socialists, and this is something that Sam brought up in the debate that I was able to briefly touch on, especially, those who are Marxists, they’ll make a distinction between private property and personal property. So what they’ll say is, there’s an article by Bhaskar Sunkara who is the editor of Jacobin Magazine. So he’s a very prominent socialist who believes in classical socialism.
He wants to abolish wage labor. Every employee should have equal ownership in the company that they work for. But even there, he’s not even arguing for the classical view of socialism, which is that the state owns businesses, that the state owns it. So Sunkara has an article on Jacobin called Socialists don’t want your Kenny Loggins CDs.
And so the idea here is someone had emailed Bhaskar and said, “Look, I want to be a socialist. But does that mean that all my socialist friends get to have all my stuff? They get to have my Kenny Loggins CDs?” And so Bhaskar says, “No. Socialism is just saying that you can have the stuff that you use to support yourself like your home or your food in your refrigerator or your personal possessions. You can have that. You just don’t get to own things that generate wealth for you or other people.”
Now, I do believe the distinction between private and personal property is a bit dubious because there quite gray areas. For example, most American families have two cars. What if one of the cars is used 80% of the time for Uber driving. It generates wealth. Is that personal property or is it private property?
If I save up money under this view that I can’t own private property, I guess I can own my home, but let’s say I’m thrift and I practice frugality, which is what Pope Leo says we ought to do. Can I save up money for a down payment to buy a second home and rent that home out? It seems to me, when I read socialists, they say, “Private property is that property which someone owns and it generates wealth for them by the fact that they won’t let other people use it or own it.”
And it seems to be the case that if I own a second home and I rent it to people, that’s lasting private property. I don’t see how I could be allowed to do that under socialism. Rather what socialists would want for housing, the Marxist view, is that housing is not a commodity you buy or sell. It’s just a right. That government owns all housing and allocates it to people which is totally unworkable because think about it, Matt, if you can just pick. The government gives you housing, well, who gets the houses that are here in San Diego and who gets the houses that are in rural North Dakota? It’s going to be the people who are friends with the bureaucrats and the central planners.
So just to get back to what socialism is before we continue because that was the big thing I was trying to get Sam really focused on here that, yeah, there are Catholics who say they’re socialists and what they mean is they want rigorous policies that protect the poor and promote social welfare. And that’s fine. But classical socialism is about communal ownership and there’s different kinds of that.
So you might have, for example, like in the Soviet union, Maoist China, North Korea, where the state owns all businesses. And so the state manages the economy owns it, regulates when goods are produced, how they’re distributed. And it’s just a nightmare because the state is totally inefficient. It can never manage the economy, like letting individuals do it. So it leads to shortages. Imagine letting the DMV run your podcast. The time it takes to get around and turn around and do things, it never works.
So a lot of modern socialists will say, “Well, no, I’m not that kind of socialist. I’m a democratic socialist.” I’ll say, “Well, what does that mean?” Now for some people, democratic socialism is synonymous with the social welfare state. And so they say, “Well, I’m just going to be like Norway or Sweden.”
And that’s why it was so hard for me. I think that’s what Sam was getting at in the debate. He asked me, what did I think about postwar Europe where they enacted a lot of these social democratic policies. And I said, “I’m fine with that, but it’s not socialism.”
Matt Fradd:
Tell us what you mean then by democratic socialism and tell us what Pope Benedict had to say on that.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So Pope Benedict in a famous, rather infamous essay in First Things, and I think he was quoting a previous book he had written on the subject, talked about how in post World War II Europe, there were strains of socialism that obviously you could not support. But he said a line about how democratic socialism was something that is close to Catholic social teaching and had some positive things within it.
Trent Horn:
But people take that as some kind of coup d’etat to say, “Oh, see, you can be a socialist.” I say, “Well, no, because Pope Pius XI said that there are many true things in socialism, and he wrote this in Quadragesimo anno saying there are many things that are true in socialism. And this is something that none of the pontiffs have ever denied. But these things are not unique to socialism.
And what I pointed out in the debate is that Pope Benedict didn’t say that this was Catholic social teaching. He said it’s close to it. And he never encouraged people to become democratic socialists. And so what he’s referring to, that word is so elastic. Democratic socialism.
Matt Fradd:
Help us to understand what that means.
Trent Horn:
Well, it depends who you ask that. But I think in the context Pope Benedict is using it, he’s talking about the generous welfare state and protecting the rights of workers like to form a union, for example.
Matt Fradd:
Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t looked into this stuff at all, but when I hear democratic socialism, I hear we all vote as to how the money that we all make gets to be allocated.
Trent Horn:
That’s closer to true democratic socialism. So you’ll hear people who will argue, “I’m a democratic socialist.” David Bentley Hart, for example, wrote in a New York Times editorial something like People need … I forget the title of the article. He basically said, “People need to calm down and stop freaking out about socialism.”
And in the article he said, “Socialism is just another word to describe the sane governance of the national purse.” Which means that just the government spends its money wisely to help people.
Matt Fradd:
Could we take a step back?
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt Fradd:
I want to quickly define for people socialism, communism and capitalism. I know there was some discussion last night about these things. And I know you wrote a book on socialism and you have many people online write to you and say, “Capitalism is contrary to the Catholic faith.”
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt Fradd:
So maybe we can begin with that. What is capitalism and how should we as Catholics view it? And then I’d like to discuss the difference between socialism and communism, because I think there’s a lot of confusion there. Not just among lay people like myself, but even among people who would claim to be socialists or communists.
Trent Horn:
Oh yeah. And the confusion, Matt, a lot of it comes from their side because many people who claim to be socialist or communist, they use terms interchangeably or they equivocate. And so it can be hard to figure out what they actually mean. And that was one of the things that was frustrating in my debate with Sam.
Matt Fradd:
Last night. It was evidence.
Trent Horn:
I asked him specifically. I asked him a question, I essentially asked him, “What makes something socialist?” And he said, “It’s not an analytic term. It’s a lived reality.” And that’s just not helpful. So then I asked a follow up question, “Well, what is a country that is not very socialist?”
Matt Fradd:
Didn’t he say China?
Trent Horn:
He said China is not very socialist. And I, for the life of me, could not figure out why. And I asked him, “Well, why?” He said, “Well, because they are more totalitarian.” So then I asked the followup question. So does that mean that communism is when you use totalitarian force to own the means of production and socialism is when you use democratic means to own the means of production? And I think that’s what he was going towards, but he just couldn’t settle on a definition.
To me, if I was to answer the question, I would say Singapore or Hong Kong are the least socialist countries on earth because they are the countries that provide the most private property protections. They have the freest markets. When you go to Hong Kong or Singapore, Hong Kong, you can start a business in a day. Fill out a form. It’s very easy to start and operate a business.
There are rules, of course. You can’t defraud people. You can’t run dangerous operations, but it’s not that hard to start a business. But you go to other countries, even here in the US, it gets harder as. You know how it is for your podcast. You had to go through a lot of forms to fill out. But it’s not as bad as a place like India, for example, where it can take years to start a business. Because the labyrinthian maze you have to navigate of government structures is almost impossible to penetrate. It truly is Byzantine in every true sense of that word.
Trent Horn:
Or then you get worse. What’s even more socialist than that would be countries in Subsahara Africa that were operated under socialism for a long time and still have under a kleptocracy where a kleptocracy is when the government steals whatever it wants from people. It steals foreign aid when it’s donated and it steals businesses.
In some countries, especially in Subsaharan Africa, you start a business, you own it one day. The government sends in their troops and it’s not yours anymore. And so they can confiscate your materials or what they think is best. And so that’s the thing when it comes to with Christians and capitalism, what’s hard, Matt, is a lot of people think that the only way we can help the poor is by alms-giving. And that was true in the time of Jesus.
And that was true through most of the time of the church fathers and even up through the Middle Ages because there was no way to really make wealth. Wealth existed. Wealth was a very scattered, meager thing. Wealth was a bit of fertile land you could find or maybe some gold in a mountain. But you couldn’t make wealth. So the traditional teaching was if you want to help the poor, you give the poor money.
But nowadays it’s different. We can make wealth. And what we’ve seen with the data across the world is that the best way to give people wealth is to give them capitalism. And all that capitalism is, is stringent protections of private property so that you can start a business and it won’t be taken away from you arbitrarily. You can make income and profits and they won’t just be taxed at a hundred percent and taken and redistributed to other people.
Matt Fradd:
What do you say to people who say that true socialism has never been tried and so you shouldn’t really knock it until we see evidence of it.
Trent Horn:
What I would say there is that those who make this objection never seem to be inclined to hear this one. They’re always very critical of capitalism, but I don’t feel like it would satisfy them if I were to say, “Oh yes, but true capitalism has never been tried where people equitably work together to maintain their property in exchange. You have to give it a chance.”
For them, it’s always true capitalism. And so I would ask them, “Well, what is true socialism?” And I would say, “Okay, so you’re telling me, I shouldn’t judge your system because no one has ever instituted a totally unrealistic version of it that depends on people acting against their nature in a perfect altruistic way? Okay, well, if your system depends on people acting in this way, it’s not a good system because I can do the same thing, man. I could say, ‘Oh yes, but true capitalism, Matt, is where employers always make sure their employees’ needs are taken care of and go above and beyond.'”
Matt Fradd:
That makes sense.
Trent Horn:
And so everything you’re showing me is not true capi- … If we just had a true capitalist system. You can either judge fanciful socialism against fanciful capitalism or you can judge lived socialism against lived capitalism. And we do have ways to do that. Now we do have ways to do that. And we have experiments that have been done in the history of this world. And two good ones are North and South Korea and East and West Germany. That is socialism. And it’s the socialism that people object to, “But it’s status socialism.”
But that’s what ends up happening. As I said, if you get more than 20 people, if you get hundreds of thousands or millions of people, the social power will reside in government bureaucrats. It can’t reside in the populace. So when you look at East and West Germany and North and South Korea, the differences are stark, especially when these four countries, when they started, so East and West Germany started after World War II when you had the split. Eastern Europe was occupied by the Soviet Union.
I remember actually growing up, it was funny. It wasn’t till the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, that you had a unified Germany. I remember growing up, I had a globe in my room that had East and West Germany on it.
Matt Fradd:
Wow.
Trent Horn:
And then we had to change it. You compare them, East and West Germany, North and South Korea. They start actually about economically the same. And then when you let the decades unfurl, you see their competing ideologies where you have prosperous West Germany, you have the BMWs and the most prosperous automakers now in West Germany. South Korea is the seventh largest economy in the world.
And today, of course, East Germany doesn’t exist. But when it did, East Germany could only put out things like the Trabant, which was a car that was so bad you had to rock it to mix the oil and fuel together. It didn’t have important safety features. North and South Korea, South Korea is the seventh largest economy in the world. North Korea is a hermit kingdom that’s totally dark at night.
Matt Fradd:
Here’s a question then.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt Fradd:
How can you explain to someone that socialism or communism is evil as opposed to just arguing that it doesn’t work.
Trent Horn:
Sure.
Matt Fradd:
And is that something you would want to argue for?
Trent Horn:
If you’ll notice in the case that I made against Sam in my debate, I gave not just what the church teaches, but I gave principled reasons. I gave five of them in my debate as to why the church teaches good Catholics cannot be true socialists. And so when you go to Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIII, he does make a practical argument. He does say, “Look, if you implement true socialism,” he actually seems to elude to Adam Smith, who was the founding father of modern economics.
So Smith, what Leo seems to allude to, is when Leo says that the sources of wealth would run dry. That if you took away the ability to innovate, to reinvest capital, to grow businesses, no one would ever invest in that, the sources of wealth would run dry. There would be envy, there would be discord. And so Leo talks about how people would all be brought down to one dead level.
But the argument that he makes is a principled one. And I put it very bluntly in the debate. I said, “Look, it’s wrong to steal other people’s stuff just because you think you will be better off. You can’t do that. It’s a sin. You can’t steal something that belongs to someone else just because you think you will be better off.” That is the sin of socialism, it’s theft. And so I put forward that Leo puts forward in Rerum novarum 15 through 17, he makes an argument for private property.
And what he means by private property is not just personal property. Things that we consume. He makes the point and it’s this. How are we different than animals? I mean, think about this. We eat, we need shelter. We need to reproduce. So we’re similar to animals in a lot of ways. So if that’s the case, then the only thing we would have a right to as human beings if we have a right to these things, would just be access to them, not ownership.
So it’d be like saying, “Okay, Matt, you and your family, you need to eat. You need to be fed, go down to the watering hole.” like in the Lion King, we’re all going to walk down to the watering hole, get our drink and then head back. But Leo says, “We’re not animals because we don’t merely just eat and drink and wander from place to place. We plan our lives out. We plan and we pursue goods beyond merely surviving. And we then allocate goods to those we care about like our children and we support them.”
So in order to do that, in order to make use of our rational mind, to be able to do that, we have to not just be able to use things that support us, but own them. We have to have ownership over them to say, “They are ours.” And we are able to use them for our benefit and the benefit of those who are related to us, either familiarly or through a commercial relationship, like those who labor for us.
And that’s why Leo says that this is a right that is rooted in natural law, that comes from our human nature. It’s not something the state lets us have private property at its graces. We have a right to this and to take it away from the ability to be able to support ourselves and force us to be dependent upon the state instead is a grave injustice.
Matt Fradd:
So if socialism is evil because it essentially steals things and redistributes them and there are kind of differing degrees of socialism, depending on how you use the term in different countries, I’m thinking of Australia. I was just looking up tax rates the other day in Australia. As soon as you start making over a certain amount of money, you get taxed a heck of a lot more there than you do here. So could you just complain and, well, that’s also a theft?
Trent Horn:
Right. And Sam brought this up in the debate about paying taxes, that taxes are not theft, right? And my reply would be some tax rates are not theft, but others are. So just because something becomes evil in degree, there are some things that are intrinsically evil like abortion is just evil for example. But there are other things that come evil in degree. So for example, this works well with the current news that is happening.
When an officer uses force to subdue a suspect that is not intrinsically evil. So if an officer just put his hand on a suspect’s shoulder, firmly on his shoulder and said, “I’m going to recommend that you just calm down for a minute,” he’s using force. Let’s say he’s pressing down on the shoulder, not breaking his clavicle, but you know how it is. Someone might do that, letting you know, “I got force here, buddy, but I’m not going to use it.” In a well natured way. We would say that’s not evil.
But if he were to lean his knee on the person’s neck and asphyxiate him to death, that would clearly be evil. So force would be something that becomes evil in degrees. But clearly, there’s force that’s not evil. So you couldn’t say, “Ah, well, because there’s some force that’s not evil I can use any force I want.” That doesn’t follow at all. It’d be the same thing with taxes. Oh, because there’s some taxes I can levy that are not evil, I could levy any tax I want. It doesn’t follow from there either. That would be the same mistaken view.
So Leo talks about this in Rerum novarum. That’s why he says, “The state can regulate private property.” I’m actually going to respond to a Marxist soon, who is critiquing my book, who claimed that I argue for an absolute right to private property. I do not. That’s a common straw man of the position I’m arguing for, which is the idea that your property is yours. And no one can ever take it away from you for any reason whatsoever.
That is not a position I endorse, it’s not a position the church endorses because property belongs to … God made the earth for everyone, but it doesn’t keep us from owning parts of it. So what Aquinas says is that because God made the earth for everyone, you have a right to other people’s goods in cases of necessity.
Matt Fradd:
That’s right.
Trent Horn:
So if you’re lost in the woods and you’re starving to death and you come across someone’s summer cabin that they’re not using right now and you break in to get out of the blizzard and feed yourself until you’re rescued, that would not be theft. It falls under the duty to protect life and the universal destination of goods. Now you couldn’t say, “Oh, this person doesn’t have a right to this cabin because we could use it to house people that are homeless in this county and take it from that person.” That would be wrong. That would be an abuse of their property that they’re using either personally as a summer getaway or in a private mean.
So I never say private property is absolute and it can be regulated for the common good. But just because it can be doesn’t mean, “Oh, we’ll throw all the rules out the window. And the government says exactly what you can do.”
So Leo makes a point and he says, “Private property can be regulated for the common good, but the state may not absorb it altogether. And so it would be an injustice, I quoted this in the debate, for the state to assume all of people’s properties through taxes. So just to use a 100% tax rate to say, “Okay, you worked, we’ll take that now. And we’ll redistribute it.” Leo is very clear. The worker has a right to his wages and to dispose of them at his leisure.
And now some people, Matt, I don’t mean to go on and on. I’ve got so much here. Some people will say, “Ah, but the encyclicals say that what you have that is superfluous, what you don’t need to support yourself, belongs to the poor.”
Matt Fradd:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
That’s true. It’s a moral duty. We have a moral duty to support the poor, but Leo even says that one may retain income, not just for subsistence, but he says, “To keep up life becomingly.” So you don’t have to live in an empty house with folding chairs.
You can live a life that is becomingly but with recognition of the moral duty you have to the poor. And so what Leo says is that the dispersal of the superfluous income is a matter of Christian charity. It is not a matter of human law because it’s-
Matt Fradd:
It’s-
Trent Horn:
Go ahead.
Matt Fradd:
It’s one thing to tell individual people to feed the poor. It’s another thing to tell governmental officials to steal from everybody in order to try to rectify the inequalities.
Trent Horn:
Right. Or to have the government … It would be stealing, but to have the government enforce our moral obligation to help the poor. Because Aquinas makes it very clear that the government does not enforce all of our moral obligations if, in doing so, it makes a greater evil. That’s why, infamously, Aquinas allowed for the legality of prostitution, because he believed that if you made it illegal, following Augustan, the world would convulse in lust and it would be …
So to take from that. So when I see people saying from this, “Oh, look at this, we have this strong moral duties so the state should compel us to do that.” Well, Aquinas would say we have not just a strong moral duty, but an absolute moral duty not to frequent prostitutes. We have a stronger duty to not avail ourselves with prostitutes than we do to give to the poor.
But even there Aquinas did not argue for the state to be involved. Now, today we have the benefit of more empirical knowledge to know about the relevant harms that come from prostitution and the sex trade. And so we do not create greater evils in making it illegal, though we can, of course, prudentially disagree about how to implement these laws. And the same comes with the distribution of wealth.
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