True Catholic Social Teaching

From American Thinker

September 06, 2009
ObamaCare and Catholic social teachingBy Mark Wauk

The 9/2/09 issue of the Wall Street Journal, in its Notable and Quotable feature, calls attention to an important article that Roman Catholic Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa, published in his diocesan newspaper on the subject of health care and health care reform. The article is important for two reasons: first, because there has been and continues to be a certain amount of confusion regarding Catholic social teaching as it affects health care; second, because Bishop Nickless goes to great lengths to base his discussion on principles, and not merely on tactical considerations.

Bishop Nickless begins by noting the importance of the ongoing debate over proposed reforms of our health care system:
"There is much at stake in this political struggle, and also much confusion and inaccurate information being thrown around. My brother bishops have described some clear "goal-posts" to mark out what is acceptable reform, and what must be rejected. First and most important, the Church will not accept any legislation that mandates coverage, public or private, for abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic stem-cell research."

After further noting particular concerncs for Catholic hospitals and health care professionals -- the possibility that the Government would attempt to force them to act in violation of Catholic teaching as well as in violation of their consciences--Bishop Nickless concludes:
"A so-called reform that imposes these evils on us would be far worse than keeping the health care system we now have."

However, Bishop Nickless doesn't stop here. He goes on to enunciate several additional considerations of great importance. The bishop's second point gets to the heart of the role that government should play in health care:
"Second, the Catholic Church does not teach that "health care" as such, without distinction, is a natural right. The "natural right" of health care is the divine bounty of food, water, and air without which all of us quickly die. This bounty comes from God directly. None of us own it, and none of us can morally withhold it from others. The remainder of health care is a political, not a natural, right, because it comes from our human efforts, creativity, and compassion. As a political right, health care should be apportioned according to need, not ability to pay or to benefit from the care. We reject the rationing of care. Those who are sickest should get the most care, regardless of age, status, or wealth. But how to do this is not self-evident. The decisions that we must collectively make about how to administer health care therefore fall under "prudential judgment."

In other words, provision of health care must ultimately rest on prudential considerations that affect an entire society. Broad assertions of generalized "rights" without reference to underlying prudential considerations are not helpful. The relevant considerations include need, but also cost. Another important prudential consideration, however, is this: who should be the main provider of health care, government or the private sector? Bishop Nickless insists that health care provision is not only not a central concern of government as such, it is also likely to introduce harmful economic and policy distortions:

"Third, in that category of prudential judgment, the Catholic Church does not teach that government should directly provide health care. Unlike a prudential concern like national defense, for which government monopolization is objectively good - it both limits violence overall and prevents the obvious abuses to which private armies are susceptible - health care should not be subject to federal monopolization.

Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined "best procedures," which are equally beyond the influence of most citizens. The proper role of the government is to regulate the private sector, in order to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses. Therefore any legislation that undermines the viability of the private sector is suspect."

Clearly, there is much that could be said on this score. Nevertheless, Bishop Nickless' reflections are an excellent starting point for any constructive discussion of these important issues. Bishop Nickless places his own considerations in the context of demographic considerations:

"The best way in practice to approach this balance of public and private roles is to spread the risks and costs of health care over the largest number of people. This is the principle underlying Medicaid and Medicare taxes, for example. But this principle assumes that the pool of taxable workers is sufficiently large, compared to those who draw the benefits, to be reasonably inexpensive and just. ... Without a growing population of youth, our growing population of retirees is outstripping our distribution systems. In a culture of death such as we have now, taxation to redistribute costs of medical care becomes both unjust and unsustainable."

I, personally, would suggest that further consideration needs to be given to the entire notion of taxation to redistribute costs. Obviously, this occurs in many areas of our politics: national defense, public works, etc. Just as obviously, when joined to false notions of "natural rights," and a failure to consider the human dignity that and emphasis on individual responsibility fosters, the redistributive use of taxation has led to many controversial and even "unjust" abuses of the government power to tax (my quotes refer to Bishop Nickless' words, above). The power to tax is, after all, the power to destroy, and that destruction can have not only economic consequences but moral consequences as well.

Bishop Nickless appears to assume that Medicaid and Medicare were, initially in any event, established on a sound principle. Without getting into the the particulars, which are far beyond my expertise, I think that is an area that would needs to be closely reexamined before moving on to adoption of any new reforms.That Bishop Nickless is open to such discussions, and that the considerations involved are central to Catholic social teaching, becomes apparent from the bishop's final point. That point addresses the whole issue of preventive care which, as several recent studies have shown, can actually greatly increase health care costs.

Bishop Nickless places the primary responsibility squarely on the individual:
"Fourth, preventative care is a moral obligation of the individual to God and to his or her family and loved ones, not a right to be demanded from society. The gift of life comes only from God; to spurn that gift by seriously mistreating our own health is morally wrong. The most effective preventative care for most people is essentially free - good diet, moderate exercise, and sufficient sleep. But pre-natal and neo-natal care are examples of preventative care requiring medical expertise, and therefore cost; and this sort of care should be made available to all as far as possible."

The caveat "as far as possible" is a strong indication that Bishop Nickless, in the context of Catholic social teaching, does indeed recognize that cost is an important part of the entire health care equation. No society can morally devote an endlessly increasingly portion of its resources to a poorly structured health care system, while ignoring the long term financial health of its future generations.Having enunciated these four principles and their related goals, Bishop Nickless asks the all-important question: "Will the current health care reform proposals achieve these goals?" His answer is a firm: No. Not only would all current House and Senate proposals introduce government subsidized abortion (and likely several other morally objectionable features), but these proposals would strike at the heart of private sector health care provision.

The House proposal "provides a "public insurance option" without adequate limits, so that smaller employers especially will have a financial incentive to push all their employees into this public insurance. This will effectively prevent those employees from choosing any private insurance plans. This will saddle the working classes with additional taxes for inefficient and immoral entitlements."

And the Senate proposal would also "impinge on the vitality of the private sector" through various provisions.Bishop Nickless' resounding conclusion:
"I encourage all of you to make you voice heard to our representatives in Congress. Tell them what they need to hear from us: no health care reform is better than the wrong sort of health care reform. Insist that they not permit themselves to be railroaded into the current too-costly and pro-abortion health care proposals. Insist on their support for proposals that respect the life and dignity of every human person, especially the unborn. And above all, pray for them, and for our country.

Bishop Nickless' article begins at http://www.scdiocese.org/ and continues at http://www.scdiocese.org/Stewardship/healthcare/tabid/416/Default.aspx

The S word

Because it is Sunday night I'm going to partake in what I call lazy blogging...a oneliner above a cut and paste and thats it...goodnight :)
---------------------------

Socialism is really cannibalism
Carol Negro

Apparently in our current political climate "socialism" has become a word that does not convey the horror it actually represents. It has become common and thus meaningless beyond the virtuous idea of "sharing" and "taking care of the poor".People, especially among the ignorant -- particularly the college educated -- seem proud to call themselves "Socialists" today.

And the supremely ignorant -- our politicians -- go a step further, and celebrate the word "Progressive" as though it had a glorious and honorable history.I refuse to allow "Socialism" and "Progressivism" to be understood as benign, helpful, caring, sharing- as another way of saying "The Brotherhood of Man".

Socialism and Progressivism are cannibalism.

When I work, I use up hours of my life... my limited, mortal, human, physical life. The money I am paid represents the life I expended to earn it. My pay-my wealth-is my labor. It is the expenditure of some of my body's short, precious life on earth.So when someone takes my money, they steal my hours of labor.

They consume not only the fruits of my labor, but my labor itself, that labor which is the very expenditure of my life.When someone loots and consumes the money I have earned, they consume the part of my life devoted to producing what they have taken.What is that but cannibalism?

A selfishness so profound, so inhuman, so greedy, so barbaric that it encourages and celebrates-and seeks to legally require- the consuming of the life's blood of one human by another.That is the vicious reality of Socialism.

Don't let the bastards call it anything else.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

Do You Hear What I Hear?
I hear the sound of the left squealing in protest at the “rising tide of anger” in this country. I see calls for us to “calm down” and get a “security blanket” and maybe join hands and sing Kumbaya or “switch to decaf” and I laugh. I laugh because I know we are making a difference. I laugh because I know the genesis of that call for us to all just please get along.

Oh, the left will tell us that we are being mean or even un-Christian in our criticism and we will continue anyway. I laugh because it is always amusing to hear someone from the left try to instruct us on Christian behavior, when conservatives are standing on the front lines to defend the defenseless unborn every single day. Nevertheless, we are not being mean, we are being truthful, and apparently, the truth hurts.

The genesis of the calls for us to get along is rooted in one single emotion: fear. We saw glimpses of the fear liberals live with during the election when anyone who questioned Obama’s country of birth, who funded his education, his associates, and his platform immediately tagged with perhaps the most repulsive tag of all: raaaaacist. We saw that fear come raging through Joe the plumber’s private life when Joe looked socialism in the face and called it by name. We saw the fear again in the massive voter fraud scheme that is ACORN, and jackbooted thugs who attempted to intimidate voters at polling places.

Later, we saw that fear in disgraceful form when the President of the United States Barack Obama and other elected officials attacked private citizens, namely Limbaugh and Hannity, simply for doing their jobs. Not only did BO attack them, he attempted to put them out of work by suggesting Americans stop listening to them. Their fear has been on full, inglorious display during the porktastic spending bill fiasco

What do they fear? They fear losing perhaps their one chance of settling the heavy mantle of socialism about the shoulders of this great nation. They understand full well, Obama was elected on emotion and once the American people actually do “get over it”; we are certainly going to be angry.

In perhaps a desperate attempt to shame us into silence we are asked what would Reagan do? Here is what I think that great man would do. I think he would remind us "Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors, which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?" Ronald Reagan 1975. Or perhaps he would remind us, as I did in a previous blog, “You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay. There is a point beyond which they must not advance...You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness”. Ronald Reagan 1969

So, to those on the left, who would silence our opinions, chide away, carry on your ridiculous campaign of fear mongering. We will not be silent. If the current volume of the sound of millions of Americans voicing their anger is so distressing to you today, then I humbly suggest another line of work. As more and more Americans awaken from their HopenChange stupor, soon the rising tide of anger you hear will become a tidal wave of fury and hopefully scour clean, once and for all, the stench of socialism from this beloved land of ours.

So if any of this, in your opinion, makes me an “out of touch extremist” or a “cranky curmudgeon”, I will consider the source and say thank you very much.

Uncle Sam's Plantation

When I was much younger, I used to read those historical romance novels. I loved them. I had an interest in history and of course I thought the descriptions of the gowns and the women who wore them was amazing. I remember the story line from one novel of a young English woman who was sold into indentured servitude to pay off her father's debt. My heroine wound up in the Carolinas on a fledgling tobacco plantation and by the end of the story, she had fallen in love with the handsome but troubled plantation owner and managed to marry him and bought herself her freedom in the process.

That was my first exposure to the concept of indentured servants. Seemingly ordinary people who had to place themselves at the mercy of a debt holder for a period of time, because either they or someone else in their family owed more money than they could repay. I feel that mentality creeping up on this nation's people. Do you feel it? As a nation, we owe much more money than we are going to be able to repay in our life times and our elected officials are working overtime to add 1 or 2 or maybe even 3 TRILLION dollars to that debt.

So will our children be sold into indentured servitude to pay for the socialization of our nation? There won't be any handsome plantation owner to come and save them from the fate we are assigning to them. We have raised a nation of Americans who believe the only way they can live their lives is through the beneficence of the government. Now we reap what we sow. Even though I didn't sow those particular seeds, the seeds of apathy, ignorance,laziness,amorality, dependency I have to pay for the consequences. My sons will pay the consequences and so will my grandchildren. That fills me with such sadness.

Star Parker writes "A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mindsets from "How do I take care of myself?" to "What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?" in her article this week. That statement came to mind this week when I saw Ms Hughes begging the president for a new house or a new kitchen. I saw it again in that young man, Julio who wanted the president to hand him better healthcare. I saw it all throughout the elections, a woman claiming that BO was going to fill up her gas tank, and all sorts of miraculous feats.

"Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems. The kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn responsibility for their lives over to others.
The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools, and broken black families. "

I know Star Parker was speaking as a black woman about other blacks, but I see this not in a black or white context, but a context of those who were raised to believe the government is the font of all that is free and those of us who know the government is going to take from us to give to them, just to maintain the plantation. That really bothers me.

http://townhall.com/columnists/StarParker/2009/02/09/back_on_uncle_sams_plantation?page=1

The Cloward-Piven strategy...continued

A while back, I pulled an article from The American Thinker blog about the Cloward Piven strategy. This is the third in the series. It is their end game. This article connects all the dots. I pulled a few paragraphs from the article, but please...please take five minutes to read this article, then share it with anyone who still might be an undecided voter. Please...we only have a little more than a week.


http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=2114

"The United States of America is the world’s marketplace. Without the worldwide trade generated by American demand, the international marketplace will fail. Today we are witnessing an undeniable demonstration of this fact as world markets reel in response to our domestic financial crisis. This lesson must be burnt into our collective conscience. Our nation is the last repository of free market economic principles, and a fundamental change in our government toward socialism will spell worldwide economic disaster from which we may never recover."

"At its core, socialism can only be parasitic. It cannot survive without its capitalist host. Therefore, if the United States becomes a socialist country, worldwide capital will soon dry up. Remaining market economies around the world will succumb either to their own internal socialist movements or direct military threat from abroad. Without the protective umbrella of American military might, they will have no other choice."

"Barack Hussein Obama has been chosen as standard bearer to bring this agenda to fruition here. If he is elected we can expect a sea change in Washington. But it will not be for the better. The socialist economic agenda he has publicly articulated is enough in the current financial crisis to plunge our economy into deep recession. The disarmament agenda he has publicly articulated is enough to strip us of the meager defenses we currently have against a rogue missile attack, and Iran has already telegraphed plans to launch such an attack."

"What is even more frightening is the agenda he has not shared, but is implicit in his radical upbringing, his radical connections, and his limited but demonstrative experience.

Obama’s Radical Roots
Are we beating this subject to death? Sorry, we have to. And there’s much more, if you still need convincing. Obama hates being “associated” with radical individuals and organizations. But the truth is he hasn’t been associated with them at all, he has been immersed in them. He is one of them. And it goes back to his youth."

Europe's Sorry Lesson

An article by Steve McCann

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/europes_sorry_lesson.html

"Nonetheless many are willing to surrender more of their freedom and fortune in the vain hope that the same government and it's attendant ruling class can solve the problems they created. Their proposed solution is to continue adopting European socialism while dramatically weakening our economy and enriching potential enemies as these same elites in their worship of radical environmentalism and the power to tax and regulate free enterprise refuse to allow any practical solution to our energy and wealth creation needs.

One need only to look across the ocean to the countries of western Europe to see the failure of socialism: inevitable bankruptcy due to excessive entitlements, high unemployment, a declining birth rate, total dependence on others for defense and a rapidly diminishing role in world affairs. "

I miss Reagan, don't you?

I miss Reagan
Please watch this amazing speech by Ronald Reagan, on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1967...his words ring so true, especially when he speaks of the power of the government treatment of America's farmers. Remember the bailout? It gives the secretary of the treasury the exact same powers over America's banks.

And then this quote, even though he was speaking of our Cold War enemies, it still rings true today.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum.

And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.

If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance.

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness."



++++++++++++++++++++++



++++++++++++++++++++

American dream vs socialism

If anything, this perfectly sums up the whole problem with Obama's plans for this country.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" he asked.

"It's not that I want to punish your success," replied Obama. "I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. . . . I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."