Real Social Justice

The Sunday N.Y. Times for December 4th had a wonderful column by lawyer and economist Ben Stein celebrating the life of his old friend and mentor economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman who became famous at the University of Chicago while teaching there from 1946 to 1976. Friedman celebrated the virtues of the free market and is now in his nineties. Yes, he celebrated the virtues of the free market--I still recall my father carrying a copy of Friedman's 1980 bestseller Free to Choose--but Friedman, in my view, is one of the leading proponents of social justice today. Why? Friedman back in the nineteen fifties was, I believe, the first to propose school vouchers as an alternative to the public education monopoly of public money. He is still, in his nineties, crusading for that long overdue social justice reform.

Many fancy themselves great proponents of social justice in our society. In my opinion, the two greatest social justice issues in American society today are ending legal abortion and making school vouchers available to as many parents as possible--in that order. Yet, many who pride themselves on oozing with social compassion for the poor and the weak refuse to attack legal abortion and turn up their noses at school vouchers. In this world, things are not as they appear; and rhetorical self-description is highly suspect.

In his column praising Friedman, Stein gives us a grand example of the deceptive character of our high-flown rhetoric:

In about 1965, the whole world was worshipping at the altar of John F. Kennedy's words, "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." Professor Friedman, in his writing, said that neither was a fitting question in a free society. People should be asking what they can do for themselves and their friends and communities, not how they can serve the state or what they could get as wards of the state.

Ben Stein, "On Milton Friedman's Birthday, We Get the Present: Him," N.Y. Times, Sunday, Dec. 4, 2005.

Personally, I never "took" to Kennedy's famous rhetoric from his inaugural speech. I could not quite put my finger on it, but the high-flown phrase, nay command, always seemed empty and vacuous to me: words in search of elusive content, the sort of thing you would expect a politician or an aggressive salesmen to say. Sounds good, but what does he really mean? What is he trying to get me to do? Do I want to do what he is ordering me to do? Is his agenda really the agenda I want? To me, the phrase always seemed more manipulative than enlightening. (By the way, the Ronald Reagan of 1961 also had a similar reaction; he referred pejoratively to Kennedy's rhetoric as "statism," in spite of its glamorous presentation.)

So when I read Friedman's analysis of the absurdity of the Kennedy rhetoric, I can say "Eureka!," like Archimedes of old. The state is not our focus and should not be our focus. Catholic social justice teaching points precisely to what Friedman pointed to: ourselves, our families, our friends, our communities, our civic and cultural associations, our local schools and places of worship. I cannot give my love, affection, and loyalty to the abstract state. My country is not a state; my country, my patria, is the social web of friendship and affection that flourishes well beyond the state and, in many cases, in spite of the state and, nowadays, in great tension with the state. The state is, at its best, merely the framework for all of that to flourish. Our primary affection is not to the necessary and sometimes oppressive framework that is the state but to the content protected by the framework.

For too long, many of us have reflexively fallen for the vacuous rhetoric of those who, in seeking the levers of power over us, give encomiums to the state. For too long, the superficial and deceptive glamour first brought to American politics by Kennedy has clouded reality. That is why today it is still a shock to many that, if we want to look for the real crusaders for social justice, we need to look in some places we may have wrongly viewed as unlikely focuses of compassion. We need to look at those who are willing to address the leading social justice issues of our time: ending legal abortion and putting school vouchers in the hands of as many parents, especially inner city parents, as possible. Surprise of surprises: we do better in embracing social justice by looking to the education reform long proposed by the conservative Jewish economist from Chicago than to the rhetoric of the ostensibly Catholic pol from Boston. But, then again, the truth has a way of surprising us. It's a funny image: maybe the inner city poor should hang a picture of the balding and bespectacled Professor Friedman next to that of the tanned and well-coiffed glamour icon of the sixties!

Note: For the record, I am not aware of Friedman's position on abortion and disagree with Friedman's apparent proposal for drug legalization. But on school vouchers, I am with Friedman all the way. Here is a link to the Friedman Foundation website for the curious.