Common Good Capitalism

In the last few years GDP and financial sector profits have soared due to the salutary effects of free market capitalism. As President Trump has cut taxes and removed the burdensome regulations imposed on business by the Obama administration the economy has taken off and unemployment is at record lows, especially for minorities.

But, as Emile Doak observes in an article in First Things, there's a downside to our prosperity. As the economy has been thrumming along we're also experiencing a continuing plague of drug dependence, suicide and other deaths of despair. Here's Doak:

It’s against this backdrop that another ambitious GOP politician, Sen. Marco Rubio, is thinking beyond mere macroeconomic metrics to place human dignity at the core of America’s political economy. In a speech at the Catholic University of America yesterday, Rubio...outlined an economic philosophy that departs significantly from [the typical capitalist] laissez-faire approach.

“The primary purpose of capitalism is to provide for human dignity,” Rubio proclaimed.... “We don’t need socialism, [but we also] don’t need simply to say ‘the market will take care of it by itself.’ What we need is to restore common good capitalism.”

...Rubio seeks to reclaim a holistic disposition that recognizes the members of the U.S. economy as human persons, not simply scientific datum. Conservatives are turning against outsourcing—both of American jobs to China and of economic thought to libertarians.

Rubio said that economic growth is an inadequate indicator of economic health: “Economic growth and record profits alone will not lead to the creation of dignified work.” He argues for placing human dignity at the center of the economy. “Does our country exist to serve the interests of the market? Or does the market exist to serve the interests of our nation?”

Doak goes on to list some of Rubio's specific policy proposals and interested readers are urged to read the original article at the link.

Doak concludes with this:

At its core, Rubio’s common good capitalism represents a more authentically Christian approach to political economy than anything either major party has put forth in recent memory. It balances the legitimate interests of businesses and workers. It respects the rights of shareholders, CEOs, and employees alike, while emphasizing the corresponding obligations they have to one another and to the country that made their success possible....

The path forward requires recalibrating our nation’s economic priorities, reemphasizing the dignity of work and he who provides it, and reintroducing the language of national interest and the common good. The common good capitalism Rubio outlined at CUA is the place to start.

I am certainly all in favor of reemphasizing the dignity of work, but at the risk of sounding churlish I don't know how we can do that in a society that implicitly denies, in ways both great and small, the even more basic dignity of human beings.

It's interesting that Rubio is offering a proposal that grows out of a Christian worldview because on a secular worldview it's very hard to see how human beings, which are in that view nothing but machines made of meat, can have any intrinsic worth, and without intrinsic worth, human dignity, to the extent it exists at all, is simply an illusion we foist upon ourselves to stroke our egos.

If you doubt that secularists really think like this consider the words of the early twentieth century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.

Or consider the more recent claim by the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking:

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.

  And, of course, if we humans are just baboons and chemical scum then our work can hardly be imagined to rise to the level of "dignified activity."

I applaud Senator Rubio, but I think the cause of our distress, the cause of the mounting deaths of despair, lies at a much more fundamental level. We need to reemphasize not only the dignity of work but also the dignity of human beings and that will require simultaneously a persistent assault on the secular claim that we're no more than animals and a persistent reaffirmation that we are, in fact, created in the image of God and loved by Him.

Only if that is true can human beings lay any claim to dignity.