"Power, And Those Too Weak to Seek It"

There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.--Professor Quirell, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Paperback, (Scholastic, 1997), pg. 291

John Zmirak is usually well worth reading, and this piece on "consent as the criterion of the good" is quite good.  Yes, Virginia, separation of Church and state is actually part of authentic Catholic tradition.  Excerpts.

...Although the Church became entangled with government early on – namely, with the conversion of Constantine – it has never seen its primary duty as giving directives to kings, or telling citizens how to vote. That is, at best, a tertiary role the Church is sometimes forced to serve when the conscience of a polity has become so degraded that natural reason cannot do its job, so faith has to step in and plug the gaps. Classic examples include St. Ambrose’s rebuke of Theodosius for the massacre of unruly citizens; the Church in 16th-century Spain insisting that Indians in the New World were fully human and should not be enslaved; German bishops condemning Nazi euthanasia; and Pope John Paul II denouncing both Communist tyranny and the Western “culture of death.”

But these acts of political prophecy on the part of bishops and popes stand out because they are not the norm. It is the duty of laymen – statesmen and citizens – to inform their consciences with sound moral principles in order to form public policy. Religious believers and leaders must make sure that those principles are sound, and call out the culture when they are either perverted or ignored. That is what abolitionist Christians did in the 19th century, and civil rights leaders in the 20th. Such a movement in Poland brought down the Soviet bloc, ended the Cold War, and may have saved our species from a global nuclear war. So maybe – just maybe – people of faith deserve a hearing...

And then an essential rebuke of those who would seek a simply libertarian state with strict free market capitalism without paying heed to what sort of culture is needed to render that humane:

...Indeed, the very name of the workers’ movement (Solidarity) that knocked down the first domino in Communist Europe was borrowed from Catholic social teaching’s term for the force that knits society together, that goads us to treat each other justly even when the government isn’t looking, that lubricates the highly efficient engine of the market economy with the oil of human kindness. Too often, especially in Europe (as Samuel Gregg documents), the word “solidarity” is cheapened into a synonym for socialism. It’s trotted out as a slogan every time the goldbricking workers of one country crave a subsidy from the thrifty taxpayers of another. But words like “justice,” “love,” and “freedom” are often perverted, too – that doesn’t mean we drown the baby in the bathwater.

The central principle of solidarity in practice is simple and timeless – the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This ethical maxim, which Jesus quoted from the Old Testament, exists in some form in every culture on earth – as C. S. Lewis documented in The Abolition of Man, where he called it the Tao. It is so ubiquitous that it’s easy for us to assume that it’s universally accepted – at least in theory – while far too rarely practiced...

In a strongly ethical culture, a humane culture of life in the context of a civilization of love, perhaps we could have far fewer laws--more conscience, fewer cops. Perhaps a free market system could work with minimal regulation in a highly principled population.  Absent the culture, though, libertarianism at its common extreme is one more example of the very modern/Enlightenment-era mistake of thinking that humans are innately good, merely corrupted by the structures binding them.  If only we would loosen the fetters of society, then humans would do the right thing and get along without coercion.  All would be well.  Marx's revolution; Rousseau's noble savage; Rand's superman--on and on it rolls, across all ideological divides in the modern era.

Oh, look!  Zmirak proceeds to make all those points in the rest of his article!

...We have another maxim, which crept into Western souls via “worldly philosophers” such as Machiavelli and Hobbes – the principle of the “consenting adult.” Any time someone uses this phrase, he is saying (under his breath) that none of us is the least bit responsible for each other. If folks make stupid choices, that’s not our problem. Even if we are the ones who tempted them to make such a choice – if we have exploited them personally, economically, or sexually – we are still scot-free: “She was a consenting adult;” “That schmuck should have known better,” we tell ourselves, and smirk.

Instead of an ethic that rests on reciprocity, on admitting the unique value of every person because he’s a fellow human, we treasure a heartless, pragmatic ethos that shrugs at suffering and confusion, a Darwinian willingness to pounce on our neighbor’s mistakes. So “consenting adults” work in sweatshops overseas making our iPads, or sweat before cameras enacting our porn, or wake up alone in the bed where we’ve left them when we were finished with our desires. No individual rights were violated, no crime was committed or contract broken – so the modern secular conscience has nothing meaningful to say.

What we don’t dare to realize is that human trust, promise-keeping, and a basic sense of concern for our fellow man are the glue that holds a free society together. (So Adam Smith taught in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.) The anarchy which arises in its absence is just too awful for people to tolerate, so in self-defense, they will even embrace a tyranny.

So tyranny creeps in...any ideology that focuses on power relationships (rather than love and justice) is programmed to liquidate every human value in the end...

Heal the culture first.  Open the doors to God's grace to heal, illumine, and deify nature.  Then talk to me about libertarianism.