Traditionalist Right: A Need to Purge Itself of Anti-Semitism
Why Certain Traditionalist Catholics and Other People Ought to Stop Hating Jews
By Joseph Andrew Settanni
This is a discussion given concerning why it is morally and otherwise wrong for there to exist any form of anti-Semitism among traditionalist Catholics or, for that matter, non-Catholics or any Christians.
Is America now desperately trying to become a truly libertarian country of only rugged individualists fully emulating Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged? No. Will there soon be any substantial effort to return back to a level of government once seen, in the 18th century, in this country? No. Can there be a Jewish conspiracy to wickedly impose belief in an ideological cult, upon this nation, concerning a worship of free enterprise? No.
Christopher A. Ferrara’s The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church’s Teaching on Man, Economy and State will be used as a good guide toward elucidating this subject. Too many Roman Catholics, including some traditionalists, falsely think that they must be axiomatically anti-Semitic for the sake of better informing their traditionalist, orthodox Catholicism, as is so upheld in such representative publications as The Remnant and the New Oxford Review.
In addition, they do think of themselves as being very politically conservative in their attitudes and opinions. Attacks upon free-market economics qua (historical) classical Liberalism have often been insidiously used as a cover for denouncing the Jews, which is not the same thing as being anti-capitalist. Of course, almost no one “in polite society” admits to hating Jews, aside from obviously marginalized groups such as Aryan-Nation Christians, neo-Nazis, Skin Heads, and other such just virulent riffraff; incidentally, the first three groups named are ideological opponents of free-market economics and Liberalism at least as much as is true of Ferrara.
The former periodical, The Remnant, even more so then the latter mentioned, is, in the opinion of many critics, noted regarding open vehemence toward members of the Judaic faith. Unfortunately, in their ever quite cognitively misinformed and morally warped minds, a determined hatred of Jews, whether clearly explicit or merely just implicit, has, thus, transactionally become quite epistemologically and axiologically inseparable from a devotion related to trying to maintain an absolute and uncompromising orthodoxy in terms of Catholicism.
Seemingly, they also develop supposedly theologically-based kinds of justifications for such hatred and detestation, which exists as a peculiar moral problem among people who, supposedly, ought to know better; this is because they themselves (typically Latin Mass Catholics) are, in fact, a very hated minority within the Catholic Church. Is it the sad case, therefore, that those who are hated learn, in turn, to be (meaning a number of them) good haters themselves? So, otherwise, what goes on?
Jews are seen as “the other” and usually lumped in, e. g., with Free Masons and other people who have been linked to anti-Catholic bigotry for centuries. Of course, admittedly, it can be said that many Jewish people and various categories of different human beings can have ill feelings or worse toward Catholics or Christians in general; witness to this, it is true, is the ongoing vilification of the memory of Blessed Pope Pius XII who saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
However, ascribing automatically a set generic hatred being integrally present in “all” Jews or Muslims, or whatever other sensate creatures inhabit this planet, is still excessive and irrational and immoral. In any event, good (love) ought to be returned for evil (hate) in the true spirit of Christ. Also, to cover another matter, American society is not about to become a nation of atomistic individualists willing to see, e. g., millions die of agonizing hunger in the streets of this country.
Tangled Tales of Hate
Hatred of human beings, even because of their religion, is supposed to automatically be a mortal sin in the teaching of the Catholic Church; all mortal sins, by definition, necessarily endanger the eternal life of the human soul by directly committing a terrible offense against God that is then absolutely grave in its importance, unlike a venial sin. A single unrepented mortal sin would, therefore, forever deny a soul admission to Heaven and send it, instead, to eternal self-damnation in Hell.
Thus, all racism and anti-Semitism, the latter being actually a branch or subdivision of the former, are always mortal sins in terms of the surely, certainly, vile hatred involved. Catholicism includes the idea of the Church Suffering, not just the Church Triumphant or the Church Militant. Even in a secular manner, any ugly obsession with the Jews is irrational and ridiculous, disproportionate and illogical, because it is the age-old attempt to find a scapegoat, which is, itself, Hebraic in origin.
It somewhat parallels the idea of a nation’s government or people seeking out some foreign devils for directing a country’s hatred toward, rather than to fix any internal failings of the regime. Hate, inclusive of racism and anti-Semitism, is a kind of satanic poison that pleases the Prince of Hell by, thus, aiding the expansion of his dark kingdom.
And, this is the main critical reason why the traditionalist Right (meaning certain odd elements of it), inclusive, unfortunately, of the Catholic Right, must morally and spiritually purge itself of all such hatred. This obnoxious and wrongheaded, disgusting and reprehensible, obsession with the Jews must end for the appropriate sake of then attaining a fairer and truer sense of requisite Catholicism and, at the least, of a basic but solid Christianity, which ought not to abide such contemptible hatred. While Hilaire Belloc wrote many good things, e. g., worthy of attention by believing Catholics, however, his anti-Semitism needs to still be rejected as always being both ethically and morally wrong.
Let it be said, in fairness, that prior to World War II, anti-Semitism was widely fashionable even among the upper classes, much as it is, sadly, again, today. After the dispersion of knowledge of what later came to be called the Holocaust became widespread and up to about the 1980s, Jew hatred was, more or less, publicly shunned, especially in the USA, though not as much (as usual) in Europe.
Currently and since the 1990s, anti-Semitism, under the general guise of anti-Israeli (AKA State of Israel) feelings, has, once again, become quite fashionable among the literati, intellectuals, academics, etc. concerning elite opinion; the World Council of Churches, inclusive, for instance, of most contemporary Presbyterianism, also adds its theological voice to many Jew-baiting exercises, especially against the State of Israel; this is yet different, in its own specific ideational orientation, from ancient and medieval customary contempt for the Hebrews of Europe.
Ideological, meaning modern, anti-Semitism, as is well covered in, e. g., Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, began essentially in the 18th century with the French philosophes and their ilk among the liberals of that past era; she interestingly notes that such traditionalist Catholics as Joseph de Maistre, being absolutely on the political right, were then among open defenders of the Jews; factually speaking, the predominance of such modern anti-Semitism has been and will ever be set on the Left, though many Catholic traditionalists and conservative Christians may not know this truth.
Ironically, even in America where anti-Catholic bigotry is real, there are many traditionalist Catholics who insist that the Jews, though a tiny minority, are surely to blame for the terrible conditions in this country and the world at large. But, two wrong do not make a right; no one can logically fight bigotry by adopting the practice of it. Often, a particular tack is taken by which criticism and condemnation of Jews can be done by finding surrogate terms or schools of thought that have Jews prominently linked to them to a usually large or great degree. Such is, mainly, true of the Austrian School of Economics.
Detestation and denunciation, revulsion and criticism, of this school of thought offers a rather too convenient field for, thus, reviling Jews without, on the surface, seeming to do so. The same is often true, e. g., for the followers of neoconservatism who are disproportionately Jewish.
It is one thing to properly and appropriately denounce the overt immorality of Libertarianism in its ideological support for abortion, same-sex “marriage,” prostitution, and a host of other things worthy of adamant condemnation; it is entirely something else to use that revilement as a nasty and reprehensible cover for vile Jew-baiting exercises in polemical rhetoric. One can read, in the December issue of the New Oxford Review, an extremely favorable book review by Thomas Storck of Ferrara’s The Church and the Libertarian. It is, to say the least, at a far remove from a No Labels Movement.
Whether in the author’s book or in that review of it, the underlying theme gets unspoken, unmentioned, unless one reads the names of Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and even Milton Friedman (though he was not an Austrian School economist) but Friedman was, after all, still a Jew. Rothbard’s libertarian magnum opus was Man, Economy, and State. Ferrara deliberately, therefore, incorporated his title into the then consciously utilized subtitle of his own book, which is meant to be a philosophical counter-text disproving libertarian economics and its various implications and serious moral ramifications.
And yet, Thomas E. Woods, Jr. is the core object of attack since he, though not a Jew, is a supporter of the Austrian School of Economics (ASE) and was, moreover, a close friend of Rothbard who, surely, had heavily influenced him; in addition, Woods is a traditionalist Catholic who, supposedly, should be just completely anti-Libertarian in all of his basic sympathies but, in fact, is not.
Thus, the battle lines are drawn. What the reader of this present article will get is, in effect, a review of Storck’s commentary (book review), in the New Oxford Review, December 2010 issue, pp. 41-44, upon Ferrara’s recent volume. The result will be effectively illustrative of what in Libertarianism needs to be always morally rejected, as much as anti-Semitism also needs to be suitably abhorred, by all decent and moral human beings, Catholics and non-Catholics inclusive.
It may help the reader to know that Woods has discussed the thinking of Fray Juan de Mariana, a 16th century Spanish cleric, who had vigorously denounced the centralization processes of the then emerging nation-states of Europe; he, moreover, actually authored a book that had energetically, rather spiritedly, denounced tyranny.
Mariana validly represents the first true political and philosophical consciousness of what increasingly developed into the traditionalist right, not, e. g., Edmund Burke who was, after all, a Liberal Whig of the 18th century. Woods had, interestingly, demonstrated how fairly compatible Mariana’s thinking is with that of the ASE concerning subjective value/marginal utility theory versus the labor theory of value of classical economics; Austrian thinking favors what has been denominated as the marginalist revolution.
Labor theory, briefly put here, posits that a man’s labor is objectively put into a product of production that then determines its value; subjective value theory, in contrast, says that something is worth what the (free) market thinks it is subjectively worth, meaning in the opinion of the consumer (bidder) for it. Thus, the relative market price that could be attached to a painting, e. g., as once done by Michelangelo is not determined by any supposed objectively measured labor (value) put into it.
The improper kind of transposition of such relativism is, however, wrongly imputed by libertarianism to human morality that becomes translated as being mere subjective mores, with no objective basis of truth; it translates into a man-centered morality, as then based upon nominalism (transmuted into relativism), in philosophy. What can be keenly noted, as part of the argumentation in this article, is that the vast majority of people who detest free-market economics can be counted upon to also be avid anti-Semites, which would seem to be an interesting kind of existential affinity.
Anthropocentricism v. Theocentrism: The Core Argument
All believing Roman Catholics must reject anthropocentrism and, in turn, fervently defend theocentrism, meaning Christocentrism in particular, because that is fully consistent, as could be guessed, with the fundamental teachings of the Faith. Catholicism takes the Platonic position, philosophically set against Protagoras, that God, not Man, is the appropriate measure of all things. Anthropocentrism is a defining characteristic of the Libertarian ideology and suggests forcefully why no Catholic can be a Libertarian in the ideological sense of that term.
On the other hand, free-market economics as is so clearly advocated by the ASE can be then justifiably supported by Catholics against the Godless statism, secularism, corruption, tyranny, injustice, and oppression of collectivism, by whatever euphemism. God is the Author of liberty, not the State, which increasingly institutes too many violations of classical Natural Law teachings, the four cardinal virtues, traditional morality, and, at a minimum, what used to be properly called right reason.
Today, what people typically mean by “the State” is not at all simply equivalent to “the government” of a country or the notion of having a government in this country. Statism or tyranny is real. In the past 20th century, the horrible extremes of statism, known as totalitarianism, were actually seen vividly in Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. The American State of today is not simply equivalent to the 18th century American Republic that then consisted of the notion that government was only involved with governance, not social, economic, racial, or other forms of statist engineering of the citizenry of the supposedly omnipotent and omnicompetent State.
Lesser forms of statism, as seen in the transformation of this nation into the kind of social-democratic regime as greatly desired by Obama and his friends, are no less immoral reifications of what ought not to exist. Liberty is indivisible. The taking away of increasing amounts of economic liberty in the false name of expanding social or economic liberties is a lie; robbing Peter to pay Paul is immoral and always wrong; legalized theft, under any ideological dispensation, is not made then morally right even by the vote of a majority to commit thievery. The people do not have the right to do wrong.
Democratic despotism is no less despotic because a majority sanctions ideologically supported vice for supposedly altruistic or humanitarian reasons. As H. L. Mencken put it, whenever A takes from B to give to C, A is a scoundrel. The Catholic Church has had its teachings directed against both Socialism and Capitalism because both wish to run the secularized State on their behalf, not for the people. But, for important clarification purposes, distinctions and differences must be made. Free-market economics wants to see genuine competition, dynamism, invention, innovation, risk, and increasing levels of true entrepreneurship for an economy directed toward free-enterprise activism.
Capitalism is normally equivalent to what is understood as State Capitalism (AKA corporate/welfare Capitalism) or neomercantilism/Big Business in that such a system naturally favors basic protectionism, corporate welfare, tariffs, trade quotas, and the vast regulation and restriction of competition and risk under a bureaucratized State known as Big Government; entrepreneurship is then meant to be crushed for the sake of a statist-corporatist economy. None of that is related to proper political governance.
Theoretically, the more government that exists, the more proper and needed order, liberty, justice, and security for all persons and property ought to also exist; thus, true government as governance is always a positive and good thing for society and civilization; it is not a necessary evil, as thought of by classical Liberalism or, of course, today’s Libertarianism.
One can read such instructive volumes as Leo Strauss’ Liberalism, Ancient and Modern and, also, James Kalb’s The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command. What used to be the simple political administration of a society and for its people has been terribly reified, more and more, into the vile creation of an entity, Big Government, that, in effect, exists primarily or, perhaps, even exclusively for itself and its own needs, not for the people.
The modern State has, therefore, become a regime of power substantially dedicated to the oligarchical service of the ruling class/power elite running the nation. Thus, today’s empowered establishment, in clear violation of the US Constitution, has definitely gone far beyond the intentions of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic.
Big Government, consequently, is not the equivalent of plain old government qua governance, which is the pivotal and critical issue at stake; statism, furthermore, does not at all guarantee true order, liberty, justice, or security; the opposite is fundamentally true. Opposition to tyranny of whatever degree is not supposedly equivalent to being just an anarchist or, perhaps, an anarcho-capitalist; it is not the same as being against the natural and needed existence of government, which is a politically reasonable part of requisite human reality. A simply false dilemma is, therefore, created by many critics of Libertarianism, which definitely includes Ferrara.
Of course, to give here a different example, the traditionalist right in politics ought not to be confused with what passes for Conservatism or Libertarianism in America because both, in essence, are really forms of Liberalism. This is properly demonstrated, e. g., by such volumes as Fr. C. N. R. McCoy, On the Intelligibility of Political Philosophy and his The Structure of Political Thought. The traditionalist right, moreover, adamantly rejects both classical (old) Liberalism and the new Liberalism that, thus, supports collectivism/welfarism/Socialism, a milder form of Communism (AKA radical Utopianism).
And yet, one can still appropriately denounce the anti-Catholic bigotry of Free Masonry without ever cognately advocating the vicious hatred of all the followers of that belief system. Few people today know, however, that the character of Ebenezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carole, was meant to be a fair example of the morally horrid, socioeconomic thinking of 19th century Manchesterian Liberalism, not conservatism as is, unfortunately, too often just assumed. Catholicism opposes such a vilely materialistic attitude with its cruelly raw individualism. Proportionality in thought is, however, still rationally and reasonably needed. Truth ought to validate truth, not error in cognition, even pertaining to economics.
Other matters are more problematic. Rothbard, back in the 1970s, had then greatly praised V. I. Lenin, an enemy of all religion and, of course, once the ideologically ferocious Communist dictator of the Soviet Union, as having nonetheless been a kind of true libertarian, which necessarily speaks volumes. That ASE follower had then correctly demonstrated the logical affinity of such Godless radicalism, meaning atheistic humanism, with Communism. Capitalism is, thus, also compatible with a thoroughly secularized society and culture supportive of materialism and hedonism leading eventually, as does collectivism, to nihilism.
Equally, therefore, the traditionalist right is always against Capitalism but does not object to free-market economics, as with the ASE’s effort to rationally and appropriately seek the total separation of Economy and State. Big Government, as ought to be well known by now, has a both logical and intrinsic tendency toward collectivism and is, moreover, a definite functional and operational part of the quite necessarily corrupt Iron Triangle: Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor as the infrastructural triumvirate of modern statism.
But, what is the concern of Ferrara and Storck regarding the issues in dispute? Michael Novak and George Weigel (who are not cited as being neoconservatives) are noted by Storck as supporters of “the classical liberal ideology” in favor of Capitalism. Ironically, however, neoconservatism is, in essence, a form of neosocialism. The traditionalist right sagaciously recognizes that there has never, in fact, been any real antagonism or conflict between Capitalism and Socialism/Communism; they are symbiotically the two sides of the exactly same coin of modernity, meaning the basically secular-humanist effort, called modernism, to ideologically substitute deified Man for God.
Thus, all the ideologies of modernity, including Anarchism, Conservatism, Liberalism, Fascism, Socialism, Nazism, Communism, Syndicalism, Feminism, etc., are ideologically on the Left; none are on the Right. One could refer to Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot and his Liberty or Equality. One can perceive how, therefore, neoconservatism and neosocialism are logically related to each other.
Storck openly indicts the Acton Institute, which is run by a Catholic priest, for choosing Lord Acton as its intellectual mascot; this is because the book reviewer studiously neglects to mention that Acton ceased all public criticism of the doctrine of papal infallibility, after Blessed Pope Pius IX had declared it to be a de fide matter. Acton, therefore, was not an enemy of Catholicism, as is asserted by Storck.
Ferrara bravely takes on the [mainly Jewish] “cult” of the ASE, which, in terms of the entire broad field of economic science, is an extremely tiny fraction of thinkers who are so routinely marginalized and dismissed from the largely pro-statist mainstream of economics; he, in short, had so deliberately applied a proverbial sledge hammer for hitting a fly. It is highly unlikely, one does suspect, that a vast majority of American Catholics will ever become fire-breathing “freemarketeers” rampaging through the streets shouting out ASE doctrines. This is not likely.
The real (latent) object of Ferrara’s venomous assault is actually Woods, not the ASE, though the two men used to be very good Catholic friends, not too long ago. [I and my family had once attended, in Pequannock, NJ, at the Our Lady of Fatima Parish gathering (of which we were then members) of a Latin Mass Community, where both men had, in fact, made a joint appearance in notably pleasant solidarity. This was about eight years ago.]
The former, Ferrara, is marginalized to the Catholic traditionalist ghetto that does not really provide substantial scope for the kind of greater success and adulation given to Woods by his being more widely published and, therefore, read. Not surprisingly, envy and spite are immoral motivational forces among fallen human beings in this fallen world. Sin is a reality; envy, after all, is still notably one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Question begging necessarily goes with Storck saying, in a revealing manner, that nobody should “pay any attention to charges that Ferrara is motivated by personal animosity” that is (supposedly not so) shown to “a former collaborator of his.” [Such a use of that word “collaborator” is greatly tendentious and, moreover, rather snide, in context, in so describing a former close friend.]
As with the awkward admonition in the The Wizard of Oz, ignore the man behind the curtain! Ought anyone to take this statement seriously? It is doubtful. It is ludicrous. It is so Storck—who adds that “Of course, no man can read another man’s mind, but …” That’s a definite caveat. What is really going on, sir?
Woods is, furthermore, publicly affiliated with the Mises Institute in Alabama. Storck eagerly writes suppositionally about what he (negatively) assumes are the dubious and contemptible moral positions of all the Catholics attached to the Institute in terms of slandering them. Jeffrey Tucker, admittedly, cannot reconcile his Catholicism with ASE advocacy of matters clearly adverse, without any question, to the explicit teachings of the Church.
And yet, of course, that focus on Tucker is not the main core of what the book is actually concerned with regarding the ASE, meaning, actually, a largely Jew-dominated economics. Woods’ more than merely suspected philosemitism is what, thus, really irks many, not the majority, of Latin Mass Catholics.
Storck, who inclines toward collectivism as a natural function of the State, delights in pointing out: “The high place given the state in Catholic thought” as a major means of criticizing Libertarianism. But, no recognition is rightly accorded the difference between economic science versus economic morality; popes are expected, by Storck, to be fully qualified and trained experts in the field of economics when they do ever support obvious efforts toward encouraging what could only be perceived as collectivism practiced by the State. Catholicism, one supposes, is said to be opposed to free-market economics.
[An aside may be needed. Papal infallibility extends only to faith and morals, when statements are issued ex cathedra as to the universal need for absolutely unquestioned dogmatic acceptance, meaning as an article of the Faith itself. A pope’s opinions on art, aesthetics, science, economics, etc. are, however, his personal points of view, not automatic dogmas; he can, also, denounce certain economic thinking as immoral, meaning sinful; however, this would not unreasonably or absurdly cover the (entire) field of economic science, which goes totally beyond the areas of religion, theology, morality, ethics, or spirituality that are all, of course, totally under the proper purview of the Vicar of Christ.
In addition, no pope (unless, perhaps, a mentally disturbed one) can ever issue any Church statement contradicting, e. g., classical Natural Law teachings, such as declaring that the force of gravity on earth no longer existed and, consequently, Catholics are hen freed from belief in its existence. One must be careful, therefore, to neither attribute either too little or too much to what a pope may say or do.]
Thus, all ASE Catholics ought to be just excommunicated for not adhering to elements of leftist thinking congenial to this book reviewer who had been—let it be noted—a truly ardent supporter of the Society of St. John, a pseudo-Catholic (wildly freaked-out) utopian community, which used to once oddly exist in Pennsylvania, made then terribly infamous by its rampant homosexuality, larceny, and, thus, immorality.
As ever, one can perceive that it is a proverbial case of the hypocritical pot calling the kettle black. And so, he freely denounces the extremely reviled thinking “sanctioned by the Austrians and by many other free-market Catholics.” Physician, heal thyself.
Ferrara writes against “excessive CEO salaries and his explanation of the current recession” reveals that “corporations and government” were certainly united in the terrible effort at such economic and moral corruption. The latter is fully consistent, without question, with the aforementioned denunciation of the Iron Triangle; the former remark raises the question of what State agency is to decide how high a salary is to be and reflects what used to be properly called Fascism. One gets the impression that both Storck and Ferrara would be very comfortable living in a more statist-dominated society to their liking, though the mass of the November 2010 voters openly spat upon such an evil dream.
Storck, correctly, notes that “Pius XI praised Catholic legislators who pushed for government regulation of the economy…” And, the same pro-statist viewpoint was, in Centesimus Annus, expressed by Pope John Paul II. Storck favorably thinks it to be completely “foolish to dismantle federal regulation before intermediate bodies and local governments were” ready to “take over that function effectively.”
The questionable need for any such regulation is not at all rationally or economically questioned, of course, but just assumed, axiomatically, as being needed in full deference to, one assumes, the worship of Big Government. A statist mentality is thought, is blandly enough assumed, to be simply normal, not exceptional or, perhaps, morally wrong, (not just economically perverse).
A fully overregulated and thoroughly bureaucratized society and culture, as is definitely wanted by Obama and his leftist followers is OK in the estimation of those who detest the ASE or any libertarian protest against degree of tyrannization in America. Of course, one need not be a libertarian to be opposed to statism; those who favor, for instance, the position of the traditionalist right are also in opposition to tyranny, injustice, corruption, and oppression administered through the courtesy of the modern State. But, let the discussion be further engaged on Ferrara’s terms.
Subsidiarity and solidarity, which are Catholic political and social teachings, must be properly taken into account regarding the suitable understanding of applied Catholicism, pertaining to cultural, societal, and political issues. Subsidiarity means that if there are any troubles or difficulties in a society, the appeal should be first to the lowest private level of resort before going up through various intermediate levels and, finally, the highest level of possible private sector redress available; then, next, if no actually genuine and realistic private remedy can be so found or exists, the procedure, as before, starts at the lowest public degree or status of appeal and etc.
Solidarity means that no class, racial, or other divisions are ever to separate human beings concerning all of the fundamental and broadly communitarian basics of what is so morally, socially, politically, and otherwise proper to the entirety of people, of the society, in any country; because of the moral need for compassion, the general welfare, meaning the total public good, of all is to be then put substantively and substantially above the merely selfish satisfactions of anyone or any group in particular.
Thus, an extremist libertarian or anarcho-libertarian would ideologically always allow, e. g., for masses of people to starve to death rather than to ever permit any governmental assistance, meaning if that was, in fact, the only realistic alternative. As could be guessed, this would expressly, obviously, violate both of the highly imperative Catholic principles of subsidiarity and solidarity; in addition, it would be expressive of an anthropocentric point of view set firmly against the theocentric attitude and cognate theological commitment of Catholicism and, one assumes, traditional Christianity.
Storck concludes his review with the absurd assertion that Ferrara’s book will contribute to the correct “understanding of both Catholic teaching and its Austrian counterfeit.” Such a questionable statement is bizarre in that the Austrian School of Economics had and will never set itself up as a supposed rival church to that of the Roman Catholic Church (or any other religious establishment); nor, moreover, should any intelligent person try to ever idiotically extract truly Catholic attitudes or viewpoints from any school of economics, including, for that matter, Distributism.
Only Catholicism, by definition, should appropriately represent itself as teaching Catholicism, meaning according to the teachings of the Church; proper theology, thus, correctly instructs about religion; and so, correct economic science, in a parallel sense, pertinently gives out information about economics. Storck, take notice. The vile Big Mother State of a social-democratic regime, as is urgently wanted by Obama and the nihilistic Left, ideologically believes in determinism and, as expected, denies the Catholic doctrine of free will. Government, at that statist level of aggressiveness, wishes to improperly withdraw from men their God-given free will and wrongly substitute for it the immorally ideologically-sanctioned “protection” of people against themselves. This includes, e. g., when levels of government imperiously institute salt standards in fast foods as a part of social engineering.
However, the titanic contempt shown for free-market economics by the Federal government and public sector growth, for at least the past few years, should have added great joy and exaltation to the lives of Ferrara and Storck, though it, probably, has not. In any event, no one should simply expect millions of Catholics (or anybody else) rushing mightily to rapidly embrace the anti-statist economic thinking of the ASE, though it would helpfully end the massive recession/depression misery in the American economy and society. It should be known, moreover, that the USA has not, in fact, moved toward any greater solidarity under the Obama Administration; the opposite is definitely true because a postracial America was not created by Obama.
Also, the righteous principle of subsidiarity has been easily shot to Hell, as could be reasonably guessed, by the strident application of greater and greater degrees of collectivism under the current regime. Do not fear, Mr. Ferrara, the troubled USA, with its now clearly shrinking private sector, is not nor will it ever be seriously “threatened” by the ASE, as might be supposedly feared. The Church has always taught, furthermore, that one cannot be both a true Catholic and a Socialist or Capitalist ideologist at one and the same time, which is the bottom line.
But, since the majority of American Catholics are aligned, mainly speaking, with the political Left, there is, therefore, no really urgent need for Ferrara’s book and it, thus, does a grave discredit to him as a purported traditionalist Catholic. No member of the Faith, inspired by the love of Jesus, can be filled with hatred toward any race or people and, simultaneously, be a member in good spiritual standing with God. Q. E. D.
Conclusion
While the night-watchman regime of Libertarianism represents an impossible ideal that, nonetheless, encompasses certain good principles pertaining to proper governance; the nightmare State of the Left, on the other hand, has too often become a tremendously horrifying reality for tens of millions of people. The Austrian School of Economics, by wisely advocating the separation of Economy and State, unlike, e. g., the Chicago School of Economics, is manifestly on the side of free-market economics that has lifted the masses above the subsistence level of poverty wherever and whenever it has been properly tried.
Prior to the market economy, as even the infamous (Jewish) radical Karl Marx admitted, no mechanism in the entire world existed for the creation and amassment of increasing wealth, on a monumental scale, previously unimagined in all of prior human history, which is, thus, really no small achievement. Before the free-market economy existed, poverty, for the vast majority of people in a society, was then accepted as simply being the normal condition of mankind. Consequently, unlike all other periods in recorded history, literally many tens of millions upon millions of people were and are able to rise up out of poverty, which, as a thought, may somehow (greatly?) offend Ferrara.
Communism or Socialism, in contrast, maintains a low standard of living for the common people versus the luxurious lifestyles of the ruling class that runs the collectivist regime; it is a society of status, the epitome of reaction, which wants to forever insure that the free society of contract never exists along with, of course, a free-market economy. Ferrara and Storck, one confidently assumes, are then basically comfortable with the suppression of the common people, meaning, of course, in the righteous name of opposing anything that approaches the atomistic economic desires of the ASE, along with any supposed Jewishness involved.
Questioning the Catholicism of Woods, author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, ought to be recognized, moreover, as the greatly pernicious and insidious nonsense it surely is. But, much more importantly, the Church has, in fact, never endorsed either Socialism or Capitalism and has, moreover, always strongly condemned the obvious materialistic, hedonistic, and nihilistic errors of both.
In the name of the Prince of Peace, the Messiah, the Savior, let there be an end, furthermore, to this highly immoral obsession with the Jews that does not serve well the conservative cause of traditionalist Catholicism, nor the hopes of the traditionalist right either.
Bibliography
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Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot.
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____. The Structure of Political Thought.
Fr. Vincent P. Miceli, The Gods of Atheism.
Fr. Moorhouse F. X. Millar, S.J., Unpopular Essays in the Philosophy of History.
Thomas P. Neill, The Rise and Decline of Liberalism.
____. Makers of the Modern Mind.
____. Religion and Culture.
Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., Roman Catholic Political Philosophy.
____. Christianity and Politics.
____. The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from Classical, Medieval, and Modern Political Philosophy.
____. Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy.
____. At the Limits of Political Philosophy: From the "Brilliant Errors" to the Things of Uncommon Importance.
____. The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History.
____. On Tyranny.
____. Persecution and the Art of Writing.
____. Liberalism, Ancient and Modern.
____. Thoughts on Machiavelli.
____. What Is Political Philosophy?
____. The City and Man.
____. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes.
J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy.
____. The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarisation in the Twentieth Century.
____. Political Messianism – the Romantic Phase.
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
____. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
