In Catholic social teaching, there is an organizing principle called “subsidiarity.” Subsidiarity means that societal needs ought to be addressed as close to the problem as possible.
For example, if there is a pothole in the street outside your house, you wouldn’t call your Senator to complain about it. You would notify the Benicia Public Works Department, who would then take care of the problem. It works the other way, too, however: if you live in North Dakota and notice Canadian hordes pouring over the border raping, pillaging and forcing good Americans to eat that weird stuff they think of as bacon, then you would not call the local police department, but instead notify the federal authorities.
There is another principle given great importance in Catholic Social Teaching, and that is “Solidarity.” Solidarity can be summed up as an affirmative answer to the biblical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Pope St. John Paul II discussed Solidarity in his landmark Encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “(T)he roots of the contradiction between the solemn affirmation of human rights and their tragic denial in practice lies in a notion of freedom which exalts the isolated individual in an absolute way, and gives no place to solidarity, to openness to others and service of them. . . It is precisely in this sense that Cain’s answer to the Lord’s question: ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ can be interpreted: ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Gen 4:9). Yes, every man is his ‘brother’s keeper,’ because God entrusts us to one another.”
I read a fair amount of right-libertarian economic arguments, and something always strikes me when I do: It seems that they are describing the ideal economic arrangements for a world scaled almost entirely at the village level – the world of feudalist Europe in the year 1300 or so. In that world, a large and robust central national government would have been an intrusive absurdity – there was no need for it. In that world, you knew – often personally – the people that provided all of the economic necessities of your life. Your pots and pans were made by the local tinker; your food was grown no more than a few miles from your house; your cloth was woven locally, from fibers also supplied by local farmers, and so on. I mentioned something like this in a column four years ago:
“Think about what life, and especially economic life, was like in a typical village in America in the time before mass industrialization. For fun, let’s name this hypothetical little town ‘Sylvan,’ and we’ll say the year is 1800.
“In Sylvan, accountability in economic relations was pervasive — inescapable, even. If you were a typical citizen of such a town, you knew who made your clothing, pots and pans, furniture, shoes, lamps, soap, window glass; you knew who built your carriage or wagon, and so on. And not just in an abstract way— you likely knew personally the makers of those things, and could thus hold them accountable if there was a problem. If the furniture-maker’s apprentice delivered a three-legged chair to your house, you could walk over to his shop with the chair, hold it up and ask (perhaps wryly), ‘Yea, Thomas? Wert thou just back from yon tavern when ye forgot this missing leg?’ and expect poor, hungover Thomas to groan a sheepish apology, and promise to correct the situation without delay. Similarly, if your skillet handle broke, you could march off to the local tinker’s shop and demand an explanation, and you would expect to receive one on the spot.
“In short, you actually could in fact speak to The Guy Who Made the Decision, and this state of affairs obtained from roughly before the American Civil War, all the way back to the dimly known beginnings of civilization when the first farmer planted the first crop.
“…(O)ur current world is a mirror image of Sylvan: In our world, accountability in economic relations is abstracted, nearly to the point of meaninglessness. Who made the shirt you’re wearing? What were the wages and working conditions for the people who made it? What about the chair you’re sitting in? Or computer on which you may be reading the online version of this column? Or the cell phone in your pocket? If you have concerns about those things, to whom do you turn for accountability?”
To return to the principle of solidarity: in a world where one corporation– ExxonMobil– made more in profits last year than the state of California took in in total revenue, subsidiarity demands that any problems posed by mass industrialization need to be handled by an institution which operates at the same scale as the troublemaker. In a democratic constitutional republic like the United States, that pretty much means the Federal Government.
That is why I’m a New-Deal-style Democrat.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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