I think any changes in fiscal policy are only tinkering around the edges of the problem of poverty and may in fact, as modern history has shown, cause more problems than good, despite the good intentions of bleeding heart liberals.

My humble suggestion to alleviating the suffering of the poor would be -

Restore the Church to Her Sacred Traditions. Replace the apostate, heretical, and even the orthodox liberal bishops with real ones.

Catholic bishops will create Catholic priests, who will inspire the laity. In every city, Catholic institutions of social services, created by the tithes and staffed by the vocations coming out of this reinvigorated laity, would again be truly Catholic and assisting the poor not only with money, but with the message of the Gospel and the sacraments of the Church. The powerful bloc of Catholic voters would bring about Catholic-inspired social policies. And all this would go a long way to alleviate poverty.

Using the word slavery probably isn’t useful, but something similar - a path for people to follow other than the Calvinist sink or swim model may be required. In my own life, I think I’ve consciously chosen a path of slavery of sorts because it makes life easier to handle. To be sure, I was inspired to serve in the military for love of country and a desire to serve (and I still have these sentiments), but some of the motivation to stay in (so far for 11 years) and to retire, hopefully, in 9 more years, is the relative ease of life — I do not have to worry about downsizing, being fired, staying marketable, watching the bottom line, planning for my retirement, and plus, I get a free house, subsidized groceries, tax-free department store, free medical care for life, and a host of other benefits, including what I think is a decent wage (able to pay for a maid, multiple vacations, and save at least 10% a month - all of this on a single income with my wife staying home homeschooling). Life is considerably easier than many of my civilian counterparts. Adopting the military model would in some ways be impossible for the rest of the private sector. The military is an artificially economically inflated institution. I get all of this economic security package and a nice income on top. Something similar in the private sector would have to come with trade-offs. But I think many people would gladly trade large portions of their income for this kind of security. Not a system forced down their throats by an all-powerful federal government, but something that people can choose.

But in the end, I think tinkering with fiscal policy may do more harm than good. All social problems have at their base a rejection of Jesus Christ on His Church. So, any changes short of changes in the Church and in society with respect to the Church could do more harm than good.

Modern life, with its emphasis on independence and autonomy, actually requires a pretty high degree of self-direction and self-control just for survival. In order to live decently you have to find a job (some people have no idea how to do this) and if you succeed in finding one, you have to hold it down. That generally means getting yourself up at a consistent hour, transporting yourself to work, maintaining acceptable standards of dress and hygiene, interacting with people in your workplace pleasantly and professionally, and on and on. Outside of the job proper, survival requires being able to pay your bills and your taxes, to manage money to some degree, to shop for and prepare decent food for yourself, and a whole variety of other little life skills. All this is just too much for some people to handle, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those same people couldn’t accomplish anything useful given proper direction (and in some cases, proper medication; a lot of homeless people in America are mentally ill, and could be treated quite effectively if they would just take pills on a regular basis, but they can’t or won’t remember to do this and nobody has the authority to force them.)

Many societies have had fairly natural niches for people like that, who are able-bodied but completely lacking in personal discipline and self-direction. They could be farm hands, or help out in the family business, or what have you. In our society, unless they have family willing to care for them, people like that often end up homeless vagrants, living horrible, desperate lives. The life of a well-cared-for slave would surely be far, far better for many such people.

Is this taking advantage of people? In a way, yes, but not necessarily in an unfair way. There are plenty of legitimate ways to take advantage of people. For example: I’m a graduate student getting a PhD at Cornell University. Cornell pays me a very moderate annual stipend, and in exchange I work for my department, teaching sections and grading undergraduate papers. Cornell may have some academic/ideological reasons for wanting to produce Doctors of Philosophy, but in large part people like me, and Iosephus, and Tobias Petrus, are kept on because we’re competent teachers and graders, and we’re a lot cheaper than full faculty. Is Cornell taking advantage of us? Yes, but not in an unreasonable way; everyone gets what they want out of the arrangement.

Similarly in my suggested form of slavery, the masters would be taking advantage of the slaves, but the reverse would also be somewhat true, and everyone would be better off. This is precisely why the idea is potentially more effective than a large-scale guardianship scheme: the profit motive would persuade more people/companies to actually get involved, whereas most people don’t randomly volunteer to take responsibility for an incompetent adult that they don’t know from Adam.

Of course the thing would need to be properly regulated, to make sure that slaves weren’t worked unreasonably hard, that they really were given decent living conditions, and that some freedoms were respected. (For example, they should not be prohibited from marrying and having families, from worshipping God, etc.) Maybe it wouldn’t be feasible to actually set such a system up in modern-day America, but at least in the abstract I don’t think such a scheme would necessarily be bad.

i heard that the pope gave andrew jackson a crown of thorns to show solidarity with him during a time of nationalism that he was experiencing in italy.

the civil war was less about the evils of slavery but about nationalism. this is opposed to the church’s teaching on subsidiary and our founding fathers. nationalism leads to globalism which leads to endless wars and conflicts.

“So treating slaves in a way that is not consistent with that nature is clearly sinful.”

But isn’t slavery itself not consistent with nature?

Like Tobias Petrus, I dismiss the comparison with practices in the North as irrelevant to the issue at hand. No doubt the Northerners had faults, perhaps grevious faults. But right now we’re discussing slavery.

Well, that critical difference seems to prove that the relationship I’m recommending isn’t guardianship… it’s slavery. That isn’t to say that I have anything against making adults legal guardians of other adults under certain circumstances. But that institution seems to have more limited potential, because the guardian gets no return to justify their investment in the relationship (beyond just the good feeling of helping someone else.) I don’t want to seem cras, but it seems evident that the do-gooder motive isn’t going to be enough to motivate many people to become legal guardians of incompetent adults, except maybe in an instance where the ward is a relative of theirs, or otherwise closely connected to them. Ithaca appears to have a good number of incompetent adults — I see them sometimes on the walking mall down the street from my apartment, or waiting in line for a meal at the Loaves and Fishes place. (Many of them seem young and able-bodied, by the way. There is certainly work out there that they would be capable of doing.) But I’m not about to just walk up to one some day and say, “Hey, you seem to need help. How would you like to be my ward? Let’s go down to the courthouse and arrange it!”

The good thing about slavery would be that, while the slave’s welfare would be a primary concern, his capacity for labor would still be utilized by the master, thus making the relationship mutually beneficial. This might motivate some people to take a commercial interest in the practice, which would allow for it to be more regularized and formally set up — and that could be good if you’re looking to create an environment with a lot of discipline and regularity, just as reform school or the military can be good for adolescents but would be hard to recreate by individual parents at home.

Also, slavery would give the slave a social place in society. Assuming that particular companies or people took on a lot of slaves at once, the slaves would presumably form a kind of community of their own. I’m guessing for a lot of the people who would be candidates for guardianship, loneliness is a big problem. Another big problem is the degredation of feeling useless if you’re deemed unfit for holding a regular job. Arrangements like the one Tobias Petrus describes can be really healthy; they enable people to feel productive and to interact with others who might be better candidates for friendship. (And I’m not trying to say that, say, a mentally disabled person would be inherently “unfit” to be my friend… but the truth is that friendship tends to be predicated on common interests and common activities, so it’s a lot more difficult to befriend people who have less in common with you.)

We do plenty to patronize the less fortunate in society, giving them handouts through welfare and dictating to them principles of how they ought to live (including, as JSP pointed out, discouraging them from having more children.) On the whole this is a very ineffective way of treating the relevant problems; we entrench a whole class of people in a degrading dependence on the government, but won’t assume enough authority over them to actually help them pull their lives together. So, while liberals would obviously be horrified at the “indignity” of enslaving the less fortunate (or, more probably, allowing them to volunteer themselves as slaves in exchange for support and care), it seems to me that they’re in a pretty undignified position right now, such that this could well be an improvement.

Have you read what Aristotle and St. Thomas have to say about this? I think it is in the Politics and the Commentary on the Politics respectively. If I recall correctly, Aristotle holds that some men are, by nature, unfit to rule themselves and these men should be slaves. St. Thomas doesn’t exactly agree with this. Again, if I recall correctly, he holds that slavery may be acceptable as a temporary expedient with conquered barbarians, but that it is unsuitable as a regular practice among Christians. The reason - men should not be treated as means. They are liberal, or free, in the sense of having a “for-their-own-sakeness.” If their life and work are determined for them the way a slaves are, they are treated purely as a tool, a means to another man’s end.

Hmm…it’s been a long time since I studied this. Hopefully I haven’t misrepresented St. Thomas entirely.

There is a legal relationship similar to this called a Guardianship (or in some states a conservatorship depending on what is controlled). The block quote above would really not be a form of slavery at all because ward cannot, and probably should not, do work for the master. If anything, the master would really be the slave to the ward, as they would have to watch over and protect the ward. Therefore the above example is not a form of slavery.

The ideas expressed in the block quote above are incommensurable with the idea that slaves are “generally obliged to follow their masters’ orders and to work for them” even if “given legal protection from particular sorts of treatment.”

If that were all that Adam said, then I would agree with him. But, Iacobe, I don’t think that is what he was saying. “The South is no different - a few terrible exceptions mar an otherwise happy communion.” As I pointed out, the legal ramifications of the master-slave relationship itself rested on the immoral premise that a black man could be a slave but a white man could not. That goes beyond the question of whether a master abused his slaves. If the status of the slave was so acceptable, then why was it deemed fitting only for blacks? Now, you could make arguments about white slavery, which happened in some form, or about white indentured servitude. But after these people were freed they could enter civil society and rise to the top.

About the Northerners’ treatment of factory workers: The arguments about Southern slavery too often get transformed from arguments about the intrinsic justice of the institution to comparisons with the North. Both the North and South do this, and I think it’s a cop-out. When arguing about whether abortion should be legal, I find it irrelevant to point out that Middle Eastern countries that ban abortion also permit female circumcision. I am not writing to justify the bloodshed and devastation of the War of Northern Aggression or to perpetuate Yankee-Whig interpretation of history. I am not writing to justify federally-enforced abolition, which involved wreckless social engineering. I am not writing to compare the North favorably to the South, or to excuse the abominable conditions of whites in Northern cities. I know that the life of a Southern slave could actually be, and very often was, much better, healthier, and “freer” than that of a Northern white Irish-Catholic factory worker.

I am just trying to point out that racism was an *integral* part of the institution of slavery in the South. Iacobe, you write: “Certainly, no one here is about to defend the slave trade, the splitting up of families, period opinions on the inferiority of the black race, or even public toleration of such things.” Well, in the actual way history unfolded, all of these things were entangled in the “peculiar institution.” I agree with the point that a Southern slave’s life needn’t have been a bad one, and that on a day-to-day basis it may have come closer to the life of a Medieval serf than most like to admit. I even agree that the really, really bad master was rare. But there is a danger in pretending that because we today rationally can distinguish between slavery-per-se and racism, therefore in our analysis of Southern slavery as it actually existed we can so easily divide the two. This seems to indulge in the same type of ahistorical idealization that rejected slavery-per-se as intrinsically immoral.

Certainly, no one here is about to defend the slave trade, the splitting up of families, period opinions on the inferiority of the black race, or even public toleration of such things. I still didn’t much care for Clara’s original proclamation that southern slavery was morally indefensible. It’s a hard thing to argue that an entire evolving institution is immoral, and I thought her case was rather thin. What exactly did she mean by being indefensible? That the institution of slavery could not have been made acceptable without changing its nature, or that we can say nothing in its defense. Surely I can, as Adam did, that the conditions for a slave were in some ways preferable to Northerners at the time. Also, I know absolutely nothing of moral theology, or any such thing, but I imagine drawing the line that some amalgam of moral and immoral laws is “indefensible” is always going to be controversial. It smells like the whole “social sin” business to me.

I don’t concede this point. Was it illegal for feudal lords to marry serfs because serfs were viewed as racially inferior? Well, it was illegal for whites to marry blacks. That is contrary to both natural law and to the teaching of the Catholic Church — we are all one human race and marriage cannot be prohibited on racial grounds. The “throne” and altar simply were not united in the South.

Serfs could be emancipated and become freedman with the right to serve on juries and fight in military levies. Over a period of time, they could rise into the ranks of the gentry. This was not true of blacks, even freed ones. The Dred Scott decision said that blacks, never, ever, under any condition could become . . . U.S. citizens!

Plus, serfs were tied to the land. That means not only that they could not move, but their lords could not move them. Families could not be split up because serfs simply couldn’t be moved. The charters which determined what serfs owed to their masters could not be changed legally. As agriculture progressed, serfs could pay off their debts to their masters with less and less labor and the masters could not do anything as their serfs gained in wealth vis-a-vis themselves. The “fencing in” of the commons and the turning over of farmland to sheepherding that St. Thomas More laments in his “Utopia” took place because serfdom was so unprofitable for feudal lords. On the other hand, the law of the South permitted a master to sell off old slaves so that they wouldn’t drain coffers, and families could be broken up on the auction block. Slave marriages had no legal standing. Now, a master could be good and care for his old slaves and honor slave marriages, yes. But the law did not require it. The law in the Middle Ages did indeed recognize the marriage of serfs, etc.

Why was it legal for whites to own black slaves but not for blacks to own white slaves? The Church permitted slavery for a long time, but it never used racial grounds in justifying it.

Was Southern slavery the ultimate evil that Northern abolitionists made it out to be? No. Was there a revolutionary, puritanical, anti-Catholic element in abolitionism? Yes, indeed there was. Could one be a moral master? Yes, Catholic bishops in the South gave directives concerning how a master might morally discharge his duties as a master. But to imagine that the average Southern master really regarded his slave as a feudal master regarded his serf is highly dubious, if only because it ignores the fact that racism (which needn’t be murderous hate) really was the reality of the South.

The North has its false myths that it uses to defend its actions in the Civil War, but the South also has its false myths. When a problem has been seriously exaggerated to defend a dubious counter-measure, one mustn’t whitewash the problem in the process of rejecting the exaggeration.

I admitted that I neglected to discuss possible grounds that a person might have for enslaving another. I ran out of time and also I know that people get kind of intimidating about reading incredibly long posts. But if there’s interest, I’ll write a follow-up later.