Social justice usually in practice ends up with thieves employed by the government taking property from A, keeping a substantial cut, and throwing the much reduced remainder at favored B and C. This of course is why welfare programs are now referred to as entitlements, to ensure that this graft will go on in perpetuity. This poorly thought out Robin Hood theology is at the basis of the manifestly failing welfare states today. It is the antithesis of the voluntary charity called for by Christ in the tale of the Good Samaritan and it is beyond shameful that powerful people within the Church still think that the State is the preferred medium for social justice. For those completely destitute and unable to work through no fault of their own, State support is a last resort necessity. Where the welfare state ideology, masquerading as social justice, has gone astray is in taking a last resort and always making it a first resort, with disastrous consequences that are obvious to all, and completely ignored by those who ever bleat “social justice” and usually mean “state control”.
It is shameful.
It is equally shameful that when in need and you go to your parish, they give you a list of government agencies to “help” you – no direct help from them. I’m sure they have a long list of proof of how people abuse it but there has to be a better way.
I found out that in some circles social justice is just another word for intro into communism.
Why is “state support” the last resort and not “church support?”
The State is the preferred medium for social justice for them simply because they prefer to take their cut off the top.
Someone puts a modifier in front of ‘justice’, you can be sure that their object is anything but.
Cash transfers and voucher programs tend to have low administrative costs. The Social Security Administration and the IRS employ about 140,000 people between them. If the tax code were sensible, the IRS (or successor agencies to the IRS) would employ many fewer. Social Security and SSI count about 74 million beneficiaries between them. Supposedly, the Center for Medicaid and Medicare services has just 6,000 employees. (For Medicaid, the screening is done by county welfare departments and the like, so the CMS staff doesn’t exhaust the number of people making a salary off of program administration).
Where you really see grift is in two sectors, one small and one large. One is in grant funded NGOs trading in supposed service provision and ‘advocacy’. These people should be told to rely on their donors and not generate public order problems. A vastly larger collection of grifters is to be found in the education sector. The Democratic Party and its judicial wing run interference for these people and the Republican Party is perfectly otiose about addressing the various ways they injure the commonweal.
Another fat target is programs which seek to subsidize people’s mundane expenditures (groceries, housing, utility bills, &c) on an open-ended basis. These are unnecessary and generate market distortions quite apart from their administrative costs. They could all be replaced with cash transfers of one sort or another. Note, these programs in conjunction with cash transfers with bad eligibility criteria (e.g. the old AFDC program) generate perverse incentives and should be discontinued for that reason (along with programs like AFDC).
Scraping away humbug, inefficiency and perverse incentives is something to which insufficient attention is devoted. Railing against ‘welfare state ideology’ is a waste of time.
I believe the charity of the Church should be focused on those that are not “entitled” – in other words, those the state cannot or will not help because they are disagreeable to the state.
Let administrative state render what is pleasing to Caesar. Let the people of God render what is pleasing to God.
Not everything that was pleasing to Caesar was bad, even if the confiscatory means by which they are accomplished are.There is plenty of work for us to do in charity that our socialist state neglects (or inflicts) under its godless creed.
Seminarians and defenders of life need aid, as do those fighting sexual sins that have become the laurels of the godless creed.
It’s not only that “equity” isn’t equality, it’s that equity is diametrically opposed to equal Justice.
“Ubi Caritas…”
Social justice are code words for socialism. Period.