Paul Ryan has evidently metastasized to the realm of people we’re consciously aware of again, which is disappointing. Bro belongs in the dustbin of history. But if he’s going to inject nonsense into the public arena, I guess we’re going to have to talk about it.

So I’ll tip my hand. I think his politics are vacuous and malicious, but it’s the fact that he attempts to deploy Catholic social thought to advance them that really steams me. Here I’m going to handle his ‘subsidiarity’ talk, as he’s summoned it to the surface again with his recent vow to crusade against poverty.

During the run up to the 2012 election season, Ryan made the following statement:

“To me, the [Catholic] principle of subsidiarity, which is really federalism, meaning government closest to the people governs best, having a civil society of the principle of solidarity where we, through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities, through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community, that’s how we advance the common good.

“By not having big government crowd out civic society, but by having enough space in our communities so that we can interact with each other, and take care of people who are down and out in our communities. Those principles are very very important, and the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life. Help people get out of poverty out into a life of independence.”

Ryan is a master of taking simple English words and turning them into complete nonsense with minimal artistry, so if you’re confused about what exactly ‘subsidiarity’ is, here’s a better explanation than he gives in the first paragraph. Subsidiarity is, in short, a piece of Catholic social thought that intends for social problems to be dealt with by the lowest instance of community possible before advancing to higher instances. If a person needs help, for instance, they should first try to help themselves; if they can’t, then family should intervene; if that doesn’t work, then the local community; if that’s not working out, then state options open up. In this 1891 encyclical from Pope Leo XIII, we find the origins of what is now taught as modern subsidiarity:

The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them. But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself.

The idea of subsidiarity is that people need to operate individually to flourish, and that their capacities are limited by ‘absorption’ into larger, more powerful instances of governance. Subsidiarity is also frequently coupled with ‘solidarity’, that is, the two hand-in-hand intend to bring communities together by obligating people to caritas, and mutual concern. Lastly, subsidiarity operate on a pretty straightforward premise: we’re often most able to help those closest to us. (Augustine makes a similar point in book 19 of City of God, for my fellow Augustine dorks.)

What this amounts to for Paul Ryan is the notion that poverty should be handled by local communities rather than by state programs. For him, government programs aimed at alleviating poverty threaten to dissolve charitable impulses, damage community ties, and encourage dependency. So Ryan has a beautiful story, in other words, about why we shouldn’t use methods that are proven to be effective in order to alleviate poverty: to do so, he argues, would be to strip all the love and warmth out of community, and to produce a kind of sterile Brave New World scenario in which everyone has everything but somehow loves none of it.

There are multiple problems with this, so I’ll focus on the most important: Ryan’s whole scenario assumes that creating poverty is a morally good decision when structuring government.

Subsidiarity, which isn’t a horrible principle in and of itself, is often invoked in discussions of disaster relief. Why? Because it’s a purely post-hoc principle. It operates after the fact. To make any sense of subsidiarity, we must presume that a problem already exists, and that we’re trying to find a solution to it. Things like disasters are perfect examples of where using the principle of subsidiarity makes a lot of sense, since natural disasters just happen and there’s usually little to nothing we can to do prevent them from happening. The lion’s share of our coping with natural disasters happens after the hurricane, tornado, or what have you.

Poverty is not like this. Poverty, especially widespread structural poverty, doesn’t have to exist. We can quibble about how best to make sure it does not come into existence, either through a Universal Basic Income or living wage laws or a combination of those types of front-line prevention measures, but the point is that Ryan is a person with a particular amount of control over the formation of the state, and the formation of the state can determine what sort of poverty issue a particular nation will have.

So at the very least, if Paul Ryan is going to play the arch-Catholic, his statement that subsidiarity should be the preferred tack to take in responding to poverty should be thoroughly joined with an insistence that we can shape government in such a way as to prevent widespread poverty. We have the power to look at the structural failures that result in poverty, and the moral obligation to repair those failures so that fewer (potentially far fewer) people wind up impoverished. But Ryan’s Catholic ethics don’t apply, apparently, to his work in shaping how the state determines the extent or limitation of poverty. He’s only interested in cures, not prevention: and even in that sense, his interest is very weak.