A while ago, when I was writing about Christian legal realism, I pointed out that one of the problems with the veneration of private property rights is that they play such an integral role in the liberal (classical liberal, not libruls) conception of the individual that they wind up forming the basis of most liberal ethics. The problem with this, I argued, is that property rights do not actually occupy a huge center of moral concern in Christianity, and therefore societies that do construe property rights as central will conflict with Christian views of the person and ownership.

At the time, some Christo-sphere person, I can’t remember who, made some kind of sneery remark about not being able to imagine what “property-based ethics” could even mean. And I didn’t follow up on it because I had a hard time thinking of something systematic; these things can express themselves in strange ways. But now we have an example on hand.

Since it was announced that Michael Brown’s murder will earn no response from the justice system, there have been protests/riots. In the course of those protests/riots, which, mind you — are enacting the response the justice system totally refused to — there has been property damage and looting. People are very upset about this property damage.

It’s time to hold protestors accountable, says the Daily Beast. Make those protestors pay for property damages, says Fox News. Why can’t you just protest like Martin Luther King Jr., all non-threatening and respectful of my property rights, wonders USA Today. In fact, many calls for protestors to pipe down and be nice have been filed under a bizarre comparison to MLK, whose robust democratic socialism seems to have been whitewashed from American memory. He was a bigger threat to your total proprietary dominion than many seem to think.

But dead men loot no stores. In that way, they’re exceedingly appealing subjects for a culture that bases itself in the primacy of ownership. This is why the foot-stamping that protestors should be more like ghosts, and why the fact that Michael Brown (and now Eric Garner) aren’t really a big concern compared to looting and destroying property. For states based in an ethic of ownership — wherein every ethical premise is phrased in terms of ownership (“I own my body”, “My body, my property”, “I own my life”, etc.) — establishing the security of ownership is key. Because the liberal mind (John Locke being a good example) imagines ownership to begin with one’s self-ownership which is then applied to other objects, the security of property ownership is conflated with the security of self-ownership. If your property isn’t secure, therefore, you are not secure in your own self-possession: the borders of your self become porous, others can get in, and you no longer feel like the isolated, atomistic, wholly autonomous subject for domination that the liberal imaginary suggests. How to secure such a tightly controlled system of private ownership?

Policing. And you shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that the stories being adduced to parse Brown and Garner’s deaths have to do with proprietary infractions: the cigarillos Mike Brown stole are the impetus for his pursuit, and high taxes have been cited as the root of Garner’s killing. These narratives make the turns of events look coherent and necessary because they ground them in ownership and its vagaries, where police must intervene to regulate and secure, come what may. They foreclose the question of whether or not property is worth killing over: it isn’t relevant; this is just what police do.

The intense distress over looting and property destruction follow in this same vein. Sure, yes, people are being killed by police without any recourse or redress, but the real disorder arises when property comes into question. A system of ethics based in property ownership can survive if human life is not much respected (see: slavery, where human lives become property), but it is much harder to maintain when property itself is not taken very seriously. So the more immediate, visceral problem for people who benefit from the veneration of ownership really is the looting, the theft of cigarillos, the imposition of taxes, the burning of cars. They’re not mistaken about their interests.

But they are very severely mistaken about where property belongs in the matrix of human values. Property, rightly construed, can have a salutary social function. But this is only when ownership is premised upon the prior meeting of everyone’s needs. It is also only feasible when property itself, as an institution, is viewed as a means to justice and a tool for serving humankind. These formulations are typical of the Patristics, from Ambrose to Augustine to Chrysostom. They live on in Christian discourses which aim to reestablish property as an institution with a social function, rather than view ownership as a virtue in and of itself, equal to the other goods in the world — such as human life. Unless we can slice back through so many layers of proprietary philosophy and readings of the person, we’re stuck with the police regimes that prop up vicious but fragile systems of property-based ethics.

There’s an interesting species of Christianesque argument against welfare that goes like this: “by replacing aid that could be given by community members who are Christian, welfare programs prevent us from evangelizing to the poor. Thus they suffer spiritually even if they do not suffer physically.” Obviously this would be worse in the long-run for poor people, as we all eventually die and those of us who die in spiritual ruins may suffer some consequence; this argument therefore attempts to claim that being against welfare but for charity is the only sensible Christian option.

It’s a curious argument because it’s the dirty inverse of a medieval conception of charity that went something like this: “we must care for the poor so that they will use their superior standing with God to pray for us who have an inferior standing with God.” (cf. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400-1700.) In that formulation, care for the poor was an exchange that helped to ensure the spiritual destinies of the rich. That the formula has been reversed in modern times tells us, among other things, that we are now distrustful of Christ’s repeated statements that He is with the poor; rather we presume them to be in immediate need of evangelizing by the well-off. It further demonstrates that there is no sense of exchange left to charity; at this point, it’s treated like a curative measure, physician to patient.

This new reading of charity is thoroughly modern. Don’t be taken in by the claims that it’s associated with community or locality; it may theorize itself in that way, but it’s not a ‘traditional’ approach to charity by any means. It rather borrows from your standard 19th – 20th century imagination of poverty, wherein the poor are poor by nature of their lack of virtue and must be addressed as a kind of social contaminant.

With all that said, there is another very crucial problem with this approach: it presumes the poverty we encounter to be a pre-existing condition that we get to contend with, and then assumes a set of tools for doing that, with welfare as one and Christian charity as another. This is wrong. Poverty is a condition that comes about through institutional decisions. It is, in other words, a condition we create. As Matt Bruenig writes,

“The word “redistribution” implies that there is a distribution that is default, and that we redistribute when we modify the distribution away from it. This, of course, is wrong. There is no default distribution. All distributions are the consequence of any number of institutional design choices, none of which are commanded by the fabric of the universe. In the United States, we have constructed and enforce institutions of private property ownership and contract enforcement. Those institutions generate very different end distributions than we would see if they did not exist. But they do not have to exist by logical necessity, nor do they constitute the default form of economic institutions.”

Poverty is not like a tornado, it is not like an earthquake. It will always be with us for a number of different reasons, but it can be produced at different levels and rates — that is, we can move the needle on poverty itself, and raise the floor of poverty quite a bit. This means that when we say we should do nothing in terms of moving resources around (through welfare, for example) all we’re really saying is “I like the current arbitrary distribution because it produces poor people whose poverty I can then use to minister to them.” This is no different than saying, “I like constant war, because it gives me wounded soldiers to minister to in hospitals.” In both cases, the argument turns out to be less about what tools we should use and more about what conditions we should create in order to make optimal captive audiences for the Gospel. I can’t really imagine a world in which this form of evangelizing makes much sense, or a parameter that would logically bracket it against, say, intentionally spreading disease in order to minister to the sick. Strange way to love thy neighbor.

A better approach, in my thinking, is to choose to create less poverty via just distributions (as Pope Francis has indicated) and to minister through conventional means. Don’t worry about the poor: Christ is already with them, and poor people don’t actually appear to have much of a problem with their religiosity. There is no reason, then, to hack off parts of the state that assist poor people: working for justice through the state is just another avenue for grace, and it does not obviate one’s obligation to work for justice in other institutions and aspects of life.

If I ever had enough money to wedge my way into the Washington Post to do nothing more than write a love letter to my wealthy co-aristocrats, I would dump money into charitable programs until I no longer had any wealth of note. This would serve two purposes: firstly, it would help some poor folks. Secondly, it would prevent me from embarrassing myself in the style of Mr and Mrs John Saeman, whose Washington Post opinion piece on how great the Kochs are (and also maybe Jesus) must have been drafted on hundred dollar bills to interest the editors. Otherwise I’m not sure how a piece with such little substance made it to press.

The argument is this: American welfare programs are encouraging joblessness and stagnation, and therefore they must be stopped and replaced with charitable initiatives. They believe that this is the appropriate Christian response to poverty, because dignified work is important to flourishing:

“…the U.S. welfare system can actually deny dignity while claiming to grant it. Some government assistance programs can be more lucrative than work. This unfairly — but understandably — incentivizes some to stay out of the job market, abusing the social safety net designed to help those who truly need help. In so doing, it traps people in the poverty they’re trying to escape.”

There is no streamlined US ‘welfare system.’ You can fold a lot of programs into it. Public school is one, if we’re speaking strictly about things that allow you to slack off and leave it up to Uncle Sam: after all, if we had no public school, parents would really have to get their butts in gear and pay for those private schools. So the fact that public school is free certainly allows parents to laze around, mucking through their wimpy middle class jobs without putting a fire under them to really zoom upwardly through the social stratosphere. But nobody counts public school as a welfare program, because it’s only welfare if only poors use it, for some reason.

What the Koch Apologia Resource Center probably means to indicate here are programs like SNAP and the EITC. These are two big, well-known programs that poor people get a lot of assistance from. So: are these programs preventing people from getting to work? No. Empirically: no.

“The overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so.  Among SNAP households with at least one working-age, non-disabled adult, more than half work while receiving SNAP — and more than 80 percent work in the year prior to or the year after receiving SNAP.  The rates are even higher for families with children — more than 60 percent work while receiving SNAP, and almost 90 percent work in the prior or subsequent year. The number of SNAP households that have earnings while participating in SNAP has been rising for more than a decade, and has more than tripled — from about 2 million in 2000 to about 6.4 million in 2011.”

As for the EITC, well, being the earned income tax credit, everyone who gets it is working. Other big welfare programs, like Medicaid and SSI, relate to poor people who are elderly or have health issues, and it isn’t clear how those would impact work, unless the argument is that people should have to work not for dignity’s sake, but to pay cash for healthcare, and/or that it is more dignified for an elderly or disabled person to work to their own physical detriment than to receive assistance. That’s a peculiar definition of dignity if I’ve ever heard one.

So welfare doesn’t appear to be the destructive influence on work that it’s claimed to be. No surprises there. But suppose the second half of the formulation still holds true, and we should be looking to charitable programs instead of welfare programs. Again, I cannot for the life of me understand why people who oppose welfare programs because of their supposed perverse incentive effects would ever support charity. Whether the money is coming from the bepearled ladies’ golf captain in the nice subdivision or from a government check in the mail, if we are to believe that having monetary assistance disincentivizes work, then it will not matter from whence it comes. If you argue, as House Saeman does, that the problem with welfare is (in part) that it removes incentives to work, then you should never surrender a dime to charity, lest you participate in sin yourself.

What about stagnation: is the scourge of welfare trapping poor people in their poverty? I’m not sure why people wildly gesture at this point as though it’s something we should presume when it’s actually something we can measure. Countries with robust welfare regimes — like Denmark, Finland, and Norway — outperform the United States when it comes to intergenerational social mobility, meaning that kids in Scandinavian countries are more likely to come into different means than their parents than those in the USA:

“The relationship between father-son earnings is tighter in the United States than in most peer OECD countries, meaning U.S. mobility is among the lowest of major industrialized economies. The relatively low correlations between father-son earnings in Scandinavian countries provide a stark contradiction to the conventional wisdom. An elasticity of 0.47 found in the United States offers much less likelihood of moving up than an elasticity of 0.18 or less, as characterizes Finland, Norway, and Denmark.”

So there’s that. On that subject of dignity, I wonder if the Kochs are really so fixated on the dignity of the working poor as they claim. After all, it isn’t just ‘work’ that confers dignity — or else welfare recipients could theoretically do unpaid labor and still collect welfare and be in the right by the Saemans’ lights — but rather paid work. And it isn’t just paid work that is befitting of human dignity in Catholic social teaching, but adequately paid work. Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris: “the demands of social justice will not have been met if iti s not within the power of workers to earn a wage providing a secure livelihood for themselves and their families.” So, a living wage. And in Casti Connubii: “in the state, such economic and social methods should be adopted as will enable every head of a family to earn as much as, according to his station in life, is necessary for himself, his wife, and for the rearing of his children.” This is what used to be called a ‘family wage’, but is pretty much a living wage.

So Charles Koch, aggressively snuggled in this article, is all for a living wage, right? After all, this is all about dignified work. But nah, no, Charles Koch is definitely against any kind of bar-nudging on the minimum wage. Whether or not this is a problem for his fans is unclear; it’s definitely a problem for the long tradition of Catholic social teaching, though. And so, too, is the suggestion here — sly and slickly rendered — that there is some sort of conflict between subsidiarity (local applications of resources) and solidarity (broad assurance that resources get to where they’re needed) when welfare is involved. As I wrote for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (an avid supporter of SNAP), there is need for welfare and charity; there always has been, and between these two stripes of community engagement we have a fantastic array of tools with which to respond to poverty and suffering.

But as always, Jesus says it best: “You cannot serve God and money.” In a column alternately praising the Church and the Kochs, it’s pretty clear a choice has been made, and which one it is.