On FoxNews.com, Rev. Robert A. Sirico looks at the recent anti-capitalism, anti-NATO protests in Chicago:
In countless debates and conversations with modern proponents of social justice, I have noticed that they are less interested in justice than in material equality. They borrow the language of justice and the common good but have either forgotten or rejected the classical meanings of those terms.
In the classical tradition of reflection on justice (especially seen in Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and their intellectual descendants) it is clear that inequality—in the sense of unequal wealth or social status—is mostly compatible with justice, because justice is “to give to each his due.”
What one is due, of course, differs from person to person—in addition to those things due everyone: life, dignity, and liberty for example.
When we speak of the idea of the common good, we need to be open-minded about the most likely way to bring it about. The common good is, after all, a range of conditions, not a set of policies. It cannot be achieved by way of the “commonality of goods” proposed by socialists, but rather through the institutions that the socialists worked so hard to discredit.
Read “There is no ‘social justice’ without economic freedom” by Rev. Robert A. Sirico on FoxNews.com.
