Representative Paul Ryan’s budget plan famously elicited from the president a bizarre accusation about “social Darwinism.” Now Georgetown University’s faculty and priests warn that his “spending blueprint would hurt society’s most vulnerable.”
Ryan undoubtedly laughed off the Darwinism charge, but Georgetown U. is Catholic, and so is Ryan, making his response especially interesting:
“I suppose that there are some Catholics who for a long time thought they had a monopoly of sorts, not exactly on heaven, but on the social teaching of our Church,” Mr Ryan said, adding: “There can be differences among faithful Catholics on this.”
He also argued that a “preferential option for the poor,” a tenet of Catholic teaching, means that people should not become “dependent on the government so they stay stuck at their station in life.”
The latter point is especially telling, for upward social mobility is surely a prime goal of all who are truly concerned about improving the lot of the less well-off.
Interestingly, social mobility and improvement via voluntary co-operation were also major concerns of the two 19th century liberals who have since been labelled the Social Darwinists Nos. 1 and 2: Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. But then, careless charges regarding “social Darwinism” have never had much intellectual substance, and are, almost certainly, irrelevant to Ryan’s actually quite modest plan, which spends 50 percent more than Clinton’s 2000 budget. This fact led Reason’s Nick Gillespie to quip, “If that’s what passes for ‘thinly veiled social Darwinism’ … the English language is as broke as the federal treasury.”
I think that’s pretty clear, at this point.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Thinly Veiled”
Darwin, in The Descent of Man, argued that the biologically inferior should be “kept in their place” and constitute the lower classes, not permitted to improve their station in life very far — and certainly not so far as to breed with and thus contaminate the “good stock”, lest evolution be thereby taken backward!
Government dependency (i.e. welfare) prevents this travesty quite effectively. The fact that it is paid for with the labor of the biologically “middle” class is a bonus.
Even the Catholic universities and colleges have more than their share of liberal thinkers. How about those growing numbers of second collections every weekend?
I would have thought that collapsing the value of the dollar and chasing mnufacturing jobs overseas was thinly veiled social darwinism.
A question for James: did Darwin foresee government not only subsidizing but practically financing the procreation of lower classes?
The combination of government dependency and outsourcing of many low-skilled or midlevel jobs is virtually eiminating the middle class, so the “bonus”, such as it is, is temporary.
That which doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger! LOL. Now we can all support asinine government policies that steal from everyone and act as a general blight on constructive capital!
Rule #1: If you want more of something subsidize it (with money stolen from everyone)
Rule #2: If you want less of something tax it (more than you steal or “tax” from everyone else)
Rule #3: If you want paradise on earth, murder everyone in government and start over in a society that is not yet micromanaged by sociopaths.
The government is actually a great example of social darwinism. It is the strong and politically-connected (but mentally weak) using their position of power to rob from, steal from, and murder those with less political power. The sociopaths seek positions of power, and use those positions of power to rob blind, imprison, and destroy such classes as are incapable of defending themselves from such attack.
Ironically, they do so in the name of “helping the poor.”
You want to help the poor? There are 2.4 million people in prison with roughly 60% of them in prison for first-time, nonviolent victimless crime. How about removing the boot from those people’s necks, and then talking about “compassion.” If such oppressed people were simply allowed to compete on a level playing field, we’d be closer to “social darwinism,” but interestingly, it’s the deserving poor who’d be far better off, and the undeserving sociopathic rich who would feel the pressure of finally being forced to do productive work for a living.
Right now, we all pay our Federal Reserve masters for the privilege of working on their plantation, with limited travel privileges. How is that not “social darwinism” of the worst kind? Even the lowest, poorest 7 – 11 clerk pays a continual majority of their savings to the Fed, rather than keep them and allow them to appreciate (as they would in gold). That is uncaring murder of the poor by the rich, too cruel to even be called “social darwinism.”
What a grotesque caricature to say that the government cares about people. The government cares for us the way we care for livestock: as chattel.
In that regard, the maintenance of those on welfare provides a useful service to the wealthiest, economically fittest members of our society: it maintains their voter base (political control base) of self-flagellating willing victims.
Voluntaryist “social darwinism” would be a blessing to the poor. What we have now is a coercive “social darwinism” of colluding totalitarians who conspire to banckrupt all but the uber-rich central bankers. The mainstream media has never gotten a concept more wrong than concluding that
1) Paul Ryan’s plan is free market
2) The free market is crueler than coercive statism
3) the slightly freer market’s (nonexistent, or at least impossible to relieve beyond base levels) cruelty would hurt the productive poor
4) the slightly freer market is a step toward the richest of the rich gaining too much control. (How could they have more than the total control they already have?)
5) the poor would not wildly benefit from a true free market
By treating the Ryan plan as something radical (or even slightly effective), when it’s a plate of harmless mush that simply maintains the status quo, the mainstream media feeds the delusions of the willingly enslaved, and their political enslavers. The Ryan plan is an example of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” when it’s time to be grabbing for Ron Paul’s lifeboat plan.
But hey, if nobody figures this out, it’ll at least mean the current system will burn completely to the ground, and we won’t need to clear out a lot of rubble when the smoke clears. The harder the American empire falls, the more likely it is that people will learn to detest welfare (police state!) statism, and prevent its return, after the inevitable inflationary crash.