Is It A God Given Right To Teminate A Pregnancy

[veritasluxmea]

The disagreement regards the belief that more federal taxes and spending, and an ever-growing welfare state, is really the best way to help the poor and downtrodden.

 

Saint John Paul II (among others) was quite skeptical.

Maybe I misread Add's post- to me the tone read as saying "we should just pray and let God handle it and not bother trying to help people through politics", which I disagree with. 

 

I have seen cases where the welfare state was extremely helpful, I'd say necessary, and others where it let people sit in poverty and trapped people for generations. However, a lack of welfare can also mean the same thing. Capitalism has its problems. It's a difficult balance. I'm a bit skeptical of welfare, I'm also skeptical of letting the private sector handle it, especially in a pagan country. 

[Socrates]

Maybe I misread Add's post- to me the tone read as saying "we should just pray and let God handle it and not bother trying to help people through politics", which I disagree with. 

 

I have seen cases where the welfare state was extremely helpful, I'd say necessary, and others where it let people sit in poverty and trapped people for generations. However, a lack of welfare can also mean the same thing. Capitalism has its problems. It's a difficult balance. I'm a bit skeptical of welfare, I'm also skeptical of letting the private sector handle it, especially in a pagan country. 

 

I don't have time to go into the whole economic debate, but it's generally best if charity is done as much as possible freely and willingly by individuals, and at the local level, rather than by centralized government bureaucracies.

 

In recent years the range of such intervention has vastly expanded, to the point of creating a new type of State, the so-called "Welfare State". This has happened in some countries in order to respond better to many needs and demands, by remedying forms of poverty and deprivation unworthy of the human person. However, excesses and abuses, especially in recent years, have provoked very harsh criticisms of the Welfare State, dubbed the "Social Assistance State". Malfunctions and defects in the Social Assistance State are the result of an inadequate understanding of the tasks proper to the State. Here again the principle of subsidiarity must be respected: a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.¹⁰⁰

By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.

 

 

~ St. John Paul II, in Centesimus Annus.

 

 

I must say I'm lost as to why you'd think that in a "pagan country" such matters are better left to the federal government, which is becoming increasingly hostile to Christian/Catholic principles.

 

I think these days, we tend to try to solve too much through politics.  It's much easier to pull a lever for a politician who promises to fix all our social ills through government than to personally sacrifice in real personal deeds of charity to our neighbors in need.  

(And that statement goes for those of us of all political persuasions.)