Pope Francis and the Universal Basic Income

Is the Pope embracing socialism when he calls for a universal basic income? Actually, it is quite the reverse: socialism has always been an atheist’s parody of Christian teaching. The idea that the rich are in debt to the poor is an ancient teaching of the Church with roots in Judaism.

The approach Christians are to use towards the poor is highlighted in the ancient rabbinic example of two men walking through an arid desert. According to the rabbis, if one man has enough water to make it out of the desert, but not enough water for them both, it is not reasonable to expect the first man to share his water. Since a man can only be expected to look out for himself, he is morally permitted to keep the water for himself, even if that guarantees the death of his companion. But notice, this is only true if both are normal men. If both men are scholars, learned in the ways of God and His laws, then the scholar with the water is obligated to share with his companion, even if this means both men will die.

Christianity has always taught that every Christian must act not as a normal man, but as a scholar, a rabbi; every Christian must act as the most learned of men. Because Christians have been given the light of grace through baptism, every baptized man has the fullness of revelation, thus every Christians is required to act as a learned rabbi would, and share his riches, even at risk to himself. Now that we remember this, we can look on the Pope's words with renewed understanding:

I know that you nearly never receive the recognition that you deserve, because you are truly invisible to the system. Market solutions do not reach the peripheries, and State protection is hardly visible there. Nor do you have the resources to substitute for its functioning. … 

...The ills that afflict everyone hit you twice as hard. Many of you live from day to day, without any type of legal guarantee to protect you. Street vendors, recyclers, carnies, small farmers, construction workers, dressmakers, the different kinds of caregivers: you who are informal, working on your own or in the grassroots economy, you have no steady income to get you through this hard time ... and the lockdowns are becoming unbearable. This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out. It would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights.

How does the Pope make the insistence on a universal basic income fit with Paul's exhortation: "If a man will not work, he shall not eat." (2 Thess 3:10)? Well, keep in mind that the Christian understanding of what constitutes work does not match the modern understanding:

[Bernadette of Sourbirous] sat sometimes all night on the side of her bed in constant pain, because to lie down was to suffocate. That she understood this vocation to suffer is borne out by the answer she gave one of her superiors who came into the room one day and asked jokingly: “What are you ding here in bed, lazybones?” [Bernadette] replied: “I am working away at my calling, dear Mother. I am being ill.”

Suffering is work, spiritual work. This suffering has worth. Still, while every Christian is called to bear the cross of suffering, we are not meant to seek out crucifixion. Physical suffering and the various physical poverties are necessary evils, but these are natural evils, and should be avoided when possible. At one time or another, all of the apostles, including Paul, fled cities in which their lives were threatened (Acts 9:25; 2 Cor 11:32-33). In the same way, while the poor suffer, if they can avoid that suffering, then we should help them do so, just as the friends of Paul helped him avoid suffering by lowering him in a basket outside the city walls.

“When someone steals another's clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.” ~ St. Basil the Great (d. 379 AD)

"People give all sorts of reasons to excuse their lack of charity, their hardheartedness!  Some say, 'hard times.' But if the times are hard for those who have a sufficiency, how much harder are they for the poor? This pretext alone should lead one to give all the more generously."   - St. Theophan the Recluse (d. 1894 AD)

Clothe your brother first, then clothe the altar table. Of what use is it to weigh down Christ’s table with golden cups, when he himself is dying of hunger? First, fill him when he is hungry; then use the means you have left to adorn his table.  ~ St. John Chrysostom (d 407 AD)

Christians have a duty to provide for the poor. In fact, the needs of the poor outweigh even the needs of the liturgy.

Has the Church led by example?

The Pope calls for every nation to provide a basic universal income. But is not Vatican City a nation? Has the Church led by example? Has the Church given her riches to help the poor? And if you say that she has, then what of her artwork? What of her grand cathedrals? If she insists on a universal basic income, then should she not give to the poor first?

Of course, the Church leads by example, and the example is instructive. For example, according to the Economist, the Catholic Church in America alone already spends 170 BILLION dollars a year in charitable work. If American Catholic charitable work were compared to the annual GDP of the world's countries, then the American Catholic Church alone spends more each year on charity than the GDP of 136 of the world's 189 countries. That's more spent on charity by just one branch of the Church than the entire GDP of  countries like Algeria, Qatar, Khazakhstan, Hungary, Angola, Kuwait, Sudan, the Ukraine, Morocco, Ecuador, Cuba, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Kenya, Dominican Republic, Guatamala, Oman, Myanmar, Luxembourg, Panama, Ghana, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Croatia, Belarus, Lebanon, Tanzania and Macao, just to name a few. And that's just the American Catholic Church. So, if just one branch of the Catholic Church already provides more in charity than two-thirds of the world's nations earn in GDP, then how much more does Vatican City, the smallest nation in the world, need to provide before the world is willing to grant that she is "leading by example"?

But what of the vast, hidden wealth of the Vatican? "The Vatican has amassed incalculable treasures ranging from art to buildings to property to gold reserves, commercial concerns and investments(!)..."  All true. Should these reserves be sold and the proceeds given to the poor?

Let us assume you were a lawyer, independently wealthy, but interested in assisting the poor through pro bono legal work. This is a laudable goal, one the Pope would applaud. Now, would you be able to assist the poor if you sold off all your law books, gave up your subscription to Lexus/Nexus, dressed in rags because all of your clothing had been given to the poor, and lived out of a cardboard box on the street, because you sold your house and gave the proceeds to the poor? Would a judge let you in his courtroom? Now that you have surrendered every tool you have to assist the poor with their legal needs, would you, in fact, be able to help the poor at all?

Can a carpenter build houses for the poor if he has no tools to join or cut wood? Can any skilled professional help the poor if he has none of the tools of his profession at hand?

"It would be excessive to take so much out of one's own means to give away to others that with what was left one could not very well keep up the way of life that accords with one's station, and meet contingencies as they arise.... [however] there are three exceptions... Thirdly, when he is in presence of extreme indigence in an individual, or great need on the part of the common weal. For in such cases it would seem praiseworthy to forego the requirements of one's station, in order to provide for a greater need."  ~ St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274 AD)

"Whatever is necessary for one's children, one's household, honest gifts, entertainments, hospitality, in view of common contingencies, provision for heirs, future needs, etc. is not superfluous." ~ St. Alphonsus Liguouri (d 1787 AD)

The Church's job is to teach the world who God is. God is Truth, God is Goodness and God is Beauty. All three must be taught. In order to teach the last aspect of Who God is, the Church needs the artwork it has commissioned, built up and protected over the centuries. These are necessary tools to do the work of evangelization. Teaching about God without artwork is like teaching about God without Scripture – it is hard to imagine how it could be done. That's why the Church values its entire collection of art at one (1) Euro. None of this magnificent artwork, this architecture, these cathedrals, have any commercial value because none of it can be sold. All of it is necessary to the work of evangelization, just as law books are necessary for lawyers and hammers, nails and saws are necessary for carpenters.

The Church runs 5,500 hospitals, 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly and those with special needs, with sixty-five percent of them located in underdeveloped and developing countries. To help the poor, the Catholic Church invented the modern hospital, the orphanage and the modern university. If you believe Wikipedia (which does not exactly lean in favor of religious institutions), the Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental provider of education and medical services in the world. The Pope's call to the nations is to imitate what the Vatican has done for centuries. The call is not to give up everything, for if everyone did this, no one at all could be helped. Rather, we are to provide for the poor in a way that preserves our ability to always help the poor. Most especially, we are to give out of our excess. And yes, we do have excess.

Let's try this a different way.

Certainly, every Christian must agree that every human person should have enough to eat, should have adequate shelter and access to clean water, yes? Is it not the case that every Christian would insist that people have a right to adequate food, clean water, shelter, even if that right is often unfulfilled? You see where I'm headed with this, of course.

If you deny that people have such rights to basic sustenance, water, shelter, then you've essentially denied the Faith, the basic teaching that we are all equal and all deserve equal, dignified treatment. So, every Christian must admit that everyone has a right to these basic needs being fulfilled.

Clearly, these basic needs have a dollar value. So, by saying that everyone has a right to basic needs being fulfilled, we have already admitted that everyone should receive a universal basic income - enough cash (or goods-equivalent) so the poor can fulfill their basic needs. For Christians, the argument is not whether people have a right to a basic, universal income, but only how much is required and how it should be delivered. It is about where the lines gets drawn, not whether to supply a basic universal income at all.

And, since the Pope didn't supply a number (nor could he, as the cash-equivalent would differ depending on the exact locale of the person in need), anyone who agrees that people have a right to not starve to death necessarily agrees with the Pope's basic principle: everyone has a right to a universal basic income. The Pope is simply using modern economic language to say what all the saints have said for the last two millennia - everyone has a right to basic food, water, shelter, etc., everyone has a right to equal dignity in treatment.

The Nations Have Already Been Working Towards This

But, as happened with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, wherein the Pope called for reforms that were already underway, the world has already anticipated the Pope's request and has already been working to fulfill it. After all, we have fewer poor people alive today, even with a population of 7 billion, than we have had at any time in human history, even when the human population was below 1 billion.

At this month's meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davis, Gates cited data that show the proportion of people living in extreme poverty declining from 94 percent in 1820 to only 10 percent today.... Starting with that $1.90-per-day measurement, the level of extreme poverty fell from 42.2 percent of the world's population in 1981 to 8.6 percent in 2018. In 1981, 1.9 billion people lived on less than $1.90 per day; in 2018, the number was around 660 million.

Contrary to the Pope's assertion, market solutions have actually already reached to the peripheries. We know this, because the benefits of the market have already touched every living person in the world. After all, thanks to the contributions of the world's richest countries, no one today needs to worry about dying from smallpox. Nowhere in the world are cattle still dying from rinderpest. Almost no one in the world has to worry about polio. The incidence of Guinea worm has dropped from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to 54 in 2019. Even as the world's population increases, the incidence of plague and famine continues to drop around the world.

Is it the case that every poor person has access to the basics necessities? Obviously not. Is it the case that the poor are receiving the income they need in order to access those necessities? Again, obviously not. But, are we assisting the poor, helping them move out of their place of suffering? Yes. Yes, we truly are. More can be done. More will be done. But, it is good to be reminded that we are not yet done.

Once we review the ancient Christian teaching, we can see the papal call for a universal basic income is not just a call for money, but a call for all people to become scholars, to become rabbis, to become even more: to become Christians and live the life of baptismal grace. The Pope's call is simple: embrace and believe in the Gospel.