It is likely that hurricanes are on the minds of the university community, what with the near miss of Ivan. However, there are also typhoons, earthquakes, lightening strikes, tornadoes, tidal waves, storms, cyclones, monsoons and just plain old bad weather.
All of them are a pain in the butt, and dangerous to boot. These catastrophes are all the fault of – wait for it – government.
Had the voracious state not gobbled up about 40 percent of the annual gross domestic product – in Western Europe, the figure is more like 50 percent – it is likely that mankind would have made at least some progress over the last half century or so, not merely in anticipating these cataclysms and plotting their future paths, but also in stopping them from occurring in the first place.
Needless to say, we cannot be definitive in this prediction. It is extremely difficult to analyze contrary-to-fact conditionals such as these. However, we can say for sure that richer is safer: the more wealth in a society, the better able the people who comprise it are to figure out a way to ward off natural and unnatural disasters.
The government also has wasted these vast amounts of monies on killing its own citizens — R.J. Rummel puts the figure on this at almost 200 million in the last century; warring with others of its ilk — at the cost of hundreds of millions of more lives; and engaging in various and sundry welfare type schemes — for example social “security,” socialized medicine and business regulation. These actions have reduced growth and development, played havoc with incentives, and undermined private property rights and economic freedom, which is the last best hope for our species.
As a Jesuit university, our mission is to promote the Jesuit philosophy. But, which one? Yes, gentle reader, there are two of them, and very different from each other.
With one of them, we are already very familiar. This is the perspective that promotes “social justice,” as seen on those sweatshirts and advertising campaigns claiming that Loyola University New Orleans is “Social Justice University.” Here, the emphasis is on egalitarianism, interference with the free enterprise system, some version of socialism, governmental regulation of capitalism and the like. Charging for parking spaces in accordance with income is only the tip of the iceberg in this regard. Why don’t they do the same for cafeteria meals, books and vending machine candy bars?
Nary a member of our academic community has so much as even heard of the other Jesuit tradition – so biased is the teaching of those charged with this subject matter. This stems from the late Spanish scholastic school of economics, known as the School of Salamanca. Although there were to be sure Dominicans involved in it, such as Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Juan de Medina, Martin de Azpilcueta, Diego de Covarrubias y Leiva and Tomas de Mercado, several of the mainstays were, indeed, early members of the Jesuit Order. For example, Luis Molina, Cardinal Juan de Lugo, Leonard de Leys and Juan de Mariana.
These were, hard as it is now to believe, staunch free enterprisers. For them, government was not at all justified in controlling prices. To the contrary, as they saw matters, the just price was the market price.When one compares and contrasts the modern and the ancient Jesuit traditions in economics, one is tempted to entertain the notion that the former have hijacked what the latter had set up.
In the last few years, invitees for the most prestigious outside speaker’s campus programs have been biased in the direction of socialism, interventionism, egalitarianism and left liberalism. Jonathan Kozol is only the most recent in a long line of usurpations and abuses in this regard.
Others in this rogues’ gallery include Kim Gandy, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Danny Glover and Spike Lee. But what else can you expect from a university with a faculty likely to vote Democrat over Republican by a vast majority?
Not only are we the “Social Justice University,” we are also supposedly the “Critical Thinking University.” If the latter is true, why are virtually never any of our distinguished outside speakers representative of other portions of the political-economic spectrum than the left? Many of our alumni and other potential donors withhold contributions due to this bias.
The economics club, in sharp contrast, and also the committee on civil engagement, does not at all adhere to such bias. Instead, it features speakers of widely divergent viewpoints, often in debate format. The business school, with invitees such as Michael Novak, Richard Neuhaus, the Rev. Robert Sirico and the Rev. James Schall, S.J., has served as a sort of counterweight to the campus-wide speaker’s series.
