In Argentina’s recent presidential election, an upstart challenger threatened the incumbent party. Polls showed Sergio Massa, the current economy minister, behind the maverick economist Javier Milei. But Massa pulled off a victory. How? First and foremost, Massa mailed checks to large numbers of pensioners. He eliminated income tax for 99 percent of the country. And in the poorest areas his functionaries started delivering new refrigerators, stoves, and mattresses as gifts from local party bosses. They also scared voters off Milei, whose proposals for radical reforms of the corrupt system are quite extreme. (Milei ended up coming back to win in the run-off election.)
As someone who grew up in the aftermath of Richard Daley’s reign as mayor-boss of Chicago, the notion of buying votes in such ways seems familiar. On the whole, however, American elections have avoided this behavior—at least overtly. Yet the subtle patterns that undergird such corruption do have a large impact on our attitudes toward society and political institutions. We often think of politics in terms of self-interest. And we look to find someone who will give us something for nothing—the proverbial free lunch. These illusions contrast with two important ideas in Catholic social thought: voting for the common good and inserting quotas of gratuitousness throughout our daily social interactions and exchanges.
The first idea may look familiar—we hear a lot about seeking the common good. But often when it comes to voting or advocating for social policies, we actually seem to be advocating for our self-interest. By contrast, the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (On the Church in the Modern World) states clearly: All citizens must remember their “right and duty to vote freely in the interest of advancing the common good.” It is wrong, from a Catholic point of view, to vote based on self-interest.
Unfortunately, our system now favors candidates and even parties who seek votes based entirely on appeals to various group interests. The common good, in Catholic teaching, is not a matter of everyone getting things they want, but of the “sum of those conditions of social life” that enable all groups to achieve their various goods. We can and should argue about the most effective means to achieving these conditions. But we shouldn’t vote for someone in exchange for them giving or promising to give us or our group something. This kind of self-interested voting is, sadly, just a more sophisticated form of showing up with new refrigerators the week before the election.
But, one might object, maybe the common good is served by (some) people getting free refrigerators? We commonly hear economists mouth the slogan, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” a phrase that goes back to a custom in 19th-century America of saloons offering “free” buffets (often salty) to entice people into ordering drinks. Today, we know that “free” internet platforms mean “you are the product”—that is, you pay for these services by letting them subtly change you through your attention. They are not “free.” To obtain goods and services is to trade off among possibilities. You can get more for less—economists speak of this as an efficiency or productivity gain. But you can’t actually get something for nothing.
If we consider our daily lives, I fear we are losing a grip on this. For instance, the normalization of gambling changes our perception of creating out of nothing; ads throughout last year’s baseball playoffs bombarded me with messages such as, “Bet $5, and get $200 in free bets.” Our brains should recognize the temptation. Similarly, online day trading in the stock market leads us to think this “get something for nothing” way about investing rather than thinking about it traditionally: putting surplus resources to work in order to create something new and helpful for society. And though it is reasonable for governments to run deficits in wars and hard economic times, it is not possible to run deficits constantly in good times and bad. At some point, that will be paid for. Because there is no free lunch.
Now one might object: Isn’t God the ultimate free lunch? By affirming God’s goodness in creating and sustaining everything, we recognize that everything is (in a sense) a free lunch. But the belief that we can have all the stuff we want without cost is not a vision of God at work.
Instead Catholics should seek what Pope Benedict called “quotas of gratuitousness” carried out constantly in our ordinary daily lives. Interestingly, it turns out that saloon “free lunches” were in fact really important in sustaining poor people in an era prior to adequate government food and unemployment programs. Maybe the saloons enticed some to drink too much, but a poor person could clearly come out ahead for the cost of one drink.
While we can question whether this is the right way to care for people suffering hardship, what we should see is that the only “free lunch” appears within social practices of sharing and being generous in all aspects of our lives. We cannot achieve a just and loving society apart from people practicing the ordinary virtues of what Pope Pius XI called “social justice and social charity.” We cannot merely carry out acts of regular generosity within our families or among our friends. We need to develop habits and structures where such quotas of generosity are a regular part of daily life.
So, there is such a thing as a free lunch. But not one that can be provided by impersonal political or economic mechanisms and structures. It has to stem from the heart, from the true inclusion achieved by strong community ties. There are a lot of free things to be had in my mixed-income parish or on active listservs of neighbors. Local businesses add “quotas of gratuitousness” to our community all the time. Institutions with longstanding roots mediate relationships of giving and receiving, which contain truly free gifts that pay forward community ties and are not about garnering votes.
These networks are the kinds of overlapping ties that Seth Kaplan so effectively documents in his recent book Fragile Neighborhoods (Little, Brown Spark). An international expert on failed states, Kaplan recognizes that the same problems of institutional breakdown he saw at an extreme level in failing countries are also key to explaining breakdowns throughout our own society—rooted in the destruction of local social fabrics. Our economy is not yet as failed as Argentina’s, with its 138 percent inflation rate. But when we approach social institutions only looking out for our own group interests, always looking for our free lunch, we could be on the way.
This article also appears in the February 2024 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 89, No. 2, pages 40-41). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: iStock.com/zoff-photo
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