Senator Marco Rubio

It is rare that a secular politician cites papal teaching in order to make a political argument. The last time I can recall a conservative politician publicly citing a pope was when Rick Santorum dismissed Pope Francis’ acceptance of climate change.

But more recently, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida published an article in the conservative religious journal First Things, which opens with a citation of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum, on the condition of workers, and finishes by citing Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Francis, and Pope Benedict XVI. In a speech given at Catholic University of America, he again cites these popes in critique of the “free market” which has hurt American families and weakened the middle class. Rubio has effectively revealed the ethical, and specifically Catholic, motivations of his recent work in economic policy reform.

Rubio’s unconventional approach to economics keeps him from adopting the usual slogans of free-market pundits and conservative politicians, who insist that the economy is doing great simply because the numbers on the stock market are higher. Instead, he is well aware that productive investment in America is in fast decline, and that the average American worker in the 21st century cannot expect the same stability that his parents or grandparents could expect during the post-War era.

More importantly, Rubio is aware that this is a deeply structural and systemic problem, not one that can be fixed simply by telling workers “what [they] need to do in order to become more useful to businesses…” As he writes in First Things, “The dignity of work, the Church instructs us through documents like Rerum Novarum, is not just the concern of individuals. It is the concern of communities and nations to provide productive labor to their people.” The existing neoliberal economy of America — which Republican conservatives have defended since the 1970s — is set up against workers, not for them.

In line with the school of thought sometimes known as “stakeholder capitalism” or “corporatism,” Rubio identifies the major source of economic decline as financialization; that is, the excessive separation of financial activity from productive activity, and indeed the overtaking of production by finance. Marxist economists have identified this process as but a late stage in the separation of capital from labor.

The immediate effect of financialization is a decline in physical investment throughout the economy. Companies invest less in physical means of production (including labor), and more in financial assets and manipulative activities such as stock buybacks and usurious lending. Rubio reports that “nonfinancial corporate companies’ balance sheets look increasingly like financial institutions’ balance sheets, that is, they increasingly borrow and lend for profit. . . The nonfinancial corporate business sector now has more financial claims on the rest of the economy than the rest of the economy has on it.”

Rubio correctly identifies this trend as a cause of the decline in quality of life for workers and their families. Modern corporations have subscribed to the theory of “shareholder value,” making it their aim to generate the highest return for shareholders, rather than to invest in an actually productive economy ordered to the good of all, especially workers and their families. Consequently, Rubio — a true conservative — identifies as one of the effects of financialization the decline in the average American’s ability to raise a stable family.

At once the Catholic motivations of Rubio’s criticism of late American capitalism should be clear. The social encyclicals of the popes, including Leo XIII and Pius XI, have never failed to emphasize the family as the building block of society. The health of the family has always been regarded by the Church as a probable sign of the health of society at large. A major role of the state and the economic system is to facilitate the thriving of families, and their ability to participate in the common good. Late American capitalism has failed to achieve these goals.

Senator Rubio insightfully remarks that the consumer price indexes of the Commerce Department do not, as many claim, indicate a higher quality of life for modern American citizens — much less for American families. Such indexes take for granted a specific selection of consumer goods, which have happened (by the “inevitable” forces of the market) to become most available to consumers, given their levels of purchasing power. If one measures the wages of average Americans by their ability to afford these goods (TVs, smartphones, internet, etc.), then of course their lives appear to have improved over the last half a century.

However, Rubio notes, “accounting for these changes requires making decisions about what satisfies consumers’ desires. Underneath the technical debate lies the reality that to measure the value of someone’s income requires judgment about what is valuable.” (My emphases.) Such a judgment is an ethical judgment, not attainable simply by observing changing consumer preferences — which are often engineered anyway by media and mass marketing. And such a judgment can be right or wrong.

But the most crucial point is that this judgment is also political: it requires the state to make a decision about what is, in truth, the good for its citizens. This is nothing other than a reiteration of Catholic social teaching, such as that expressed by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno:

Men must consider in this matter not only their own advantage but also the common good. To define these duties in detail when necessity requires and the natural law has not done so, is the function of those in charge of the State. Therefore, public authority, under the guiding light always of the natural and divine law, can determine more accurately upon consideration of the true requirements of the common good, what is permitted and what is not permitted to owners in the use of their property.

With a gesture to recent debates among conservative intellectuals, Rubio rightly rebukes conservatives who dismiss all talk of a “higher good” or a “common good” as though it were no better than socialism. Counter to the prevailing orthodoxy of fusionist conservatism in the Republican Party, Rubio’s Catholic conservatism is unapologetic in its insistence that the government play a large role, though by no means an all-absorbing role, in the restriction of unproductive financial activity, the promotion of productive investment, and the well-being of working class families.

These functions of the state are all defined in the great social encyclicals, such as Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. A capitalism which serves only the interests of shareholders, to the detriment of workers, entrepreneurs, and families, is unacceptable from a Catholic perspective.

It is unfortunate that the only other politicians who are saying what Rubio is saying are radical progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, whose motivations are anything but Catholic. Conservatives have too long shunned Catholic social teaching on economics because, to date, the closest thing to that teaching has only be found on the radical left — and therefore easily assumed to be nothing but “socialist.”

But the fact that Senator Marco Rubio, a true conservative, is beginning to say these things — and cite encyclicals in support of them — should make conservative Catholics reconsider their ideological commitments to the “free market.” More importantly, it should inspire them to reread the social encyclicals which inform Rubio’s Catholic economics.