There is a Common Good - But Only If Common to Individual Persons

A water fountain in a city is a common good - because it is common to all the individual persons who drink from it or wash their hands in it.

If drinking and washing hands were no needs individual persons could have, or no joys they could have even when not strictly needing it, a water fountain would not be good just because it is common to the city. It is "common good" because it is common to individual persons living in or visiting the city.

Some common goods involve more than individual persons, but not less. The happiness of a family staying together is common to the family, but it is so because the family is common to the individual persons in it, even the staying together is common to the individual persons in it. Suppose one of them is staying elsewhere, he is not immediately sharing that good of staying together. He is not totally excluded from it, but this is because on other occasions he has stayed together with them - indeed on many continuous series of occasions - otherwise he would not be part of the family and would not have joy from knowing the other family members are staying together.

Or he could be de jure part of it, but separated from it, by child protective services at an early age, that is an abnormal case which I was not considering. So, I'll consider it. This rape of the common good of a family is perpetrated by states who think - or rather whose legislators and current administrators think, at least on occasion - that the common good of the state implies a kind of right to override the common good of the family, the right of staying together, in the name of protecting certain rights, defined by the state and not always real rights, sometimes more of duties than rights, of certain individual persons of the family, namely the children.

Obviously, a little child, unless He is God and can sow wheat grains that grow up before the eyes of St Amadour, is not able himself to protect his own rights. His rights therefore have to be protected by someone else. Libertarians would say, this is the family. Their opponents would say, it is sometimes the family, but the state can also do it, against certain families. In such cases, the state pretends that having a certain kind of education, rather than a different one, is a common good of all small citizens, and all small citizens getting it is a common good for all adult citizens of the future, once they live together.

There is actually one right which is essential for the common good of a state, that is the right of growing up with one's family. When God under the Old Law decided, certain Canaaneans should be killed, only the adults were guilty. So why were babies to be killed rather than adopted by Israelites? There are two options. Rob Skiba would tell us : "that Canaanean state was inhabited by giants, by mutants, their genome was evil" (or at least a trap into evil that few escape from, and none of those "of old", see Baruch 3). But what if that Canaanean city state was inhabited by normal people, with a genome roughly similar to Lebanese? Only problem being they practised Molochism with human sacrifice and Sexually immoral rites, that being a choice, not part of their genome? Well, there is an answer to that : adopting the children of city state after city state of Canaaneans would involve being a state where too many, proportionally, had grown up with foster parents, too few, proportionally, with their own parents.

There is one case in which children can be taken away from parents, and I approve : if the parents are Molochists. Let us hope this case is theoretical, though I spoke to one person who thought the case was rather practical and it was only impossible to save the victims in time, because impossible to track down Molochists. One other, namely if children are raped or even systematically molested (even with some kind of consent, valid or not) by members of the own family.

Note well, in 2002 or 2003 there was a case in Sweden, an adolescent girl was placed back with her real father, because the foster father molested her. In the same news article, there was a mention, 1/3 of all foster home placements in Sweden were back then interrupted, whether by seeking another solution or by bringing them back to parents. Presumably, her separation from her own fathers was not due to such a grave fault, but more to one of the ideology judged ones. I am rather sure, it is more common (at least per percent of each population, of majority living at home, of minority living with foster parents) to be abused in foster families than in one's own family. In the natural sense of the word, doing it with a foster daughter or foster sister is not incest, while doing it with one's own daughter or own sister is. Therefore, persons in foster families have less of a block against this than persons in the own family.

This is not adequately counteracted by Social Services selecting the foster families very carefully or even giving them educations or briefings or follow-ups : on the contrary, these things act as stress moments on family life, beyond the fact of someone presumably being unhappy of not being with her own family.

Who is in this case defending the family? Libertarians. Who is therefore defending the Common Good? Libertarians. This is not all there is to Libertarians, perhaps, but it makes them far better than typical Leftist members of some Social Science institute.

Now, look how the supposed "Pope", Bergoglio, strawmans Libertarians and upholds Social Sciences (which are not sciences, but arts of harrassment and bullying, often enough):

"Finally, I cannot but speak of the serious risks associated with the invasion, at high levels of culture and education in both universities and in schools, of positions of libertarian individualism. A common feature of this fallacious paradigm is that it minimizes the common good, that is, “living well”, a “good life” in the community framework, and exalts the selfish ideal that deceptively proposes a “beautiful life”. If individualism affirms that it is only the individual who gives value to things and interpersonal relationships, and so it is only the individual who decides what is good and what is bad, then libertarianism, today in fashion, preaches that to establish freedom and individual responsibility, it is necessary to resort to the idea of “self-causation”. Thus libertarian individualism denies the validity of the common good because on the one hand it supposes that the very idea of “common” implies the constriction of at least some individuals, and the other that the notion of “good” deprives freedom of its essence."

There may have been Libertarians who theorised that badly, perhaps because they were Atheists (and Atheism does not admit of objective values inherent in the very fabric of the universe, as Creationism does), but they have at least, indirectly, affirmed the truth, that human good is only such if enjoyed by individual human persons, and by societies like the family or analogous, and this is also true of the part of human good known as "common good". They have affirmed, very correctly, that representing the common good is not an excuse for inventing (in the interest of the common cause, as one sees it) goods that are not felt as good by the individuals concerned, and impose it on them in the name of the common good passing before private good.

And whom is "Pope Francis" speaking to? Well, the quote is from:

Message from the Holy Father to the participants in the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (28 April – 2 May 2017), 28.04.2017 https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2017/04/28/170428h.html

So, now there is a "Pontifical" Academy of Social Sciences ... well, this does not bode very good. For either individual and personal in the sense of private goods, or for the real common good which is common to personal and individual ones. Hat tip to Mark Shea who thinks "Pope Francis" is doing a good job.

In the context, the remark might pass off for very good - since coming after some actually not altogether incorrect observations about the good of workers coming before the financial interests of their employers (a thing Libertarians may miss out on, sorry Mises, but price regulation is not against the natural law, if anything it is free pricing which may easly become so, and regulations for safety and health are not bad either, if proportional, we don't want building to be a process where you moan over one brick falling down, but feel free to ignore men falling down to their death, even if I am not sure at all Josephus' details for Tower of Babel are technically the real ones).

But in this need of protecting workers against certain types of rapaciousness (and if US workers do not feel that need, it is perhaps due partly to laws that were not Libertarian) we have no right to confuse other issues, where Libertarians are simply and obviously right, like defending family from compulsory school, compulsory vaccines, or child protective services, and where the ones who are wrong are moreover more often than not invoking Social Sciences.

In the same document (which I skimmed through, but I did not content myself with Mark Shea's quote, we find a bit of thoroughly bad history:

"The fifteenth century was the first century of humanism; at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the need for a new humanism is felt ever more strongly."

Bergoglio, does he really not know that 15th C. Humanism was a revival of what was bad in pre-Christian, Pagan, Libertarianism? Does he really not know Humanists were fighting price regulations and trade impediments and other Medieval stuff that really took care of the common good, and really saw the poor man's liberties as part of the common good?

Well, sorry, but it seems that he spent more time studying rhetoric than history.

I may have to take another look on what he writes about labour, here I am concerned with not throwing Libertarian defense of families and babies* out with Libertarian bathwater equivalent in price regulations, and such questions.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Marguérite Audoux**
Consecration of the Basilicas
of Sts Peter and Paul***
18.XI.2017

Update : Therefore, persons in foster families have less of a block against this than persons in the own family. The English term I was searching was "less inhibitions" or "fewer inhibitions". For wiktionary, this meaning of "spärr" was too technical, for wikipedia, the technical term was not technical enough to have an own article./HGL

* And in defining good as enjoyable by individual persons. ** Yes, I think libraries are one kind of common good, it is enjoyed by lots of individual readers and people using the internet. That doesn't mean CPS is acting for the "common good" or even duly for the individual one or most cases. *** Can one feast it while Bergoglio is abusing them? One can at least commemorate this!