A Potpourri… The Order Of Creation, Student Loans, And Free Markets
By GEORGE A. KENDALL
Since the beginning of the so-called Enlightenment, skeptics have questioned whether it is possible for the human mind to know realities outside itself, and have produced elaborate systems to take a mind which they believe to be naturally disconnected from reality and somehow connect it to reality. This assumes as given the disconnectedness. What is wrong with this picture?
What is wrong is that it uses this questionable assumption about the rift, the lack of connection, between the mind and reality, as the starting point. What it should start with is not the mind, taken in isolation from everything else, but the Creation, which is the whole context in which the mind is and acts.
Now the Creation is the work of divine love and, as such, is good. But a world in which there are minds endowed with reason and hence the intrinsic ability to know, and beings which are intelligible, and hence knowable, but in which the two cannot meet, is not compatible with a good Creation, the work of divine love. A good Creation is an ordered Creation, in which the mind is made to know things and things are made to be known.
Hence there is no point in even asking the question whether the mind can know reality. Of course it can — how could it be otherwise? It is, as contemporary slang has it, “a no-brainer.”
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One of the things the far leftists in our Congress and elsewhere are advocating with great enthusiasm is the forgiveness of student college debt. While their agenda is to me, in general, anathema, I can actually support this part of it. First of all, I would submit that college graduates who are now up to their eyeballs in debt owed to the government on college loans have no obligation to repay these loans.
The Church teaches that we are morally obligated to repay all just debts. That would imply that we are not obliged to repay unjust ones — for instance, debts owed to loan sharks.
Now a debt that is incurred under fraudulent pretexts is an unjust debt. The pretext under which these loans were offered to college students was that a college degree would enable them to get lucrative jobs that would enable them to easily pay them off. What actually happens in a substantial number of cases is that college graduates end up flipping burgers at McDonald’s, or doing comparable work, with no hope of ever getting out of debt.
One pernicious effect of this is that it pretty much stops many of them from starting families, or at least leads to them putting it off for a long time. The social order, which depends on stable families, and which is already moribund, is being put out of its misery even faster by this iniquity (and they cannot even use bankruptcy to escape). So student loans undermine the common good.
But the universities benefit, because they can rake in student loan money and use it to hire more and more of the parasitic life forms known as college administrators. And they can expand and expand while admitting large numbers of unqualified students, while drastically lowering academic standards (abolishing them, really) to make it all possible, And while all that extra money is coming in, they can raise their tuition again and again. The whole thing is a racket, one which ought to be prosecuted under RICO laws.
Of course, the leftists who propose forgiveness of student debt couple this with a proposal for free college for everyone, a disastrous idea which would only aggravate the terrible damage done to academic standards by the student loan program. My proposal is this: Cancel all student loan debts, then require the universities to pay the money back, since they are the ones who actually benefitted from these fraudulent loans. If it puts many of the universities out of business, that will be icing on the cake.
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The free market works well to keep supply and demand in sync, that is, to make products available to people who want them at prices they are willing to pay. But that doesn’t necessarily keep things in harmony with the real order of goods. If most people want unlimited consumer goods without reference to a transcendent good, the market will serve Mammon, but not God, and not the human good.
In a society where Christian faith is alive and well, people see their ultimate good as eternal union with God, and their temporal good as a sufficiency of this world’s goods. When Christian faith is lost or minimal, people put their faith in worldly goods. The problem is that since that faith is a displacement of Christian faith, which seeks an infinite good, onto finite goods, which can never satisfy that seeking, people end up trying to get an infinite good from finite goods, and so their quest for these is a quest without limit.
It can never be satisfied, but the market will keep trying to satisfy it. That is what got us the Industrial Revolution, with all its social and personal destructiveness.
In other words, free markets can be very effective in distributing goods and services to spiritually ordered people. Where spiritual disorder is dominant, manifesting itself in hubris and moral insanity, it can only aggravate the disorder. The market cannot do an end run around the spiritual and moral order.
(© 2019 George A. Kendall)
