Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, met Pope Francis on April 20, the day earlier than the latter’s loss of life. The assembly with the enfeebled pope was transient and didn’t contact upon their disagreement concerning the remedy of immigrants. Early this yr, Francis had declared that the mass deportation plan “damages the dignity of many men and women” (“JD Vance Was Among Last to Meet Pope Francis,” Wall Avenue Journal, April 21, 2025). I feel it’s tough to not share the late pope’s concern on this level, however the bigger image is extra attention-grabbing.
While the pope is named a person of the left advocating “social justice,” JD Vance helps “the right” wherever he sees it. It isn’t instantly apparent how these two people can belong to the identical Church. Is that an irreconcilable disagreement? Casuistry might little doubt pull a couple of rabbits from the pope’s tiara or the vice-president’s MAGA cap. Furthermore, and curiously, the 2 protagonists might reconcile their variations by invoking what they each disagree with in classical liberal political financial system—if solely they knew something about that.
As classical liberal (and libertarian) theorists have defined, the idea of social justice makes unambiguous sense solely in an authoritarian social system the place the political rulers assign rewards and punishments to people in society. In a spontaneous order, no authority can do this: rewards and punishments are decided in accordance with largely impersonal elements resembling who higher satisfies the demand of unknown individuals on prolonged markets; different impersonal elements, resembling luck, accidents, and the legal guidelines of physics, additionally play a job.
To see this, we could seek the advice of what I imagine are the three main classical liberal or libertarian strands of thought in our time. (1) Friedrich Hayek has supplied an argument in opposition to social justice just like what I simply described: see his The Mirage of Social Justice, initially the third quantity of his Regulation, Laws, and Liberty. (2) The anarcho-liberal or anarcho-conservative economist and political thinker Anthony de Jasay arrives at an identical conclusion, additionally primarily based on spontaneous guidelines of conduct (which, within the method of David Hume, he calls “conventions”) however with out the state: see, amongst his works, Justice and Its Environment. (3) James Buchanan and the varsity of Constitutional Political Financial system rehabilitate the state by means of unanimous consent (that’s, particular person veto). On this contractarian principle, justice lies in guidelines which are unanimously accepted and definitely not in a conception of justice imposed by political authority: a abstract might be present in Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan, The Cause of Guidelines. (Be aware that, for Buchanan as for Hayek, being against arbitrary “social justice” doesn’t suggest that the state can not supply some kind of earnings insurance coverage.)
If that’s appropriate, we are able to say that each the (late) pope and JD Vance imagine in social justice, that’s, in political authority assigning rewards and punishments all through society, though Vance makes use of different phrases than “social justice.” The pope believes that political authorities ought to favor the poor on the expense of the wealthy all around the world. JD Vance believes that the favored teams needs to be whoever the holders of political energy in America suppose are deserving—and who’re probably the obedient supporters of such rulers. Lots of his tirades would have been authorized by Francis if he didn’t add “American” to his favored teams (“JD Vance Proclaims ‘America First’ as Republicans Embrace Economic Populism,” Monetary Instances, July 18, 2014):
“We are done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man,” he stated. “We’re done importing foreign labour, we are going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages.” He added: “We need a leader who is not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike, a leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American corporations and American industry.”
In Argentina, the pope was recognized by many as “the Peronist pope,” after Juan Domingo Perón, a populist of the left whose presidency contributed to the Argentine decline. The Monetary Instances notes (Michael Stott, “Was Francis the First Peronist Pope?” April 23, 2025):
“Perón used to say that the doctrine of Peronism was the social doctrine of the church,” stated Ignácio Zuleta, creator of a research of Francis entitled The Peronist Pope. Each church and Peronists emphasised social justice and the struggle in opposition to poverty, whereas advocating conservative social mores.
Whether or not Francis-style or à la Vance, “social justice” is an occasion of a bigger ideology. The 2 males are each collectivists, that’s, they each favor collective and political selections over particular person and personal selections. They merely favor completely different collective selections made by completely different individuals in metering rewards and punishments over the entire society. It’s fairly certain that Vance doesn’t disagree with Francis when the latter expressed his opposition to what he ignorantly described as “the neoliberal dogma [which] pursues easy profits as its main goal [and] continues to cause serious damage” (“Les 10 phrases marquantes du pape François : ‘Saint Pierre n’avait pas de compte en banque,’” Le Monde, April 20, 2025).
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The featured picture of this submit imagines Pope Francis and JD Vance arriving collectively on the Pearly Gates (the lag being as a consequence of a dent within the space-time continuum). Earlier than St. Peter, who assigns the contemplation seats in heaven, the pope is smiling and naïve, whereas Vance is naïve and offended. In spite of everything, they each imagine in “social justice,” however their standards for assigning rewards and punishments differ.
In fact, as there may be (by definition) no shortage in heaven, the reader of this weblog ought to perceive that place assignments should be a mere ritual with no sensible consequence.
JD Vance and the Pope Meet Once more, by ChatGPT and Pierre Lemieux at EconLog
