Subsidarity: Catholic Interpretations

Vox Nova revisits subsidiarity, and while the purpose of the post seems to be to scold those that would consider themselves politically right of center, I don't mind being scolded, and there is a good point made:

Subsidiarity concerns itself not with the particulars of the relationship between city, county, state and federal government, but rather with the relation between the individual, the community, and the state.

While subsidiarity can tangentially be used to guide the relationship between different levels of government, the core of subsidiarity is the promotion of social structures outside of government. As the writer puts it, community is the natural buffer between the individual and the state. This community, which is based on voluntary association, consists of family, friends, neighbors, religious and philanthropic groups, and places of business, and is what Tocqueville so loved about America:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Whenever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

I loathe Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy of pure individualism that would like any instance of "we" to be replaced with the "I" of a Nietzschean Übermensch. As a commentator to the Vox Nova post rightly put it, individualism is the Achilles' heal of pure libertarian philosophy, and is just as much an unreachable utopia as socialism or egalitarianism. If I call myself a libertarian, it would only be because I would prefer to see a more restrained and less ambitious federal government that what has been exhibited by Republicans and Democrats in recent memory.

There is certainly a role for government, and there should be discussion about central vs. local government, but subsidiarity stresses that the voluntary association of "social man"in communities is a most important feature of a strong society.