Bread Not Bombs: A Political Agenda For Social Justice.

Douglas Roche, Bread Not Bombs: A Political Agenda For Social Justice, The University of Alberta Press, Edmonton, Alberta, 1999, 162 pp. $19.95 (soft cover)

In this book, Senator Roche contends that to secure enduring world peace, we must advance an agenda of social justice. The agenda he has in mind includes arms reductions, economic and social development, environmental protection, and the furtherance of human rights.

Senator Roche believes that, in the new world of globalization, peace, security, and development are interlinked. Consequently, we must advance them simultaneously. On the one hand, arms reductions could release massive resources to fight poverty and environmental degradation. On the other hand, continued economic and social development are required for sustainable peace.

Economic development is crucial because it provides the material basis for individual and communal fulfillment. Economics, unfortunately, is a key area in which Senator Roche's analysis falls short. Without naming it, he labels capitalism a system built on greed and castigates the free market for concentrating power and depriving many people of the ability to meet their basic economic needs.

But no system has been more successful than capitalism in lifting masses of people out of poverty. Two hundred years ago, nearly everyone everywhere was poor. In the West, where capitalism took root, the incidence of poverty has fallen dramatically. Capitalism, the sustained creation of wealth, systematically and self-consciously, is one of the West's gifts to the world.

Senator Roche mistakes the vices of capitalism for its virtues. Not greed or consumerism, but enterprise, is the cardinal virtue of capitalism. What sets this system apart from others is freedom of economic enterprise from excessive political control and sustained innovation in trade, technology and organization.

Developing nations that foster the political, cultural and personal attributes capitalism requires can expect to dramatically reduce poverty also, as a number have done since World War Two. Without the required attributes, money, whether released through disarmament or extended through official foreign aid, is unlikely to result in sustained wealth creation and integrated development. On the contrary, experience with official aid suggests that much of this money would finance uneconomic projects or find its way into the pockets and foreign bank accounts of corrupt leaders and their cronies.

Senator Roche foresees disastrous consequences if the Western model of development is adopted globally. Taking into account population projections, he believes that global consumption at a North American standard, together with pollution, would challenge, if not exceed, the limits of the biosphere.

But the genius of capitalist wealth creation is not just about doing more, but doing more with less. The thrust of technology today is to splurge on knowledge and scrimp on material and energy. Consider, for example, fiber-optic cable. A few pounds of it carries as much information as a ton of copper.

Domestically, Senator Roche wants more spending on social programs. To support his position, he uses, uncritically, the statistical analyses of income favored by welfare-state activists to prove increasing poverty and inequality. The weaknesses of these analyses, which exaggerate both poverty and inequality, have been exposed by Professor Christopher Sarlo in Canada and others in the United States.

Our vaunted social programs, whose decline since the late 1980s Senator Roche laments, have subsidized the well-to-do more than the poor. Among the chief beneficiaries are bureaucrats and other social services personnel, through whom the money trickles down to the poor who need it.

Wouldn't it be better to bypass the social welfare industry and directly support grass-roots organizations working to revitalize local communities? Non-governmental community groups can dispense aid in a much more neighborly fashion than a bureaucratic state is able to do and without the coercion and social pathology that seem inseparable from welfarism. They are better able to discern the sort of help the poor need, whether temporary or protracted, in-kind or financial, specific or general. They are also more apt to identify those who lack the mental and behavioral qualities for wealth creation and to encourage their development.

Human rights, particularly women's rights, are high on Senator Roche's agenda. He writes glowingly about the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing. Incredibly, he says nothing about the attempts by feminist delegates, Canadians especially, to impose pro-abortion, anti-family policies on the entire world.

In cataloguing violence against women, he mentions "Countless female embryos [that] are aborted because of son-preference." This would have been an opportunity to say something about the rights of the unborn generally. He says nothing.

Joseph Campbell is a former broadcaster who writes from Saskatoon, SK. His contributions to Catholic insight on social justice issues are widely appreciated.