Subsidiarity Quotes

The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces.

The state has an "annexationist" character tending toward centralization and the development of a Provider State. We must uphold the principle of subsidiarity. Action should always be taken by the smallest possible unit. starting with the person. What we now have is maximal government of the lowest quality; what we need is minimal government of the highest order.

1883. ...The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.

By subsidiarity is meant the principle that responsibilities should be devolved to the lowest viable level – the individual if possible. This stems directly from the Christian concept that the individual is of overriding importance because the individual is unique, born with free will, and is of infi nite value to God. The principle of subsidiarity is therefore rooted in a Christian understanding of the nature of the human person made in the image of God. By solidarity is meant the idea that no man is an island, and that mankind has the need and duty to bind together in common action to achieve aims that cannot be achieved by single individuals. Subsidiarity then requires that the smallest possible level of communality necessary to achieve a particular end should be employed. Action at state level is essentially a last resort.

Călătoria spre un cuplu fericit nu e solitară. Avem nevoie de mentori, de cupluri încercate de la care să învățăm, de cunoaștere - asta dacă dorim să ieșim din hățișurile minții, care ne sabotează dreptul la fericire și iubire, care ne sabotează relația. Pentru asta avem nevoie de bărbați buni, maturi, responsabili și implicați. De femei înțelepte, care să se prețuiască, să nu se abandoneze pe ele însele, dar și să nu uite să-și prețuiască - și să nu pună în subsidiar (aș spune chiar să nu-și ignore) - bărbatul, relația sau căsnicia.

Christianity, then, was in one sense the stone these builders of the American nation rejected, except for Benjamin Rush and Charles Carroll. Yet the other Founding Fathers, even as modern men, still held fast to much that was good from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Jefferson's enthusiasm for the defense of reason, natural law, and the principle of subsidiarity is worthy of the best Christian thinkers. And there could be no better advice (properly understood) for any age than Franklin's "imitation of Jesus and Socrates, " for man needs humbly to live both the life of the spirit and the intellect. But it was the most unlikely of all of them, the Caesarist Alexander Hamilton, who, laying down his life for an enemy, proved that the lives and thought of the Founding Fathers - even in the heady days of the American revolution - could be completely transformed. Obedient to Christ's command of absolute love, Hamilton died very much in the manner of those other and greater figures of destiny, those who build the futures of two worlds, the only true revolutionaries - the saints.

the principle of subsidiarity, which stipulates that in matters political and economic there ought always to be a preferential option for the most local level of authority and operation.

Bannon, more synthesist than adherent, brought to Guénon’s Traditionalism a strong dose of Catholic social thought, in particular the concept of “subsidiarity”: the principle expressed in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, that political matters should devolve to the lowest, least centralized authority that can responsibly handle them—a concept that, in a U.S. political context, mirrors small-government conservatism.

la relación entre innovación y movilidad social se ve reflejada de una forma concreta en la trayectoria de los salarios de los trabajadores de poca o mediana calificación ocupados en una firma innovadora. Entonces, el Estado tiene una herramienta para motivar a las firmas innovadoras, desempeñando un papel efectivo en el ascenso social: subsidiar el aprendizaje.

Para el gobierno de AMLO la competencia con los privados no puede ser en condiciones de igualdad. Por ejemplo, el que la CFE y Pemex (como lo tiene que hacer Telmex) deban compartir una parte de su infraestructura redundante a un precio regulado implica para él subsidiar a las empresas privadas, no desarrollar nuevos mercados para tener más actores en el sector.

Higher virtues are at some elemental level nothing more or less than deeply appreciating laws of nature that enable harmony and functioning of life—see reality as it is (commitment to the truth), take no more than you need (waste not, want not), do not control unnecessarily (hierarchical power should be used only when local solutions are not possible, what 17th-century philosophers called the principle of ‘subsidiarity’) and balance action with non-action (the power of presence, true listening and non-intervention).

The Rome Treaty implicitly recognized this principle in distinguishing between two kinds of EU act: the Regulation, which is ‘binding in its entirety’ on all the member states; and the Directive, which is binding only ‘as to the result to be achieved’, leaving each state to choose the ‘form and methods’. But this was a very partial application of the principle; and Directives were sometimes enacted in such detail as to leave little choice to the states. So the Maastricht Treaty defined subsidiarity and the Amsterdam Treaty laid down detailed procedures aiming to ensure that the principle would be practised by the EU institutions. The inclusion in the Lisbon Treaty of a list of which competences are exclusive to the EU, which are shared with member states, and which are supporting state action has further ensured that there are multiple safeguards against overcentralization

The common man was aware of the king, or the emperor, but the more distant the ruler the further removed was he from the peasant's own life. In short, his relationship to his authorities was the inverse of what ours is today, where those who impact our lives the most are those furthest from us. The peasant and his patriarch formed a more or less autonomous sphere, although this sphere existed in conjunction with concentric or intersecting circles. Because of this subsidiarity, what little sway the peasant had in the eye of his superior had more in common with that of a son to his father, and it would be anachronistic to imagine him to be as impotent as a modern American would be if deprived of voting rights. The peasant's voice was incomparably louder because the ratio of ruler to ruled was so much smaller within in the jurisdiction where he fell.

It is a fact of history that no king could push his people into war as rapidly and as fluidly as George Bush or Barack Obama. And this cannot be dismissed as a technological issue brought about by progress. It stems directly from the configuration of power structures. Here we must emphasize the difference between a stratified society and the modern egalitarian regime. In the latter, the state has direct authority over each individual or group, and this is true primarily because all have been reduced to one dead level. Access to one member on any single level implies access to all. In the stratified framework, however, the authority of a man at the uppermost level does not imply access to any other level beyond that which happens to be immediately adjacent to his own. He does not subsume command of all that falls below him in the vast hierarchy. He sits on the top rung, indeed, but his arms aren't any longer than yours or mine, and so he can only grasp at the next rung down from his own. The medieval king could command his dukes, but he could not command their knights. He could draw taxes from the peasants who lived on his own estate (which was not much larger than a duke's), but he could not draw taxes from the peasants who lived on his dukes' estates. In this way the monarch had no effective way of exercising direct dominion over anyone but the dukes themselves. Any influence on the peasantry was indirect, as a result of convincing the nobility of the justness of his cause. It was open to them to refuse in a way that no American governor can refuse mobilization of his population for a military engagement.

All this motivates a new “backdoor apologetics”: instead of debating theology, backdoor apologetics wins converts through political science. Any secular or Protestant fan of limited government should be strongly persuaded by the requirements of republicanism to convert to the point of view that uniquely affirms it . . . or else to abandon the position of limited government. And this should happen automatically after he sees that a republic can function only upon the corpus of Catholic presuppositions about the universe! It is time that Catholics, Protestants, and secularists in America affirm how republics and natural rights (along with chapter 2’s subsidiarity, chapter 3’s popular morality, chapter 4’s humanism, chapter 5’s political economy, and chapter 6’s proper science) may only function from a certain point of view. And since proponents of limited government already embrace our conclusion, it is simply a matter of showing them that neither the post-Enlightenment nor the post-Reformation point of view can affirm these things with any internal consistency.

Chapter 2 takes a look at the false, secular copy of subsidiarity operative in the U.S. Constitution, explaining why local rule eventually broke down in America. Prot-Enlight plagiarized and mongrelized this primary Catholic social principle; with it, Madison wound up establishing something opposite to liberty: license. The republican culture degenerates if it forgets the moral object of its freedom.