The Vice President Meets the Pope

Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, met Pope Francis on April 20, the day before the latter’s death. The meeting with the enfeebled pope was brief and did not touch upon their disagreement about the treatment of immigrants. Early this year, 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 Street Journal, April 21, 2025). I think it is difficult not to share the late pope’s concern on this point, but the larger picture is more interesting.

While the pope is known as a man of the left advocating “social justice,” JD Vance supports “the right” wherever he sees it. It is not immediately obvious how these two individuals can belong to the same Church. Is that an irreconcilable disagreement? Casuistry could no doubt pull a few rabbits from the pope’s tiara or the vice-president’s MAGA cap. Moreover, and interestingly, the two protagonists could reconcile their differences by invoking what they both disagree with in classical liberal political economy—if only they knew anything about that.

As classical liberal (and libertarian) theorists have explained, the concept of social justice makes unambiguous sense only in an authoritarian social system where the political rulers assign rewards and punishments to individuals in society. In a spontaneous order, no authority can do that: rewards and punishments are determined according to largely impersonal factors such as who better satisfies the demand of unknown persons on extended markets; other impersonal factors, such as luck, accidents, and the laws of physics, also play a role.

To see this, we may consult what I believe are the three major classical liberal or libertarian strands of thought in our time. (1) Friedrich Hayek has offered an argument against social justice similar to what I just described: see his The Mirage of Social Justice, originally the third volume of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty. (2) The anarcho-liberal or anarcho-conservative economist and political philosopher Anthony de Jasay arrives at a similar conclusion, also based on spontaneous rules of conduct (which, in the manner of David Hume, he calls “conventions”) but without the state: see, among his works, Justice and Its Surroundings. (3) James Buchanan and the school of Constitutional Political Economy rehabilitate the state through unanimous consent (that is, individual veto). In this contractarian theory, justice lies in rules that are unanimously accepted and certainly not in a conception of justice imposed by political authority: a summary can be found in Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan, The Reason of Rules. (Note that, for Buchanan as for Hayek, being opposed to arbitrary “social justice” does not imply that the state cannot offer some sort of income insurance.)

If that is correct, we can say that both the (late) pope and JD Vance believe in social justice, that is, in political authority assigning rewards and punishments throughout society, although Vance uses other words than “social justice.” The pope believes that political authorities should favor the poor at the expense of the rich all over the world. JD Vance believes that the favored groups should be whoever the holders of political power in America think are deserving—and who are likely the obedient supporters of such rulers. Many of his tirades would have been approved by Francis if he did not add “American” to his favored groups (“JD Vance Proclaims ‘America First’ as Republicans Embrace Economic Populism,” Financial Times, July 18, 2014):

“We are done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man,” he said. “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 known by many as “the Peronist pope,” after Juan Domingo Perón, a populist of the left whose presidency contributed to the Argentine decline. The Financial Times 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,” said Ignácio Zuleta, author of a study of Francis entitled The Peronist Pope. Both church and Peronists emphasised social justice and the fight against poverty, while advocating conservative social mores.

Whether Francis-style or à la Vance, “social justice” is an instance of a larger ideology. The two men are both collectivists, that is, they both favor collective and political choices over individual and private choices. They simply favor different collective choices made by different people in metering rewards and punishments over the whole society. It is quite sure that Vance does not 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 image of this post imagines Pope Francis and JD Vance arriving together at the Pearly Gates (the lag being due to a dent in the space-time continuum). Before St. Peter, who assigns the contemplation seats in heaven, the pope is smiling and naïve, while Vance is naïve and angry. After all, they both believe in “social justice,” but their criteria for assigning rewards and punishments differ.

Of course, as there is (by definition) no scarcity in heaven, the reader of this blog should understand that place assignments must be a mere ritual with no practical consequence.