There is always much to discuss after a State of the Union address, and Tuesday’s speech is no different. Sam Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute, shared his thoughts:

“The overall theme of the address is that government is there to do stuff for you,” he said. “He starts out making remarks about America being a country that values free enterprise and rewards individual initiative…and yet he offers proposals for government intervention after intervention after intervention,… and there’s not much there at all about freeing up the labor market or trying to do things like reducing America’s absurdly high level of corporate tax.”

Specifically, Gregg wanted to view the speech through a Catholic lens, using the Church’s teaching on subsidiarity:

Obama, he said, “basically seems to think the government, and specifically the federal government, should be intervening all over the place in the economy. He talks about the administration partnering with a certain number munities throughout the U.S. You have to say, ‘Well, why does he think the federal government needs to be involved in these situations?’”

Obama said, for example, that his administration will “begin to partner with 20 of the hardest-hit [economically] towns in America to get munities back on their feet.”

“Subsidiarity would suggest that surely one should be looking at munities both in terms of local and state government,” said Gregg, “but also the munities themselves, if we’re serious about dealing with some of these problems.”

Read “A Catholic’s Take on Obama’s State of the Union Address” at Aleteia.org.

Sam Gregg is author of ing Europe: Economic Decline, Culture and How American Can Avoid a European Future”.