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Cutting in line is getting expensive. But is it a moral concern?

On some urban freeways, you can pay to use the lanes that once were restricted to cars carrying two or more passengers to encourage carpooling. For a fee, so-called High Occupancy/Toll (HOT) lanes are available to single-occupant cars in Houston and California and have been proposed for Washington, D.C.; Maryland; Georgia; Minnesota; Washington; Colorado; Florida; Minnesota; and Dallas and San Antonio, Texas

You can avoid long lines in some amusement parks by renting a pager that holds your place. At Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, the cost for this service is $20, plus $10 for each additional member of the group.

Soon, you may be able to avoid long security lines at airports by purchasing a special pass. A pilot program at five airports is free, but the Transportation Security Administration plans to charge for the service when it becomes widely available.

And in August, a Texas man zipped past 17,000 liver-transplant candidates because his family had the financial resources to advertise on billboards and in newspapers for a new liver. He found a donor and underwent transplant surgery, thus circumventing a national system designed to give everyone an equal shot at a transplant.

We asked two theologically trained experts whether we should be concerned because these are new ways for the rich to seal themselves off from the unwashed masses, or whether they are simply examples of a free market working correctly.

Eugene McCarraher, a Villanova University historian who is working on a theologically informed critique of corporate capitalism, said it is both—with one important disclaimer.

"I take it on socialist and Catholic principles of 'solidarity' that we should reduce in every way we can the ability of the wealthy both to control and degrade the non-wealthy—in this case by visibly asserting their ability to exempt themselves from rules and conventions—and to erode the sense of commonality which is essential to any flourishing democracy," said McCarraher.

"While current Catholic social thought doesn't, I think, address the problem of class as forthrightly as it should, I think its injunctions to solidarity are quite compatible with a traditional socialist emphasis on a common culture of fellowship as well as a common control of production," he said.

Making highway lanes available to those who are willing to pay is precisely the way the market is supposed to work, said McCarraher. But when that point is considered in light of the injunction against exerting class privilege, "the capitalist market stands indicted as a systematic attack on solidarity."

Dennis McCann is co-convener of a group of Protestant and Catholic scholars who are studying the theological presuppositions and consequences of "the common good." The Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, sponsors the three-year project. A former Catholic priest who received his theological training at Gregorian University in Rome, McCann now serves as Alston Professor of Bible and Religion at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga.

A major question for the scholars is whether privatization of goods somehow undermines the social fabric.

"If you privatize (an item), if you put a price tag on it where people are making their individual decisions regarding their own self-interest, you're more likely to get an efficient use of that resource than if you just simply left it open as a free good," he said.

For example, hospital emergency rooms are viewed as the health care provider of last resort for the poor, but some hospital administrators say this practice has led to overuse and abuse of ER services.

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48