From “Why Christians Should Be Leftists” by Phil Christman
First, let’s look at the word “politics.” I’m often befuddled by the way people use it most of the time – as though politics were an unnecessary and distracting add-on to life that can be avoided with a little forethought. Aristotle defines “politics” as, essentially, the way people live together, the form of corporate (in the sense of “brought-togther-in-one-body”) or social life. Political activity is the search for the best way or ways to live together. Aristotle says a lot of things, many of which we reject – he thought that women were just defective men, for example – but that definition of politics seems right. If you think about it this way, “politics” is just “morality as practiced by more than one person,” or “morality as practiced by humans as conceived in a social context rather than in some imaginary state of isolation that nobody has ever lived in, ever.” As humans, we need each other; thus, we have to continually hash out how we’ll live together. We can’t escape that task, and we don’t need to.
If we take this definition of “politics,” we’ll see that it necessarily involves questions of what we call economics. If we want to figure out the best way to live together, we will at some point have to figure out what are the best ways to get everybody fed, clothed, housed, educated, and, as necessary, doctored. How do we make that happen? Who decides how our resources are used? These are “economics” questions – who we distribute resources, who gets what – but they are also “political” questions.