The New Socialist Pope's Wealth Redistribution exposes his true colors.
His "Economic Plan" is pure unadulterated Socialist Bullshit hidden behind a curtain of incense and myrrh and smoke and mirrors.
Pope Francis demands wealth redistribution. He forgets St. John Paul's recognition of the "positive role of business, the market, private property" as "the model which ought to be proposed" for the Third World.
Addressing U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other officials on Friday, the first supreme pontiff from Latin America called for "the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state."Excuse the irreverence, but his holiness may be forgetting the hundreds of millions of souls whose lives have been improved, lengthened, even saved by maximizing capitalism and minimizing government.
As Steve Forbes points out, "capitalism is more moral than any and all alternatives," producing over the last 300 years "more advances — in incomes, standard of living, social mobility and longevity — than in all the previous centuries put together."
George Gilder, in "Wealth and Poverty," often referred to as the Bible of the Reagan White House, observed: "Capitalism begins with giving. Not through greed, avarice or even self-love can one expect the rewards of commerce, but from a spirit closely akin to altruism, a regard for the needs of others. ... Not taking and consuming, but giving, risking and creating are the characteristic roles of the capitalist."
Calls for government to rectify "inequality" are based on a fallible assumption: that wealth is finite, not created by free human beings. With statism rising in Russia and China, and the New Deal entrenched in America, Ludwig von Mises in 1949 posed the choice between capitalism and socialism as choosing "between social cooperation and the disintegration of society."
Von Mises and other champions of the free market weren't foes of Christian charity. "We may fully endorse the religious and ethical precepts that declare it to be man's duty to assist his unlucky brethren whom nature has doomed," he wrote. The question is "what methods should be resorted to" in doing that duty. If government is in charge, "the discretion of bureaucrats is substituted for the discretion of people whom an inner voice drives to acts of charity."
That inevitably means massive waste, corruption and other unintended negative consequences.
Pope John Paul II, canonized as a saint by Pope Francis just last month, addressed capitalism's morality in 1991, asking if "capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society" and "the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?"
His conclusion: If capitalism "recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative" — although "market economy" or "free economy" might be a more accurate name than capitalism.
Pope Francis' fans extol his open-mindedness. We hope he'll open the great books by von Mises, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and others that make the powerful moral case for free markets.