Consider the following excerpts from an LA Times article by Michael Hiltzik:
In an address to the CEOs and assorted financial hangers-on gathered this week in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum, he admonished that “modern business activity,” for all its virtues, often has led to “a widespread social exclusion.”
He continued, “Indeed, the majority of the men and women of our time still continue to experience daily insecurity.” In the speech read by a proxy, he observed that the business community often fails to take into “the dignity of every human person and the common good. I am referring to a concern that ought to shape every political and economic decision, but which at times seems to be little more than an afterthought.”
The pontiff’s words largely replicate the critique of capitalism in his apostolic exhortation last November. (“Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.”) What was special this time around was the audience and its setting, the faintly ridiculous yearly financial glamorfest of Davos.
The excerpts not only reflect typical sentiments of leftist journalists, it regrettably reflects what seems to be the Pope’s misunderstanding of market systems and failure to take care to make important distinctions integral with his statements. Failure to do so is irresponsible.
The Pope’s reference to the “laws of competition” we suspect have little to do with the attendees at the Devos confab. We suspect that the majority did not get their ticket punched because they achieved their wealth operating under “the laws of competition.” In disciplined use as regards economics, the term presupposes no government favoritism or protections to an industry, no bailouts, no concept of “too big to fail,” no regulations that serve to protect a company or keep others from effectively competing. . . .no ability to manipulate markets to the disadvantage of others.
Similarly the Pope’s other references to “unfettered capitalism,” in the work referenced in the LA Times article, are ignorant of what produces the wealth he refers to as the “powerful feeding upon the powerless.” It may be effective jingoism but it too is off base.
We suspect “unfettered capitalism” has little application to the majority of the wealth represented in Devos. Government enforced privilege, the “fettering” of capitalism by government, protecting, subsidizing, applying nationalistic precepts is more likely to produce the Devos kind of wealth than truly unfettered capitalism which allows “the laws of competition” to come into play.
The following excerpt from the publication Agora Financial makes the point that income disparity or income inequality are more associated with lack of freedom, and political disparities. It also warns of the dangers of misunderstanding or blaming free markets because ignorance and propaganda devolve into the sin of promoting envy.
“Fairness disparity, if left unchecked, immediately leads to ‘envy disparity.’ This is a particularly nasty affliction wherein the person having improperly dealt with the former quickly develops an actual hatred for someone having attained that which they themselves have not, and then, concluding said person should not have attained it, they, therefore, have no right to it — whatever ‘it’ might be.
“This mental state of disparity produces the desire to institute ‘political disparity.’ The mind afflicted with this dreaded and hateful condition wishes to impose, at the point of a gun, whatever brutality may be necessary to try to eliminate the results of the entire disparity chain they have fostered and which has led them to the inevitable ‘victim disparity.’
“In summation: Freedom quite naturally produces different outcome(s). When you look out across the panoply of 300 million citizens in this country, there are some of us that, because of combinations of the above ‘disparities,’ together with their inevitable ‘character disparity,’ are just going to be more successful than are others.
“Our collective goal, if civilized society with all of its attendant and wonderful benefits is to be sustained, should be to assure that there is no said political disparity. To the extent there is, it does produce actual disparity — and it is, indeed, unfair and unjust.
“An injustice not the result of rewards for merit, as judged by our freely acting fellows, but as rewards for merit’s absence; compulsions enforced by those holding the gun(s) to each or any of our heads.
“A ‘disparity’ which is not the product of income, but the product of tyranny…”
The best friend of the poor is freedom, economic and political. Still more excellent points about income disparity and economic freedom are made in this article in Forbes. R Mall
