Offers faint praise to capitalism if it and its state sponsor is communistic, the model that has worked so well in Argentina
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I’m afraid I can’t get as elated about Pope Francis’s seemingly sudden ‘conversion’ to free market capitalist, as the author of this piece is.
Pope Francis Shocks Workers With Pro-Capitalism Pitch
True. Pope Francis seemed to say some positive things about capitalism. Typical of Francis, however, his full address was chock full of contradictions and reflections of his deep ignorance about how companies in a relatively free society must work in order to provide “an economically health economy”, a successful business, and a source of employment for as many as possible!
As usual, a listener can usually find something in the Pontiff’s musings he or she wants to hear. And, also as usual, the things that key parts of the religious and secular communities may not want to hear, are always followed up by His Holiness’s “cleanup crew” which ‘corrects’ or ‘clarifies’.
The typical papal remarks are ambiguous enough to make critical analysis seem curmudgeonly. And I believe this speech was no different, though I admit to being pleased that Francis did not resort to his often expressed disdain for “unfettered capitalism”.
DLH
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Given Pope Francis’s predilections, indeed still ignorant view of how market systems result in expanded prosperity for all, shepherds, a frequent meme of his, would never dispose of their sheep, only raise them to be raising them, the end game does not matter (eating). Employees of course are not sheep, that is his analogy. In a free market system workers are human beings who are economic operatives selling services. Managers and owners are not divorced from workers or they will not succeed. His economic analogies are too often screwed up reflecting his mindset of capitalism as generally victimizing. He also resorts to truisms when matters well understood in the Western world, including the most free market ‘capitalistic” economies. He still relies on biased presumptions to create what amounts to caricatures when bad actors are not general in nature.
R Mall
Without denouncing unemployment benefits, Francis insisted that state intervention wasn’t a real solution. “A monthly check from the state that allows you to keep the family afloat doesn’t solve the problem. It has to be resolved with work for everyone,” he said.
The Pope went on to underscore differences between healthy entrepreneurship and financial “speculation,” the latter of which he called both dangerous and unethical.
“A sickness of the economy is the progressive transformation of business people into speculators,” Francis said. “A speculator is a figure similar to what Jesus in the gospels called ‘hired-hands’ as opposed to good shepherds.”
Like a hired hand, Francis mused, a speculator “doesn’t love his company or his workers, since they are merely a means for making profits. He has no problem firing people, closing a factory or relocating the company,” because he doesn’t care about his workers but uses them simply as a means for increasing his profits.
Francis also said that when competition goes too far and affects the internal life of a company, it becomes self-destructive.
“The accent on competition, beyond being an anthropological and Christian error, is an economic error because it forgets that a company is above all about cooperation,” he said.
“Business is a noble vocation,” the Pope continued, “directed to producing wealth and improving the world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the area in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.”
“When it’s a system of individual incentives that puts workers into competition among themselves, you can obtain some advantages, but it ends up ruining the trust that’s the soul of any organization,” the Pope argued. “When a crisis comes, the company falls apart. It implodes, because there’s no longer any harmony.”
