The pope is a new pope, and Twitter is a new(ish) medium, but Francis certainly knows the old tunes. Here’s a papal tweet from this morning:
My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost.
Don’t get me wrong: unemployment is a curse and a scourge, but to blame it on an overdose of the profit motive is economic illiteracy worthy of—oh I don’t know—the previous pope perhaps, or, for that matter, some ancient socialist or maybe, just maybe, an old Peronist or two.
You’d think the church could employ a big chunk of the unemployed.
The Church is an old institution and certainly predates modern capitalism by enough to regard banning usury as a hot new economic idea. Although the Church could be a powerful ally if it embraced a more rational economic model, since it’s stuck in medieval mercantilism, it’s better if it’s just ignored when the Pope starts spouting economic nonsense.
Perhaps some wisdom from Edmund Burke will provide a more balanced view of the Pope’s perspective.
“There must be some impulse besides public spirit, to put private interest into motion along with it. Monied men ought to be allowed to set a value on their money; if they did not, there would be no monied men. This desire of accumulation is a principle without which the means of their service to the State could not exist. The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all States. In this natural, this reasonable, this powerful, this prolific principle, it is for the satirist to expose the ridiculous; it is for the moralist to censure the vicious; it is for the sympathetick heart to reprobate the hard and cruel; it is for the Judge to animadvert on the fraud, the extortion, and the oppression: but it is for the Statesman to employ it as he finds it; with all it’s concomitant excellencies, with all it’s imperfections on it’s head. It is his part, in this case, as it is in all other cases, where he is to make use of the general energies of nature, to take them as he finds them.”
I believe the Pope is speaking as a moralist and as a man with a “sympathetick heart” here. Capitalism is wonderful and amazing and incredible and is responsible for more prosperity than any other economic system designed by man. But it is not beyond critique from perspectives other than the love of money, which is, as one ancient source notes, the root of all evil.
One need not be a reflexive atheist (like I am) to see even the pope may have a point. Paul Volcker had the same sentiment, in a more refined sense, when he pointed out that, between 1997 and 2007, the financial sector doubled its share of corporate profits as a percentage of GDP.
The negative effects of that run up are evident in our GDP sluggishness and high unemployment
The only thing a prominent cleric is likely to be able to say worth saying on any question of economic policy is that “let’s all grab what we can and f**k the ones who lose out” is a morally unacceptable policy. What one does, if anything, about society’s net losers is a technical question about which they have nothing valuable to say. But I do think what they can say is worth saying because a great many folk in public life who claim to be adherents to some religious tradition do, in fact, adhere to the “let’s all grab, etc…” view, and it is good to smoke them out.
“Capitalism is wonderful and amazing and incredible and is responsible for more prosperity than any other economic system designed by man.”
Problem: you would NEVER get any pope (or bishop for that matter) to admit that. You are imparting a view to the Church that does not exist. In fact, the sum total of the last five pope’s pronouncements on capitalism strongly suggest the Church has the opposite view.
Don, I didn’t attribute those views to Catholic leadership — those are my own views regarding the beneficial nature of capitalism. My own view is that the authorities within the Catholic Church are insufficiently appreciative of the benefits of modern capitalism and free market economics. There are a variety of reasons they are like this, but on the whole (with one or two exceptions here and there), I think they don’t understand how economics really works well enough to have much of an informed opinion the specifics of economic policy.
Which leads me to agree with CJColucci — the basic job of the Pope or any religious leaders when it comes to economic policy is to insist that a given society not ignore the people within it who aren’t doing well. How the problem of the have-nots gets addressed, well that is better left to the secular authorities (both in government and in business, intermediate associations, etc.). The Pope’s critique of free market economics is strongest when he is pointing out that there is still poverty, suffering, etc., and that people (particularly people who claim to be part of the Christian tradition) have a duty to try to help the poor and the suffering. Where his critique is weakest is where he strays from his basic area of competency and tries to get into serious economic analysis. He just doesn’t have the training or skills for that kind of critique, so it inevitably is weak.
What I do support is the right (and duty) of leaders like the Pope (but not just him!) to try to remind people that we have moral duties to others. That those moral duties are not often the proper subjects of government regulation or command does not alter the fact that we have those moral duties. In a culture that is increasing becoming atomistically individualized, such reminders are good to have.