Tag: Pope Francis

Capitalism and Pope Francis

George Noga
Capitalism is not moral because it works; it works because it is moral.
Capitalism and Pope Francis
By: George Noga – September 9, 2018

       As someone born Catholic, who attended parochial school and was observant much of his life, I take no pleasure in this posting. But Pope Francis is astoundingly callow and ignorant of even elementary economic concepts. Because 1.25 billion Roman Catholics (1 of every 6 souls on the planet) look to the Pope for enlightenment, it is important to set the record straight. Go to our website www.mllg.us to see our related March 13, 2016 posting entitled “Pope Francis Enters the Twilight Zone”.

      Recently, the Pope (directly and via Vatican pronouncements) has criticized capitalism for, inter alia, consumerism, fossil fuels, environmental harm, materialism, lack of charity, speculation, seeking profit, promoting individualism, harming the poor, credit rationing, injustice, legal tax avoidance and credit default swaps. He advocates more government intervention, regulation, politics, taxes and central planning.

        If you missed it, read the September 2nd post on our website. It reports capitalism cutting extreme poverty in the world by 75% and lifting 1.2 billion humans out of the grip of poverty in the past 25 years. Every day, capitalism raises 135,000 more living, breathing people out of extreme poverty. Again thanks to capitalism, every metric of human well being is improving. Capitalism has produced a cornucopia of wealth and is the greatest human success story of all time for the common man. Yet strangely, there is never any mention of this economic miracle by Pope Francis – only vitriol.

         Capitalism is effective and also moral. A market economy is based on voluntary transactions in which both parties benefit; that’s why, upon concluding a transaction, both buyer and seller say “thank you”. Capitalism is peaceful and non-coercive; it channels human nature and self interest toward the common good. Capitalism is a positive sum game since both parties win in all transactions; there are no losers. The most powerful force on earth is a consumer armed with a free choice and even the biggest and most powerful corporation cannot make someone buy its product.

         There is space to address only a few of the Pope’s naif criticisms. Nations must be wealthy (capitalist) to be good environmental stewards; the worst degradations of all time took place under the commies and now are  being cleaned up by capitalists. The Vatican labels credit default swaps “economic cannibalism that profits from the misfortune of others“. Such swaps are merely insurance against defaults and make it easier for poor countries to borrow. The Pope condemned derivatives and speculation, both of which make markets more orderly and especially help third world agriculture.

          Pope Francis doesn’t grasp that squandering trillions for uncertain, infinitesimal climate benefits means the money cannot be spent now to alleviate suffering from unsafe water, malnutrition and lack of electricity and medicine. The last thing a poor child in an African slum needs is a solar panel. The Pope has called money “the dung of the devil” – no riposte needed. Capitalism doesn’t cause consumerism; it responds to it. If consumers demanded more bibles, the market would instantly supply them.

        The Pope is concerned for the poor but attacks the greatest anti-poverty engine in human history. Poor countries suffer due to insufficient capital; wealth must be created before it can be shared and private charity is much more effective than government redistribution. Pope Francis said building a wall is “unchristian”. Is the US unchristian for creating great wealth amidst liberty and becoming a magnet for emigrants?  Or, are socialist nations unchristian for creating great poverty, stifling liberty, fomenting civil unrest and making life so miserable that their people desperately flee their homes?

        Capitalism is not moral because it works; it works because it is moral. Capitalism has achieved, and continues to achieve, miracles that in earlier ages could only have been ascribed to the gods. However well-meaning Pope Francis may be, he fails to understand the morality of free markets and the immorality of statism and collectivism.

Our next post on September 16th addresses reality and denial in America.

Guns in America – Liberty vs. Government – MLLG Update

George Noga

We address: (1) Guns in America redux; (2) MLLG status and website; and (3) the eternal struggle between personal freedom and government power.

By: George Noga – June 26, 2016

    This post touches briefly on three topics beginning with a followup to our February 2016 series: Guns in America, which enjoyed phenomenal distribution that propelled it to a high position on search engines including Google. Recently, we noticed a paper published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Although it was published years ago, it has just now begun gaining widespread traction in the gun control debate.

  The paper is entitled: Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? To read, simply click the title. It documents that gun control has no correlation with criminal violence and, in fact, has a negative correlation, i.e. more guns, less crime. The authors concluded that gun control is ineffective because it does not affect the social, cultural and economic factors that are the real determinants of violent crime. Note: The main sources for the study include the CDC, US Academy of Sciences and United Nations.

Uncommon Wisdom about Liberty and Government

    It doesn’t get better than this; that’s why MLLG is publishing a lengthy quote. The case being discussed was before the Texas Supreme Court and involved eyebrow threading, a safe and traditional South Asian practice to remove unwanted hair. The State of Texas demanded threaders obtain cosmetology licenses requiring 750 hours of training (that did not include eyebrow threading), shut down of their businesses and fines of thousands of dollars. The threaders took Texas to court. Justice Don Willet wrote the following in his opinion supporting the threaders, who won the case 6-3.  

   “This case concerns the timeless struggle between personal freedom and government power. Do Texans live under a presumption of liberty or a presumption of restraint? The Texas Constitution confers power – but even more critically, it constrains power. What are the outer boundary limits of government actions that trample Texans’ constitutional right to earn an honest living? Must courts rubber-stamp even the most nonsensical encroachments on freedom? Are even the most patently farcical and protectionist restrictions unchangeable, or are there judicially enforceable limits?

    “This case raises constitutional eyebrows because it asks building-block questions about constitutional architecture – about how we as Texans govern ourselves and about the relationship of the citizen to the State. This case concerns far more than whether (Texans) can pluck unwanted hair with a strand of thread. This case is fundamentally about the American Dream and the unalienable human right to pursue happiness without curtsying to government on bended knee. It is about whether government can connive with rent-seeking factions to ration liberty unrestrained and whether judges must submissively uphold even the most risible encroachments.”

MLLG Preview and Website Update

    So far in 2016, MLLG has published two series, Guns in America and Inequality in America. We have blogged about, inter alia, the US election (3 times), climate change (3), government and socialism (3), school choice, tax inversions, Pope Francis, Islamic terrorism, Scandinavian economics and Jefferson-Jackson Day. Whew!

    For the second half of 2016, look for multi-part series on (1) climate change; (2) poverty, hunger and homelessness in America; and (3) financial repression, negative interest rates and the war on cash. Other pithy topics may include: China, political correctness, Greece and Puerto Rico, Uber and gay marriage (you’ll really like that one) and media bias. This summer, as customary, we lighten things up with posts about life in Montana – our summer home. We call these posts “Montana Moments“; enjoy!

Pope Francis Enters the Twilight Zone

George Noga

When Pope Francis strays from religion, he is eminently fallible; he has erred

about clergy child abuse, climate change, capitalism, economics and Trump.

By: George Noga – March 13, 2016

  As an observant Catholic for much of my life, I take no pleasure in chronicling the recent pratfalls of the pontiff, which have been too numerous to ignore. The most egregious is his shameful re-characterization of the priest sex scandal as “child abuse” which now replaces “pedophilia” as the Holy See’s descriptor of choice. What actually happened was neither child abuse nor pedophilia as Pope Francis well understands.

  Only 3% of the clergy sexual assaults were pedophilia, i.e. involved prepubescents; 97% of the victims were older; ipso facto, the scandal could not be pedophilia. Child abuse is a gender-neutral, catchall term connoting non sexual forms of abuse. In the priest sex scandal, the only abuse was sexual and it was not gender neutral. Overall, sexual assault victims overwhelmingly are female; in the church scandal, the victims were 80% male. Therefore, the scandal could not possibly be considered child abuse.

   Okay, so what really was the scandal and why does it matter so much the pope dissembled to such a preposterous extent? Pure and simple, the scandal is homosexual abuse of young males. The church, abetted by the media, injected the polemical straw men (pedophilia, child abuse) solely to palliate and obfuscate. The motive was in part political correctness; but the greater motive was to avoid dealing with the 900 pound gorilla in the room, i.e. the increasingly dominant homosexual culture of the church.

   Independent studies estimate priests at over 50% gay with a higher percentage for younger priests. Some seminaries are so militantly gay, they drive out heterosexual seminarians. Pope Francis knows this truth full well but he either will not or cannot change the culture; instead, he disingenuously changes the name of the problem.

   Pope Francis imbibes the climate change kool-aid. At the UN, he pleaded for immediate action and blamed the problem on capitalism’s “selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity.” He forgot the worst environmental degradation in Earth’s history resulted from socialism in the USSR and is now being cleaned up by those selfish capitalists. Only rich countries can afford to protect the environment.

“A poor child in an African slum doesn’t need a solar panel.”

   He doesn’t get that squandering trillions for uncertain, infinitesimal benefits means we cannot spend it to alleviate suffering from unsafe water, malnutrition and lack of electricity and medicine. A poor child in an African slum does not need a solar panel! Pope Francis undoubtedly is well-intentioned but we all know where that road leads.

   Economics is Pope Francis’s real blind spot. He believes capitalism makes people rich by exploiting the poor. Unfortunately for the pontiff, even the most cursory look around the world confirms the dead opposite to be true. The poorest people under capitalism in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea are light years better off than those in socialist sinecures like Venezuela, Cuba or even Francis’s native Argentina. Capitalism has lifted one billion people out of poverty in China and India.

   This brings us to Trump. Is building a wall unchristian? Is the USA unchristian for creating great wealth amidst liberty and becoming a magnet for people everywhere? Or are Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela unchristian for creating great poverty, stifling  liberty, fomenting civil unrest and making life so miserable their people flee from their homes?

   There is a pattern in the pope’s pratfalls. He has a socialistic, Utopian world view that is demonstrably contrary to how world really works – especially the world of economics. Pope Francis needs to stick to his knitting to avoid further embarrassments.

The next post dissects recent EPA carbon regulations in a manner not found elsewhere.