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Then consider your role in creating poverty I read this…
Pope tells Davos elite: Consider your role in creating poverty
…and my immediate response was “Fine, and then consider your role in creating poverty”. This economically illiterate collectivist favours precisely the sort of top-down state run economics that strangle innovation and distort markets to favour whoever can best manipulate the means of collective coercion.
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It’s well known that Jesus hated individual responsibility, and favoured collectives, and wanted his followers to take over the state institutions. Oh, sure, it’s not actually written down in the gospels or elsewhere, but we know what he must have meant. We can just feel it, like Luke Skywalker hearing voices telling him what to do.
It’s fine that the Pope concerns himself with poverty and it’s fine he tells others to do the same. That’s about it. Evidently, none of this means an iota in terms of economics. The man represents an institution that, after all, has been continuously around for many centuries and that has enjoyed a great deal of power for long periods of time. The legacy of this institutional power in terms of “addressing poverty issues” is everywhere for all to see. As I said, none of this means an iota in terms of economics. But the poor could worse.
If I wanted a view on how many angels can dance on the head of pin, I’d consult Pope Frank. Economics? Less so.
You know, maybe I contribute to poverty! I regularly give to charities, and beggars- so I’m sustaining their lifestyles! If I stopped empowering them, by not giving any money, would they all find productive jobs?
Don’t stop giving, Nicholas. The reasons for poverty are many. Consider mental illness, for example.
I don’t think I put this (from 2014)up here before:
RRS:
There are no “structural causes for poverty.”
“Poverty,” mere subsistence or less, even the failures of subsistence have been the beginning and end of much of human existence and experience. It has always been the beginning.
Sufficiency, which is the displacement of mere subsistence and of poverty, has been accomplished through human interactions with one another and their surroundings.
Where the conditions for those interactions have been optimal and occurred in the greatest conditions of freedom, abundance has accompanied sufficiency.
History is replete with examples of “structural obstacles” that have limited those conditions of freedom of interactions which could produce the sufficiency to displace poverty. They are with us everywhere today.
The “urgency” is to remove the structural obstacles to freedom of human interactions, without political direction or ideological determinations, before mankind’s faith in its given nature to produce sufficiency is further weakened, requiring longer and harder efforts to regain the power of that nature.
It’s ironic that many people who live in the thriving democratic Papist nations of Latin and South America choose to live in Protestant America where the poor are crushed under the jackboot heel of capitalists.
The pope is the most well-off impoverished man on the planet.
The Church could sell off a ton assets and redistribute their own money.
No one “creates” poverty; it is the default state of mankind. There are, however, many at Davos who have done much to eliminate it. Unfortunately, there are also many at Davos who have done much to perpetuate poverty, and to stymie those who would help to alleviate it. Those are the statists and collectivists, most certainly not the people Francis was addressing with his ignorant and tiresome tirade.
As I have said here before, this is a deeply stupid man. His elevation to the papacy was a grievous error. The Catholic church will be far better off once he is gone.
The answer to a bad idea is a valid idea but Francis has no idea at all.
Why would the Pope’s roll have contributed to poverty? And would it have helped if he’d chosen a croissant or a simple piece of toast instead?
Well, Laird said it perfectly, and I for one am glad to see him take notice of the fact that there are two sorts of Davosites; so that the Pope is right about some (most?) of them, for exactly the wrong reason.
Tim,
Not unless it were were rather thickly buttered, and accompanied by an egg (over easy) and several strips of bacon cooked crisp but not hard, and having more fat than meat. Oh, and for gawd’s sake, not with “water added”!
My role in creating poverty? Well I have never voted Labour, and I have lived in the main by free trade, although I once worked for the tax man, doing refunds of around £2,000,000 in a year, on a salary of less than £10k, so I made, or rather maintained, my own poverty.
You know, maybe I contribute to poverty! I regularly give to charities, and beggars- so I’m sustaining their lifestyles!
yep. poverty is created by welfare and charity. Simple as that.
Nobody mentioned the spelling error in the headline? Is there some intended irony only I am missing?
I was going to say ‘hard cheese roll in poverty‘ but I thought better to leave it.
I took a neutral stance on it, like a Swiss roll.
It’d help a bit if you understood how the Church is actually organized and what the Pope’s role is before you pop off on any particular one. Every occupant of Peter’s throne comes to the job with various talents. Virtually all of them have weaknesses and areas where they are wanting. They’re human after all. The Pope’s role, first and foremost is in the area of morals. There are moral ways to deploy money and immoral ways to do the same. It’s not wrong for the Pope to urge that we spend money morally. It’s part of the job description, arguably a core part since deploying our material resources occupies the lives of ordinary people quite a bit.
Where this particular Pope is lacking is in economic theory. I know this for certain because Pope Francis has said so himself. He’s been pretty open about his incapacity to lay out any specific economic program or plan. So laughing and pointing out that the man doesn’t understand the free market is a bit beside the point. He’s just stuck with an obligation to deal with the morals of distribution without knowing very much about the details of how to make it all work. So he says things like “consider your role in creating poverty”. This statement touches economics but only in the most vague way which is exactly the sort of detail I would like from a moral leader who is properly modest about his less than stellar knowledge of economics.
Now it happens that there are free market critiques that would apply to the Davos elite and would justify a call for a bit of introspection, repentance, and reform. I’m more than happy that somebody, anybody, got in on the inside and asked these jokers to stop screwing things up.
A just attack Perry.
Pope Francis comes from Argentina – and over his lifetime the Peronists with their “Social Justice” have reduced Argentina to beggary.
Yet Pope Francis has learned nothing.
He still believes that people have a “right” to the goods of other people (“positive rights” “social justice” – turning such things as the British and American Bill of Rights on its head).
Pope Francis calls this “Catholic Social Teaching” – but it is actually only one interpretation of it (someone such as Tom Woods would present a very different view).
Sadly the Roman Catholic Church holds that the statements of the Pope are the final authority.
Which is a problem when there is a Pope who is a fatal mixture of arrogance and ignorance. It is very depressing.
No TMLutas – it is precisely in the “morals of distribution” that the Pope fails.
In a free society income and wealth are NOT “distributed” they have owners (and the state does not decide who these owners are).
If the Pope is talking about the Christian virtue of Charity then he should say so.
But he says he is talking about JUSTICE – he uses the word (repeatedly).
Justice is about whose, by right, income and wealth belong to.
If the Pope says that X rightly belongs to “the poor” then he is saying that “the poor” have the right to use FORCE to take it.
If Pope Francis does not mean force (killing) then he should not use such words as “justice” and “right”.
Priests have been playing this game in Latin America for ages.
First they stir up violence – say the looting of supermarkets or “land reform” (i.e. land THEFT) and then, when “reactionaries” pay them a visit, they say “nothing to do with me Sir – I am a priest, I believe in PEACE”.
If someone means Charity they should say Charity, if they say “Justice” or “Right” they mean THE SWORD (FORCE).
It is not just some Roman Catholics – it is also some Protestants.
For example Samuel Pufendorf – the “compulsory charity” (dry water) German Protestant theologian of centuries ago.
The idea being that the Book of Genesis is the gift of the world by God to humanity IN COMMON.
That the world is owned IN COMMON (not left for various bits to be claimed and traded) – hence the “Common Good” and so on.
It is a misinterpretation of the Book of Genesis – as God actually opens the world, He does not hand it over as a lump to “the collective”.
We are not talking economics – we are talking basic theology and moral philosophy.
According to Pope Francis “the poor” have a RIGHT as a matter of JUSTICE to the goods (such as land) of others, as this stuff does not “really” belong to these people.
Not the Christian virtue of Charity – RIGHT, JUSTICE.
Now either the Pope means this – in which case he should pick up his AK47 and start organising his “Social Justice Warriors” in looting supermarkets and organising “farm invasions”.
Or the Pope does NOT mean “Right” and “Justice” in relation to the claims of “the poor”.
In which case he should not use these terms.
Ditto for Protestant theologians.
Or for atheists.
And nothing to do with economics.
Private ownership does NOT have to be “justified” in terms of higher economic efficiency – the (Pufendorf influenced) “Lockeian Proviso” (“as much and as good left for others”) is wrong.
It is both bad theology (a basic misunderstanding of the Bible – the Book of Genesis) and bad moral philosophy.
One will always be able to find poor people (all I have to do is look in the mirror) I do not “benefit” from the Duke of B. having a big estate down the road. But this does NOT give me a right to take any of his estate.
It is not mine – period.
A National Food Service. The waiting list for a (halal) steak pie is 12 weeks from referral, and it might even be hot, but if you are a fatty, it’s salad and oats for you until you reach your target weight.
We must bear in mind that this is many a Lefty’s political wet dream.
Paul Marks responded very well to TMLutas’ comment, but I would also like to add that the Pope is considered “infallible” with respect to Roman Catholic religious dogma and matters theological, but nothing more. When he ventures into other areas, and especially those about which he is so obviously (and apparently willfully*) ignorant, he should just keep his stupid mouth shut. There is nothing “moral” about advocating theft.
* As Paul notes, Francis spent his entire life in Argentina, witnessing first hand the abject failure of socialism and its attendant pathologies. Yet he still professes to believe in them. Willful blindness of the first order. I guess that’s what “faith” gets you.
“Pope Francis comes from Argentina – and over his lifetime the Peronists with their “Social Justice” have reduced Argentina to beggary.”
Spot on!
“Sadly the Roman Catholic Church holds that the statements of the Pope are the final authority.”
No, Paul Mark. We accept the papal infallibility only on theological and moral matters and if and only if speaking ex cathedra. Not every asinine regurgitation of the Pope is infallible.
I might be courting a latae sententiae excommunication. 🙂
@ P M:
On “Justice.”
A plausible case can be made that Justice is the performance of obligations.
How that performance is attained or “secured” falls within one realm of discussion.
How the obligations are established falls in another.
All the “Rights” of one or of some are grounded on the concomitant obligations of others.
In General:
“Theologians” (and others -perhaps most individuals) encounter in themselves a “sense” of obligation to others. In some the scope of “others” is small; in many it is broader. For any it is probably the “force” behind Caritas. Many “resent” or resist that sense, at least selectively; raising the query of “why is this, in any part, my obligation.”
That has become the error of the South American clergy, RC and others. The drive is for acceptance of obligations for reasons of blame or guilt. That was clearly disclosed In the June 2014 Conference about Libertarian error.
But all those errors do not change the sense that people have, however selective, that we are all obligated to one another.
South American Bishops offer that libertarians do not (sufficiently?) accept obligations to the “poor” because that limits their freedoms and their individuality. Their views are empirically wrong by the evidence of the periods of greatest enrichment and reductions of poverty over the last 250 years or so.
“consider your role in creating poverty” AND also: ‘consider your role in creating wealth or abundance’.
I think that rich people usually create wealth not poverty.
So, the Pope should have blessed the Davos millionaires (except the politicians and clergy) for creating wealth.
Of course, the Pope, and the rest of the lefties and Marxists, have no idea how wealth is created, or even that it needs to be created.
As others have said – poverty is not “created” – it is the natural state of man (one who does nothing). Its only wealth that needs to be created – and wealthy people are , by definition, creators of wealth. (That is: unless they are inheritors, or thieves, or politicians, or lottery winners).
The above sentence (in the headline) isn’t the biggest piece of idiocy the Pope conveyed in his message. Here is another:
“New technologies such as robotics must also not be allowed to replace humans with “soulless machines,” he said in a message to the World Economic Forum in Davos.” Luddite!
“The poor we shall always have with us.” That’s a mathematical certainty, for poverty is graded on the curve, as is wealth. The richest ten percent will always have more than the poorest ten percent.
Humanity’s biggest problem is that half of everything is below average. (Don’t persecute me with mutters about “mean”. I’m not mean.)
South American Bishops offer that libertarians do not (sufficiently?) accept obligations to the “poor” because that limits their freedoms and their individuality. Their views are empirically wrong by the evidence of the periods of greatest enrichment and reductions of poverty over the last 250 years or so.
It wouldn’t matter if their views were “empirically correct”. Such communist theology is wrong, heretical, and evil. In earlier ages they’d have been burned for much less.
Its only wealth that needs to be created – and wealthy people are , by definition, creators of wealth. (That is: unless they are inheritors, or thieves, or politicians, or lottery winners).
Again – so what? It is theirs, they own it, it belongs to them, and they are morally, ethically, and spiritually better than poor bludgers because of it.
Paul Marks – I recall a picture, you can find it here:
http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/turkish-official-teasing-starved-armenian-children-showing-bread-armenian-genocide-1915/
You seem to be concerned that a law might be passed dispossessing the turkish official of the bread he is taunting the starving armenian children with. The Pope’s concern is that the turkish official and his spiritual descendents not go to hell for doing such a thing. In short, your response is profoundly off point because you assume that the Pope is talking about the sort of justice that comes out of a human court and leads to jail sentences and armed men redistributing economic resources at the direction of their political masters. Primarily he is not because it’s divine justice that is at the heart of his job description, not secular justice, and when talking about the universal destination of goods (which is a very old and well developed doctrine which you seem to be complaining about), there’s very little in Marx or Smith that really maps well to the concept even though how goods are distributed is a common part of all economic systems and I’m somewhat surprised to read that you do not think so. Goods in a warehouse must be distributed to be useful, ultimately. When they are distributed and how may change but they do get distributed in every modern system and how the economic calculation is made to guide that distribution is at the heart of the conflict between capitalism and communism.
The universal destination of goods is how, as just christians, we should treat our goods regardless of how the law requires us to behave. It is an extra-legal doctrine at heart. It sets out of bounds and denies the justice of entirely shutting out individuals or entire classes of people from economic activity and condemning them to poverty and death. In the first world, the doctrine is trampled much more often by the state than by any mustachio twirling capitalist villain. And even those capitalist villains seem to have the state as their preferred tool of choice to do their bad deeds.
I would recommend a closer reading of Hernando deSoto if you think capitalism is well developed and not in need of serious reform in Latin America.
I divine in that passage, perhaps through infelicitous wording, the fundamental error that Ludwig von Mises wrote about, to label that which you find bad ‘capitalist” and to go on from that to conclude that capitalism is bad. What is in need of serious reform in Latin America are the political systems, the law and governments, then capitalism might have a chance. If you cover your lawn with a carpet, a leftist would blame the grass for not growing.
In “Latin America” from the late 50s, through the 60s and “formulated” in the 70s Liberation Theology became entrenched amongst priests and thinkers , especially Jesuits – of which this Pope was one. He is the first Jesuit Pope.
Whether in its so-called “Marxist” approach or in the “Interventionist” view (the Church as a buffer between the oppressed peoples and the combinations of elites with those who control violence – similar to Guizot’s study of the Church’s role in European history), Liberation Theology as a function of theology has continuing influence – and for good reasons.
On its theological side is a perception of the “sin” of those whose acts or omissions contribute to or result in the “oppression” of others, observed as poverty (inter alia).
Neither the Bishop of Rome nor Cardinal Marandiaga (who is probably his closest friend and advisor) are stupid. The scholarship of each in economics and social philosophy probably exceeds that of any0ne commenting here. That does not make their conclusions free from error.
It is possible (likely) that conclusions reached from the experiences of Liberation Theology err when applied to open societies (capitalists, if you will) and that the acts and omissions of Libertarians are not the sources of “sin” that produces conditions of poverty, as Marandiaga and others suggest.
While the composition of the “elites” of the world may be changing and their relationships to control of violence, which has preserved the status (and order) of many, may be in transition, there is observable oppression and continuity of poverty from those relationships. But, it is not the “sin” of Libertarians.
The scholarship of each in economics and social philosophy probably exceeds that of any0ne commenting here
Wrong. And inculcation in the openly-communist university “scholarship” is also evil. The unrestricted right to private property is, in the limit, the only right there is.
@Angry T:
Define “Property.”
Liberation Theology is the result of the crass combination of undiluted Marxism with a dash of Christianity. We need to know both, Marxism and Christianism, to see the flagrant anti-Christian nature of Liberation Theology, though.
It should be remembered that the sole role of Christianity is the spiritual salvation of mankind through faith, not the relief of the material suffering of mankind.
It is heretic to go against Jesus Christ, who said “My kingdom is not of this world”
Thought I posted this @ 8:45 p m:
AskBlog motto of Arnold Kling
Cristina (and others):
Perhaps; but there has been a great deal of discussion about “works,” and “Grace” of individuals; not to be disputed here.
Still, many convicted of and practicing “Christianity” are motivated to the relief of the material suffering of mankind. For many that motivation and its response IS an article of faith. Little Sisters of the Poor
For many it would be much more comfortable to accept the conclusions of Acemoglu & Robinson, or even of North, Wallis & Weingast as to conditions in Latin America that gave rise to, and continue, the impacts of Liberation Theology. But, should that bar theologians from concerns with the material suffering of mankind?
Well, apparently it does not.
RSS – there has been a Common Law definition accepted for around 1000 years, at least until the 1800s, comprising personal possessions, real estate and improvements and chattels thereof, and animals and those indentured thereto.
@AngryT:
If that is your choice, what IS that definition?