Morals and markets

Morals and markets

New York City professor says wealth redistribution is the siren song of utopianism.

Now comes an essay from Joseph Loconte that challenges some of the points in a recent encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI. Loconte is a senior research fellow at The King’s College in New York City, and authoer of “The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.”

In the essay, appearing at American.com, Loconte says Pope Benedict’s “Caritas in Veritate” encyclical is problematic because it proposes “mutually exclusive set of propositions.”

Loconte makes the following points:
• “Conservative thinkers and activists will be heartened by the document’s defense of free economies as the best context for nurturing human potential and upholding human dignity. But the political and religious left, the self-styled apostles of ‘social justice,’ will also find fodder to rationalize massive government intervention at the expense of individual freedom.”

• “The encyclical eventually drifts into the realm of fantasy. It claims an urgent need for ‘a true world political authority’ to accomplish its economic objectives. Such an authority, we are asked to believe, would compliantly and reliably observe the Catholic principles of subsidiarity. ‘Such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights.’ Such an authority, it must respectfully be noted, is not imagined in Christian theology until the Second Coming of Christ.”

• “The encyclical seeks support for poor countries ‘by means of financial plans inspired by solidarity.’ It calls for ‘a worldwide redistribution of energy resources.’ It envisions the ‘large-scale redistribution of wealth on a worldwide scale.’ … All told, the redistribution of wealth gets far more papal ink than the creation of wealth.”

• “The desire for the worldwide redistribution of wealth — and for a global political authority to impose it — is a stubborn temptation. It is the siren song of utopianism.”

• “‘Caritas in Veritate’ is at its best when it warns that ‘without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality.’ This has been the besetting sin of the modern welfare state. At its wisest, the document rebukes the liberal tendency to obsess over the structures of society while ignoring the tragic nature of the human condition.”