Papal Politics

            I like Pope Francis. He is “a good guy.” But he faces a host of problems. From the day he was elected in 2013 he has had to deal with the Vatican’s widespread misuse of Vatican finances and the financial mismanagement of its vast real estate holdings. The old guard in the Curia, the Vatican’s administrative body, has been plagued with evidence of greed, cronyism, and mismanagement as well. Worst of all, the pope himself has been accused of not dealing forthrightly with widespread sexual abuses in the church and cover-ups by, and even in some cases, among senior prelates.

            Of late, Pope Francis has found himself in the middle of quarrels between liberal and conservative factions that could go so far as to result in schism if not resolved. Sensitive issues include pastoral celibacy, married priests, and discriminatory treatment of women in the church. The pope himself has ruffled some traditionalist feathers by floating a proposal for ordaining married men in parts of the world that are suffering from an acute shortage of priests.

            If there is one area where the pope has shown superior sensibilities, it is in addressing extreme poverty in the world. Drawing on his experience of life in Argentina, a country with a wide gap between the wealthy and the poor, the pope has never been bashful, even now, about mingling with the poor. And he has always taken the lead in proposing solutions to poverty. Unfortunately, his proposals are too often at odds with reality.

            The pope believes that there is a widening gap between the extremely rich and the extremely poor. Poverty, in his view, is on the increase, and the poor are getting poorer. He places the blame squarely on the greed of the wealthy and concludes that the accumulation of wealth is a sin made possible by structures of sins, such as tax havens and tax cuts for the rich. 

            Francis sees wealth redistribution, therefore, as the essential solution to world poverty, a view shared by socialists around the world. But this solution rests on one basic and false premise, that there is a widening gap between the extremely rich and the extremely poor. The pope is simply wrong.

            Pope Francis does not know economics. If he took time to bone up on the facts, he would realize that the world is currently experiencing the lowest prevalence of extreme poverty ever recorded in human history, and that extreme poverty is falling rapidly and falling across every single poverty line. Data from the World Bank points to a dramatic increase in per capita income worldwide, a level three times higher today than it was in 1990.

            Moreover, according to the Brookings Institute, in free market economies that favor wealth creation such as the United States, extreme poverty has virtually been eradicated. Here, as in other countries with free markets, there is no such thing as a tiny sliver of extremely wealthy people at the top and a huge mass of very poor people at the bottom. The fact is that the vast majority of people are somewhere in the middle.

            It’s a pity the pope’s experience has led him to have a lasting antipathy for capitalism and an unwillingness to concede that it has benefitted the poor as well as the rich. In spite of his severe myopia when it comes to economics, I still think that Pope Francis is a good guy. I just hope that he will come to realize someday that capitalism is the solution to poverty, not its cause.