The poverty doctrine

Pope Francis, undoubtedly sincerely, admonishes us to help the poor. Alas, his preferred form of help--a massive global redistribution of wealth--promises to only make the poor poorer and more numerous.

And therein is found the source of the left's tragic mistake--to continue to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that taking money from some people and giving it to others is the best means of alleviating poverty. In reality, it only deepens and expands it.

As economist Thomas Sowell has long pointed out, what requires explanation is not poverty but wealth, because poverty is the default setting of human experience. It is what most people throughout time have experienced and what you get when you don't establish political institutions and public policies that encourage the only thing that can alleviate it, which is the creation of wealth.

And the only economic mechanism we have for creating wealth is the very capitalism that Pope Francis and his leftist admirers incessantly criticize. Rather than enlighten us on poverty, in their economic illiteracy, they undermine the only approach that has ever reduced it.

It was the largely unregulated laissez faire capitalism that the pope has called "the dung of the devil" that drove the industrial revolution and created the prosperity that the First World now enjoys. And it was that same capitalism, rough edges and all, that provided the largesse that the left has been trying to redistribute ever since, with continuing obliviousness about where the money came from in the first place.

Is it really necessary to go over again the record of how socialist systems built around the redistributionist ethic have fared against their capitalist counterparts built around the profit motive, especially in terms of lifting ordinary people out of heartbreaking poverty?

We can site Ronald Reagan's America versus Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, Helmut Kohl's West Germany versus Erich Honecker's East Germany, and contemporary South Korea versus Kim Jong-Un's depraved, starving North Korea.

Or perhaps Taiwan versus Mao Zedong's China, and Mao's China compared to China today, after over three decades of the capitalist reforms begun under his successor, Deng Xiaoping. Or the staggering poverty of India under the socialism of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi compared to the performance of India since its shift to capitalism in the mid-1990s.

Perhaps most telling of all, we can examine the plight of the pope's own Argentina, which a century ago had the world's 10th-highest per capita income under capitalism, only to experience economic ruin and devastating decline in living standards under the kind of Peronist socialism that Pope Francis apparently supports (one says apparently because, despite all his blather on the evils of capitalism, it isn't clear that he has any genuine understanding of how it works or of what socialism would actually consist of as an alternative).

Socialism can redistribute wealth through the state, but it can't create it. Only capitalism can. The wealth that the welfare state spends in its effort to provide cradle-to-grave economic security therefore has to be created first by capitalism. In its fervor to carve up the pie, the left never grasps where the pie came from, or what is necessary to make it bigger to the benefit of all.

Why? Because socialism provides none of the incentives for entrepreneurship, innovation, and human creativity that capitalism calls forth through the lure of profits. Leftists call it greed, the rest of us simply the human desire for success; by whatever name it's proven necessary for human progress.

The pope's pursuit of "social justice," properly conceived, should thus begin with the understanding that progress toward that goal has only been possible through reliance upon economic markets based on supply and demand, sanctity of contract, and guarantees for private property. And that socialism has, by rejecting such elements, created an equality of outcome only in the sense of shared poverty.

The mistake in all this is, of course, two-fold: first, to assess socialism and capitalism purely in terms of intentions, rather than results; second, to allow the inequalities and broader imperfections that invariably continue to exist under capitalism because they are intrinsic to human nature itself, and therefore largely ineradicable, to blind us to its historic accomplishment in wealth-creation.

Even Karl Marx, however wrong he got the end point of history, conceded that capitalism was a necessary stage in historical development because it was the first stage which produced a sufficient level of goods and services to basically satisfy human needs.

Does all this mean that capitalist systems should go unregulated and that we should abolish the welfare state because it's a fetter upon capitalist efficiency? Or that we have no obligation to help the downtrodden? Of course not; rather, it is simply to remind those who would profess their concern for the poor of what has and hasn't worked throughout history to make people less so.

It was John Erskine who argued that we have a "moral obligation to be intelligent." In the present context, that could be interpreted to mean that anyone who wishes to help the poor who doesn't embrace free markets as the appropriate means dismally flunks the moral test, even if he is the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 10/05/2015

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