In my latest The Week column, I write the obligatory defense of market capitalism against the Pope Francis critique. It’s an argument I’ve made before, but the pope and China’s President Xi Jinping almost being in Washington together gave me a nice “what if” hook. What if they took a meeting? How would the pope contextualize his capitalism critique with 700 million Chinese escaping extreme poverty due to China’s market tilt over the past four decades?
So, yeah, it would be great if Pope Francis fully acknowledged this humanitarian marvel provided by markets. But not just that. Economic freedom also enriches the lives of humans far above starvation levels. As my AEI colleague Michael Strain beautifully writes:
Free markets also enable flourishing lives through meaningful work. Pope John Paul II writes in Laborem Exercens that man is “called to work.” “Man is the image of God,” writes Saint John Paul, “partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth. In carrying out this mandate, man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe.” In our ordinary tasks — in our day jobs — we are, according to the church, “unfolding the Creator’s work.”
The free enterprise system allows individuals to choose where (and if) to work, educating our passions by directing them to productive ends — ends that we choose ourselves, and that are therefore likelier to bring us fulfillment and to maximize our potential. They allow us to express creativity, to make our contribution to society as we see fit. The remarkable capacity of market economies to generate jobs sufficient to match a growing population allows us the opportunity to fulfill one of our most basic human desires and meet one of our most basic duties: to provide for our families.
Not that the pope’s argument is without any merit. Far from it. As I write at the end of my The Week column:
Capitalism isn’t perfect, of course. And free marketeers should talk about those imperfections. Capitalism has created a globalized, technologically advanced world generating great wealth and great anxiety. (Will the robots take all the jobs other than CEO??!?) And every market outcome isn’t an acceptable one. For instance, if the market wage for low-skill jobs won’t keep families out of poverty, then society, through government, should act.
More on that to come on that. And finally, this bit from a previous post by me that again quotes the great Deirdre McCloskey:
As the Christian and libertarian economist Deirdre McCloskey writes in The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the good society can be built on the cardinal and theological virtues that also support a prosperous commercial society. The virtue of courage, for example “to venture on new ways of business … to overcome the fear of change, to bear defeat unto bankruptcy, to be courteous to new ideas, to wake up the next morning and face fresh work with cheer.” And hope “to imagine a better machine … to see the future as something other than stagnation or eternal recurrence, to infuse the day’s work with a purpose, seen one’s labor as a glorious calling. … The claim here is that modern capitalism does not need to be offset to be good. Capitalism on the contrary can be virtuous. In a fallen world, the bourgeois is not perfect. But it is better than any available alternative.” McCloskey goes on to write that capitalism needs to be “inspired, moralized, completed.” That sounds exactly like what Pope Francis is trying to do.
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