As if the world’s bankers haven’t already been demonized enough over the past 21 months, FT Alphaville has reported that none other than the Pope himself has now piled on and pontificated on the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism.
Pope Benedict XVI, on the eve of the G8 summit in Italy, used his bully pulpit to call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy. I can only pray that the Pope is not purporting that we should look to the Vatican and its policies as a model of how the rest of the world should behave. While I have to acknowledged that many of my fellow bankers have not been the most upstanding members of the global community, to my knowledge we have not yet descended into widespread pedophilia, genocide, drug running, extortion, and racketeering (oh wait, maybe just a little of those last two…).
Seriously though, as easy of a target as the Catholic Church is (try googling “Crimes of the Catholic Church” – over 2 million hits, compared to just 346,000 for “Crimes of Goldman Sachs”), I am a strong believer of separation of church and state, especially when it comes to establishing the right structure for global finance.
The Pope’s decree for “forms of redistribution of wealth” is exactly the kind of language used by every communist and socialist leader in history who has used an economic crisis as a means to gain populist support for their regimes and to implement policies that are specifically designed to take from the rich and give to the poor.
But inevitably, also as seen in every true communist regime in history, the destruction of capitalist principles – in reaction to what would have otherwise been a temporary economic crisis – has resulted in the obliteration of much more than just economic vitality. After the State wrests economic freedom from the populace, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of thought, freedom of religion and many other fundamental human rights that we in capitalist societies usually take for granted also quickly fall in short order, slaughtered victims of the new “People’s State”.
Indeed, mixing religion with politics and economic policy is a slippery slope that everyone should be diligent to avoid like the plague. I only hope (and pray) that the leaders of the G8 listen to the Pope politely, then proceed to implement policies that continue to promote capitalism as the best means to ensure prosperity for the most and poverty for the least.
Indeed, while this article will surely be crucified for concluding that capitalism is the best economic model in the world – with the usual references to the U.S. being the home of some of the largest income disparities between the wealthy and the poor of any country in the world – what we should also be mindful of is the fact that even the bottom 10% in the U.S. are significantly more wealthy and have a far better standard of living, than the typical middle class citizens of Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam and numerous other current or historical socialist states.
