This past week, President Obama forced the CEO of General Motors to resign. The real significance of this may be lost on most people. Some might say, “Well, if General Motors is not doing well, the CEO should be replaced.” The major difficulty with this is that this is a special power of the GM Board of Directors, not the President of the United States. Effectively, this makes President Obama the Board of Directors of General Motors, and any other company he wants to control, and makes the Board a mere figurehead. Slowly but surely, this is moving us to a fascist form of government. In fascism, the companies still exist, but the government tells them what to do. This was similar to Mercantilism, which was the predominant economic system in Europe from about the 1600s until 1800, more or less. Mercantilism was the system of economics that Adam Smith wrote against in his famous An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which most people shorten to the cryptic Wealth of Nations. Smith was trying to show that government control of business impoverishes nations. Instead, he posited “a system of natural liberty,” which allowed people to follow their natural pursuits, take on the risk of doing so, and allow the market, that is, the countless decisions of people, to decide the outcome. It was the realization of the truth that Smith expressed in his work that subsequently brought prosperity to countless nations.

Now we are returning to the old system, under a new guise. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner recently asked Congress to grant him unprecedented power to shut down any company that, in his opinion, is dangerous to the overall economy. Note that there are no specifics to this power—it would be at his discretion. For those who have read my blog entries “The Economics of Politics,” you can see that all of this is a grab for what politicians live for—power, and power alone. Politics attracts those kinds of people. When asked by a Congresswoman where in the Constitution he went to get justification for this type of power, Geithner expressed incoherent babbling. It did not seem ever to cross his mind that he needed Constitutional justification for such an assumption of power. Again, this is typical of fascism. A crisis is, if not created, then hyped, panic flamed up, and people in this panic are willing to trade their freedom for security. Only too late will they realize that the situation was not as bad as the self-interested government officials portrayed it. The power will have been granted, and only a miracle will pry it away from the hands of the government. Once taken, government almost always keeps a power.

Getting back to General Motors, its problems go all the way back to government-imposed protective tariffs, which are a remnant of Mercantilism. Corporations seek to be protected from foreign competition so they do not have to work to keep up. The government, bowing to pressure and false economic theories, puts tariffs and quotas on imports to raise their prices higher than those of the domestic product; in this case, cars. The car makers then can do whatever they want because consumers face a choice of either us or nothing. In the 1970s, when we began allowing imports, the American car companies were caught, and almost went out of business. They finally got their act together when a new wave of government regulation on cars was imposed, thus raising the cost of domestic cars. To boot, the latest situation is that the Federal government is dictating to the car companies what types of cars to make, all in an effort to be “green.” The problem is that the market does not want these cars, so the company is forced to spend millions on cars they cannot sell. Then the government says, “Oh, it would be terrible if the companies failed; so many would be put out of work. So we have to bail them out again, and since we are ponying up the money, we now have a controlling interest in them, we can call the shots, we can tell the company what to produce, we can fire the executives, and when the company comes in with a loss, we blame the company again, bail them out again . . . .” And the circle continues. Remember, this government is the same one that has brought us the Post Office, the Department of Motor Vehicles and the public school system. All those who believe that the government can bring us out of a recession should remember that it was the government that caused it in the first place. Remember the housing bubble?

What a racket!

There are so many people out there who think that businesses are just rich, evil institutions. They do not reflect that it is business that gives us all the wonderful things we have today, many of which did not even exist in my childhood, and also employ countless people. They therefore cry out to government to tax corporations, because these folks think that they have too much money, and somehow they have stolen it from us, forgetting that no one is forced to buy anything. Let us look at the business tax situation.

1. Taxes on earnings. After deducting expenses to run the business, a company must pay taxes on its remaining earnings. The person on the street says, “Well, they should!” But let us look at business as the dynamic institution it is. Competition keeps a company sharp, efficient, and forces it to upgrade its current products and bring new ones to market. We benefit from these activities. In order to do this, the company needs money. Now a company has a number of ways to get that money. First, it can issue stock. But that option is limited by at least two things. What is the current price of its stock? If it is low, the investment bank who will buy the initial offering of stock might not be willing to buy it, or will give it too low a return. Secondly, it can borrow it, by selling bonds or going to a bank. If they do that, they have to pay interest, and as we wrote last time, that raises the cost of capital and makes it have to get a larger return on their product in order to pay the interest back. The best way to pay for the development of new products is to take it from your net earnings. There is no interest on your own earnings. But the more earnings are taxed, the less earnings available to use for product development.

The result of the taxes on earnings is that it force many businesses into the credit market. If the economy is in a recession, the interest rates might be very high due to less savings. If the Federal Reserve tries to lower interest by swelling the money supply, this will cause inflation, and raise the cost of capital, because inflation drives up prices. So if I borrow a million dollars today in an inflation environment, by the time I get to pay for the product development, I see that I did not borrow enough, prices having risen. This forces the company to borrow more, and so forth.

2. Sales taxes. This one is easy. A sales tax artificially raises the price of an item and with that price rise, sales decline. So the buyer pays more for the item, and the company sells less. Therefore the income of the company declines in a proportion to the level of the tax. Some states have very high sales taxes, and those states have always seen a flight of the tax base as companies go elsewhere. This is a main cause of the growth of the “sunbelt” in the 1970s and 1980s. Even I, a native New Yorker, live in Virginia, something I never thought I would be doing.

So the next time someone says, “Let’s tax these evil corporations,” remember that those who say that are cutting your throat, or even their own.

What happens when government does not take in enough money in taxes as it spends? It borrows. How does it do that? It issues bonds. A bond is a certificate for a loan. If you buy a government bond, or any kind of bond, for that matter, you are loaning the entity from which you bought it money. The bond contains a rate of interest which you get during certain time periods for corporate bonds, or at the end for government bonds. The rate of interest paid is directly related to the demand and supply of bonds. If there is a big demand for your bonds, you can offer a smaller rate of interest than if you have to “force” people to buy them, which requires a larger rate. (For the sake of this article we will not complicate the model by talking about selling bonds on the bond market, prior to maturity, although the same economic rules hold.)

Government bonds do not have as high an interest rate as corporate bonds, and one main reason for this is safety. Companies do go out of business, and there is a possibility that the bondholders might not get their money. But what is the likelihood that the government will go out of business? Not much. Investment managers like to show good returns for their companies by purchasing bonds, but a large part of their portfolio will be in “safe” bonds. The more safe bonds are public utilities bonds and the like, AND government bonds. Even though the fund managers want to get a respectable return, they do not want to take too much risk, so a large part of their portfolio will be in safe investments. The most safe bonds are government bonds.

Now you are a corporation who needs a very expensive piece of equipment and you do not have enough profits saved up to buy this machine. Not buying this machine will mean that your business will come to a dead stop because you will not be able to make a component of your product. So you issue bonds. The problem is that your bonds are competing against a ton of safe government bonds. In tough economic times there is a “flight to safety,” which means investors are more likely to buy “safe” bonds than regular corporate bonds. In order to get people to buy your bonds, you must offer a high rate of interest to entice them away from the government bonds. But this raises what is called “the cost of capital.” This means that the corporation will have to make more money on their product to pay the higher interest rate than they would if they did not have to compete with government bonds.

This is similar to a situation where you need a car for work. You have no choice but to buy a reliable car. But because your credit rating is not as good as that of your neighbor, Fred, you get charged a higher rate of interest to buy the car. Both you and Fred are competing for the same available money. Because he is “safer” than you, his “cost of capital,” the interest on his car, is less. If your personal budget is already strained, you will lose weight quickly, because you still have to get to work, but will not be buying your usual quota of food. If you cannot make the payments because of the high interest, the car gets repossessed, and you are out of work completely.

Now, how does the company make more money to pay the larger rate of interest? In a competitive market, it cannot raise prices, because most of their customers will go to its competitors. It could improve the product, it could do better advertising, but none of these things guarantee success, and they cost money, which was the problem in the first place. In truth, the company might not be able to buy the machine, or, having bought the machine, not be able to keep up the interest, or the cost of capital. They then will declare bankruptcy, or just go out of business.

So when government tells you that it will spend tons of money to help the economy, and taxes are not scheduled to pay for these expenditures, remember there will be many more safe government bonds available to compete with corporate ones, which will be crowded out of the market, making it harder for companies to borrow money in the bond market. Government deficit spending (sound familiar, President Obama) to help the economy is actually helping to kill it!

As many readers have no doubt read, law professor Douglas Kmiec, who is Catholic and has pro-life credentials, has taken offense at some criticisms leveled at his pro-Obama stance. If you read his comments, he makes it appear that he has been attacked only by immature, name-calling, right-wing Catholic nuts. Of course, others, like myself on these pages, criticized him on reasonable grounds, grounds he has yet to respond to.

Why did Professor Kmiec bring up only the vitriolic criticisms, and not the rational ones? There are, I think, two reasons. First, as a law professor, he is first and foremost a lawyer. Lawyers are trained in debate and one of the ways one can successfully debate is to draw people’s thoughts away from the issue at hand, especially if your arguments on that issue are weak. By not addressing my criticism of his support of Obama, which, as I wrote, placed the “social gospel,” a phrase which the Church never uses, above specific moral evil, he is reversing the role of the Church, turning it from primarily a herald of the right order into a welfare agency. This is aside from the fact that, as a law professor and not an economist, his idea that the Obama administration can do things to help the poor is questionable at best.

But the second, and perhaps the most disturbing, fact here is not merely that he was supporting a pro-abortion politician, but that he supported a flaming statist! There was more than one issue in this campaign. And although the life issues are the most important by far, the others are not insignificant. The fact that no one ever brought out that the whole Obama message was that government is the solver of everyone’s problems is very disturbing. It backs up the fact that for generations the Church authorities have been teaching the faithful to see the government at the sole source of the common good (see my article “The Common Good as an Excuse to Reject Human Dignity”), and have ignored the findings of economists in the Public Choice school, if in fact they ever heard of it. We have been moving, with the help of countless Catholics, bishops and priests included, toward an economic fascism, with its concomitant destruction of personal, moral responsibility for economic problems. I have written elsewhere that long-time Catholic support of the Democratic Party has led Catholics into the dilemma of supporting a socialist party which has become anti-life. Well, make your choices! The one goes with the other.

Many people cannot get the idea into their heads that society was not created nor is run by a single authority. Now someone objected to this idea once by saying that since God created everything, He is effectively the creator of society as well. That is true in a sense, but one thing I have insisted on, along with the late Pope John Paul II, is that God made man a co-creator with him. This applies to inventions, etc., but also applies to society and the market as well. Remember, John Paul II held that we humans have self-possession and self-governance which give us self-determination. Men are in control of their actions (assuming they are not a slave to their passions or public opinion, or something else), and therefore are responsible for those actions. This includes the setting up of institutions, usually occurring over long periods of time, and resulting from trial and error. These institutions serve the function of human flourishing. For example, look at the way universities evolved since the later middle ages. They went from monastic schools, meant for monks, to being open to others, to the great universities in the major cities, to the institutions we have today. Are they perfect? Of course not—nothing man does can be so. But one cannot argue that they have not been centers of great learning and progress for the benefit of the human race.

The same is true of the growth of markets. Agricultural inventions in the middle ages allowed more than minimal food to be grown, thus allowing people to travel. They traveled to the great trading cities and brought back things never available to people in the medieval non-costal areas before. These folks set up bazaars, which the people visited and bought things which enhanced their quality of life. These turned into towns when the patterns of trade became habitual. The towns became cities, etc.

The great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek uses the Greek terms “cosmos” and “taxis” to describe the difference of worldview between those who see the spontaneous order of society and the market and those who do not. Cosmos describes the self-governing order of things—like the cosmos. Did you know that the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy are on a collision course—and there is nothing we can do about it? This is an example of cosmos in the area of space. Think of taxis in the sense of hailing a taxi cab, and then telling the driver where to take you. In this case, you are directing the cab. In the first instance, the cosmos is self-directing.

Society and the market conform to the cosmos rather than the taxis. Both are self-generating by the billions of interactions between thinking human beings all over the globe and those interactions are based on the interactions yesterday and those are based on the interactions on the day before that, etc. No one controls this. This does not mean that large institutions can’t influence the society and market. But there is no control here. Even with President-elect Obama’s economic “stimulus” plan, no one is really sure how the market is going to react to it. How did it react to the original issuing of money to free up loans? Well, Donald Trump put it this way the other day: “No matter what your credit rating or your track record, you still can’t get a loan.”

The implications are clear. Those who say that they can fix this, that, or the other thing, in society or the market are blowing smoke. Even if they can influence things, this influence might not be for the better, because of the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is founded on the fact that people will act in their own perceived best interest, regardless of what a government program will try to accomplish. This is why it is better to let the economy deal with circumstances than try to tweak it. It was that constant meddling with the economy which caused the problems in the first place. More meddling can’t remedy the results of the original meddling—at least if we are not in some kind of dream world.

Since economics is a part of a science of human action, we can relate some basic human behaviors to their effects on economics. One of these is the penchant for what is called “instant gratification.” People generally have what is called a high time horizon, which means that they prefer things now rather than later. Would you like $100 dollars now or next June? Obviously you would want it now. If I am going to put it off, you will want it with interest, because $100 dollars in June is worth less than $100 now, firstly, due to inflation, and secondly, the wait.

But a good person must learn to temper this natural human tendency for instant gratification, and the failure to do this leads to a lot of trouble. Let’s take a few examples.

1. Two 17-year-olds are dating, and they both realize that, as far as they can tell, they are meant for each other. The natural tendency of those who have found each other is marriage, and with it, conjugal privileges. But that means that these two lovebirds have to wait until circumstances permit the tying of the permanent knot, hardly the case at 17 in this modern society. But the drive for the conjugal privileges is there now. If they have no ability to temper this above named tendency, they will lose their virginity, and a possible pregnancy will result when neither is ready to care for this new life.

2. A person is raised in a comfortable family. The person is not spoiled, but he or she has always had whatever he or she needed. The parents were good providers. They went on nice vacations, the person went to private schools, got music lessons, etc. Then they graduate from college and get an entry-level job. They are used to living the comfortable life, not only for their whole childhood, but even in the college they went to where everything was provided for them. They did not have to cook or work, etc. But now their salary cannot provide that type of life. They are paying a high rent, which eats up a large part of their pay. Then there are the utilities, transportation, clothing, and so forth. To the rescue comes the credit card, or even the bank loan for that house so that the person does not have to live in an apartment. The result—massive debt. Why? The failure to control the time horizon has resulted in a failure to wait until, like his parents, he could afford to live a better life.

3. Every year or quarter accountants issue the financial statements of companies. The statements have their purpose. They give a picture of the health of the company. But what happens if the company lost money this quarter? Well, to the trained eye, factors can be seen that can explain the losses. Coupled with other sources, and an examination of the economy, one can make a reasoned judgment about what the company should do, or stop doing, to get out of the hole. But this loss is not a cause for panic, all things being equal. The function of the management is to enhance the wealth of the stockholders. This task is a long-run job, and at times, just like my alma mater’s basketball team, might require a few years of “rebuilding.” But since most people have a high time horizon, they want instant gratification. They want the stock price to go up now; they want to be rich today; they are unwilling to wait for the company to grow. So they dump their stock. When the economy recently began to decline, one guy on a financial channel advised folks to dump all of their stocks and go into cash. This was totally foolish advice, and if you had a high time horizon, you are just the person who listened to this advice. The company should produce a positive return now, or good-bye.

The effect of this growing attitude of the public on CEOs is dangerous, because now they will fear to grow the company if this means taking a loss for a period, because they will be punished by the stockholders for their long-term plans. They will then do things to look good in the short term—things which might be to the detriment of the company in the long run, such as entering into a deal for a new product without much forethought because the publicity will make the company hit the news just before the financial statements come out. Those who have studied for an MBA know better, but the big CEO salary creates an interest that might trump knowledge, and even morality.

But the source of this problem is the society in general. This is why in my Thanksgiving Reflections I reminded all of us not to be hyper-critical; to take the beam out of our own eye before taking the speck out of our brother’s eye. Our materialist society more and more has encouraged the high time horizon attitude. No one wants to put off anything anymore; no one can see the long-term benefits in things. No payoff now and I’m not interested. This has even affected the Church, where so many people think that serving God doesn’t pay off now (of course it does, but you have to experience it before you realize it, or you have to trust the saints) or you refuse to abide by the teachings. Prayer is useless to so many people if it is not a “gimme” prayer, and God’s answer is “no.” This may even be a cause of college students’ binge drinking. It is possible that they see no intrinsic value in the long-term study process they are engaged in, so they hide in alcohol and rampant sexuality.

We need to teach each other and our youth that a low time horizon is a good thing. Waiting pays off bigger than instant gratification. Self-control is a virtue, and the widespread acquiring of this virtue will be reflected in a better society, and a more healthy economy.

There are many more implications to this, but space will not permit me to follow them up now. One line of thought is the Federal Reserve’s constant expansion of the money supply to give the illusion of prosperity. Perhaps next time.

My father had a polite expression for people he saw who were probably drunk. He’d say, “That guy has a package.” I wonder if this is related to the fact that in some states liquor stores are called “package stores.” Be that as it may, I was inspired to write this article to make a point. All analogies limp at some point, but this one limps less than many others.

President-elect Obama announced today that as soon as he takes office he will submit a “stimulus package.” To most of the news media (maybe all) this is a good thing. I am sure that Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal for one would not agree, but he would be a rare exception. After all, both candidates pledged in the last election “to get the economy moving again,” thus revealing their ignorance of economics. It is here that the “package” analogy comes in.

When a person saves money, that money came from his producing a good or service that some other people wanted. Those other people took their discretionary funds and purchased the good or service. Those discretionary funds came from their production of some good and/or service that others wanted, and so forth. The money saved in a bank or in the purchase of corporate bonds or stocks goes to finance new projects, thus creating new wealth in the forging of those new products and services that people are willing to pay for. The economist Jean-Baptiste Say told us of this: the funds generated making all the goods and services in society will eventually be used to buy up those very goods and services. This came to be called Say’s Law. This doesn’t mean that there will never be any economic downturns. Entrepreneurs make errors and outside factors, like OPEC, complicate things. But the current crisis, as I have written before, was mostly government-caused, originated by the expansion of the money supply, and then by pressuring banks to lend to unqualified persons for the purchase of homes. This expansion of the money supply came from “whole cloth.” The Federal Reserve merely “creates money” by a bookkeeping entry made in the account of a bank that sells government securities to the Fed at a premium. There is no creation of actual wealth, as wealth comes from the increase of real production of new goods and services.

The economist who was the hit of the town since the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes, rejected Say’s law. He believed that savings took money out of the economy. I asked one of my economics professors if he thought that Keynes was tempted to say this because people were putting their money in mattresses at the time, because they did not trust banks. He told me that that was probably the case. But we can see that this is not the case today. People do use banks and other investment tools, and their money is put back into the economy in order to buy capital goods, which then make new things which people want and buy.

But Keynes is alive and well in the politician’s and media’s mind, even though most of the economics profession saw in the 1970s, with stagflation, that Keynes was wrong, something that this writer knew as a college freshman in 1966. Keynes believed that an economic downturn was caused by people spending less on goods and services than the companies planned to sell. The result was a recession. He did not believe that wages and prices would adjust to accommodate the lack of purchasing, as all classical and Austrian economists believe, and that thus the only remedy was an injection of government funds without a concomitant rise of taxes—i.e., deficit spending. This, of course, would be on top of what we do now. This is exactly Obama’s “stimulus package.”

Let us see why this stimulus package is similar to the package of one who has had too much to drink. Always look at the microeconomic foundations of any macroeconomic idea. The economy is founded on the actions of individuals, whether acting separately or in firms. A government stimulus package is called “fiscal policy” as opposed to “monetary policy,” which is an injection of money into the banks by the Federal Reserve Bank. In fiscal policy, the government undertakes projects in society that the society doesn’t necessarily need or want, but which employ people. William F. Buckley, Jr., said facetiously that fiscal policy was like the government paying people to throw stones into the ocean, and then paying other people to retrieve them. Prior to his election, president-elect Clinton wanted to build a federal swimming pool in Los Angeles, financed by deficit spending. President-elect Obama’s plan will have many, many similar projects in it so that billions will be injected into the economy, thus adding to the deficit, but, and here’s the big point, without any increase of productivity. This means that this injection of money is not real wealth. However, people will begin to spend more. This will put pressure on the consumption side of the economy. Without any increase of production to produce the extra wealth, this will push prices up, as things become scarcer. The same thing happened recently with the housing market. The artificial injection of money into the economy by the Fed caused an artificial building boom, pushing up prices of land, supplies, and labor, until housing became too expensive for people to buy, and then the builders were stuck not only with houses they already built but cannot sell, but with contracts for materials and labor that they cannot now use. When a person has their first or second drink of the evening, they feel good, happy; they get more sociable. As they have more, the “stimulus package” of liquor gets them to do more and more things they would not ordinarily do, because their view of their milieu is artificially stimulated by the alcohol. Here is where they put a lampshade on their head and dance on the table, an action which will result in their falling off, thus making a fool of themselves, and getting kicked out of the party.

Now let’s take the case of the bakery that used to be in my neighborhood elevated train stop in New York. As you came down the stairs, you could smell the baked goods, and, no doubt, this aroma got hungry workers to buy goodies on their way home. Now, with extra money in the pockets of the persons coming off the train, the bakery begins to sell more baked goods (and people plump up nicely). The baker does not know the reason for this; he only knows that he is moving more stock. To keep up with the increased demand, he hires more workers, buys a new machine, contacts his suppliers for more sugar, flour, etc. But to stimulate demand without a concomitant increase of actual wealth through production is to put stress on the current, non-expanding system.

This forces prices up—first of suppliers. To compensate with the increased price of supplies, the baker raises the price of his baked goods. So does everybody else. Now the consumers are paying higher prices for everything, and they realize that this increase in money in society merely forced prices up, thus making it more expensive to live, and thus eating up any extra cash they might have. So they reduce their spending to pre-stimulus package levels. The bakery loses sales, has to let the extra help go, has to sell the new machine, which is now a used machine, so it cannot recoup the full price paid, and has to reduce the supply orders it recently made. This is the economic hangover which occurs after the binge of the stimulus “package.” Gee, the analogy does work, but, now that I think about it, the partygoer did not intentionally drink too much. He was drinking the punch that he was told was not alcoholic, but all the while the government was spiking it. By the time he realized it, he had a “package.”

Please, Mr. Obama, don’t spike the economic punch. The market can have its own fun at this party.

According to a report from the Zenit News Service, Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, recently insisted that the “logic” of the market be changed. He said that the logic “was till (sic) now that of maximum gain, and therefore the most investments possible directed toward obtaining maximum benefit. And this, according to the social doctrine of the Church, is immoral.” This is because, according to the Cardinal, the market “should be able to benefit not just those who invest capital, but those who participate in the step of making it grow, that is, those who work.”

Aside for the fact that some of the terms he used are too vague to make any judgment about, like “maximum benefit,” the economics in his statement would be more appropriate of a kid, rather than a Cardinal. So, let’s learn some economics.

Firstly, money has alternative uses. If I have some excess wealth, I am going to invest it in the things which give me the highest return. Why would I do this? Because, those projects which promise the highest return, taking risk into account, will produce the things that people want most, and hence will give me more “bang for the buck.” For example, would you invest your money in a carpentry business run by me? I wouldn’t—because I can’t hammer a nail. No wants a carpenter who does not know what he is doing. But would you invest in McDonald’s? Sure. Most everyone eats at McDonald’s, and kids especially love the place. And what do the people who patronize McDonald’s get out of it? They get a food for which they willingly and freely exchange money, and feel the better off for doing so, or they would not do it. And who supplies the food? The workers, in exchange for their discounted marginal revenue product. In other words, they exchange their time for the money equivalent of what they produce. Why are people paid different wages? They get different wages because their output is different. The work of the person who sweeps up, while necessary or he would not have been hired, is worth less than the work of the person who puts the burgers together. The burger guy’s work is not worth as much as the trained manager who is responsible for coordinating the whole operation. None of this would be possible without the people who ponied up the money in the first place expecting a high return for the money the usage of which they were willing to forego. If this is immoral and against the social doctrine of the Church, then I am Santa Claus. If fact, to have an economy worthy of the name at all without this investment process would be worthy only of a figure like Santa Claus.

I have long argued in my writings that churchmen who have no real economic training or understanding prescind from making remarks like this which mislead the faithful, and portray the sui generis (self-generating) free market economy as an operation run from the top by a few greedy people constantly plotting to withhold wealth from the ordinary folks.

Lastly, the Cardinal remarks, “All of us should collaborate in the good of all.” This is exactly what the market does, except for those who are not able or refuse to participate in it, much of which is caused by political interference with the process, such as governments who punish provinces in Africa which are in rebellion and refuse to allow food supplies to reach the people in those provinces, or Western politicians who, in exchange for votes, have created generations of people addicted to government checks, rather than productive work and advancement.

I wonder what His Eminence thinks of government-imposed protective tariffs the purpose of which is to keep the goods of foreign workers from competing with domestic goods, in return for support from corporations and unions in the domestic industry. This prevents globalization—it prevents the wealth of the United States and other well-off countries from going to them for the products they work to produce.

Gee, Cardinal Martino, get a clue.