By Cal Thomas
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
I have great respect for the humility displayed by Pope
Francis, but in his latest call for the "legitimate" redistribution
of wealth, he has it backward. Instead of taking more money from those who have
earned it, he should advocate for creating new wealth.
If the money I have earned, saved, invested and spent responsibly
to care for myself and my family is confiscated by the state (and goodness
knows the state already takes a lot of it), who is going to care for us should
I retire or become incapacitated? I can't live on Social Security alone. What
will happen to the charities to which I now contribute? Will the government
give them an equivalent amount? Where will that money come from?
Time magazine reports that, according to the best guess
of bankers, Vatican wealth is between $10 and $15 billion. If Pope Francis is
serious about redistribution, he should lead by example and sell all Vatican
property, including its valuable artwork, empty its bank and give the money to
the Italian government, or to the United Nations.
Charity and philanthropy are better than wealth
redistribution because they create a bond between the giver and the receiver,
unlike an anonymous government check. These donations also establish an
expectation that the receiver has a moral responsibility to use the money or
services wisely and be accountable to the giver.
What happens when the giver runs out of money? Will the
receiver invest the money he has already been given to build wealth for
himself, or will he squander it and eventually end up back where he started?
And if the previously poor receiver becomes wealthy, should he then be expected
to give his money to the state and resume his previous condition of poverty?
Redistribution, or whatever name you give the practice,
is socialism. Socialism often leads to mutually shared poverty.
Poverty has many causes, but there are mainly four: 1) a
dictatorial governmental system that thwarts individual initiative and liberty;
2) a religious system that oppresses people, especially women, in the name of
an angry deity who is ready to pounce on anyone having pleasurable experiences;
3) the wrong economic system, which stifles growth and discourages risk-taking;
4) Wrong lifestyle choices when it comes to education, sex, marriage and crime.
The United States has tried redistribution in Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. It doesn't work. In fact,
according to a 2014 report by the Council of Economic Advisers, the percentage
of the population in poverty declined just 16 percent between 1967 and 2012
and, in 2012, "there were 49.7 million Americans grappling with the
economic and social hardships of living below the poverty line, including 13.4
million children."
Redistributing America's poor children from their failing
public schools to better ones would improve their long-term prospects, but
liberal politicians won't let them escape for fear of losing political
contributions from teachers' unions.
George Gilder, author of the best seller "Wealth and
Poverty," has observed: "As Marxist despots and tribal socialists from
Cuba to Greece have discovered to their huge disappointment, governments can
neither create wealth nor effectively redistribute it, they can only
expropriate it and watch it dissipate. Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock
of goods than a flow of ideas and information, the defining characteristic of
which is surprise."
In a speech to the heads of major UN agencies meeting in
Rome last week, Pope Francis also said about wealth distribution:
"Specifically, this involves challenging all forms of injustices and
resisting the economy of exclusion, the throwaway culture and the culture of
death which nowadays sadly risk becoming passively accepted."
He's right about that, but removing barriers to the
creation of wealth is a better path to elevating the poor than penalizing the
wealthy through asset confiscation.
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