The Pope's Economic Plan

[PoliticalChic]

Quite a stir, the new Pope, an Argentinean Jesuit, Pope Francis, has created!
In Francis we can see a return to the poor as the first and major concern of the church, borrowing 'liberally' from Pope Leo VIII's ' "Rerum Novarum."

Rather than a 'revolutionary change,' the meaning of "Rerum Novarum," a closer look reveals it to be an attack on capitalism, and, ultimately, America.




1. "Joy of the Gospel(Evangelii Gaudium) is the title of the pope’s November 2013 apostolic exhortation, a document that encapsulates Francis’s vision for mankind.... it’s especially striking for its tough and uncompromising appraisal of the global financial system,particularly capitalism, [calling it] “a new tyranny.”

2. .... Rush Limbaugh lambastedEvangelii Gaudiumas a full-frontal assault on America. “This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the pope,”he said. “Unfettered capitalism? That doesn’t exist anywhere. Unfettered capitalism is a liberal socialist phrase to describe the United States.”

a. .... the pope emphasizes the need for a new system that combats injustice and inequality, that defends the poor and weak, that protects the rights of humans. It all sounds appealing.But we need to think seriously about its fundamental economic and political tenets:tearing down free-market capitalism and introducing a new financial system.

3. ... Evangelii Gaudium,he has outlined the financial model he wants to implement.
While his plan sounds fresh and innovative, it is entirely unoriginal. In fact, it has been employed multiple times. The results have varied, from simple failure to painful and total destruction.





4. By the time of the defeat of French Emperor Napoleon in 1815, the last remnants of the old feudal economic system had been destroyed. Over the next century, two competing economic theories sprang up in its place.

a. The first was Adam Smith-style capitalism, which flourished in Britain and America. The second was Karl Marx-style socialism.

b. Whereas capitalist philosophy called for economic power to rest in the hands of the individual, socialist philosophy placed that power in the hands of the collective state.Both economic philosophies displeased the Vatican and Europe’s Catholic elite.




5. Pope LeoXIIIwas concerned by how these twin evils, as he considered them—Protestant capitalism and atheistic socialism—both marginalized the Catholic Church in state affairs. In 1891, he wrote an apostolic exhortation,Rerum Novarum(On the Conditions of Labor), that laid out a Catholic economic and social model. Leo’s model became the official social doctrine of the Catholic Church and soon gained wide acceptance as a “third way.” Pope Francis has admitted thatEvangelii Gaudiumis rooted in Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.





6. .... Pope Leo’s new social doctrine was essentially an updated version of the medieval feudal order that had existed as far back as Justinian in the sixth century. The economic premise was the belief that equality is a cruel illusion, and that people are happiest when placed in a social and political hierarchy shaped and guided by the Roman Church."
Much More Than an Economic Plan - theTrumpet.com





".......people are happiest when placed in a social and political hierarchy ...."

Can any system, political or economic, be practical if based on a misunderstanding of human nature?

 

[saveliberty]

I guess we can do way with capitalism here. Of course the entire world will starve and illness will wipe out millions, but hey maybe that is why he's the Pope and not a CEO or political leader.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I guess we can do way with capitalism here. Of course the entire world will starve and illness will wipe out millions, but hey maybe that is why he's the Pope and not a CEO or political leader.

"...do way with capitalism ......or political leader."

I can name quite a few political leaders who are on board with his plan........

Bet you know who I'd name first.

 

[PoliticalChic]

7. Pope Leo VIII was hardly enthralled with capitalism, as can be seen in the reference to "Protestant capitalism...."
Perhaps he had a point, at least as far as the term.

What is 'Protestant capitalism'....and is it really 'Protestant,' or merely a clearer understanding of human nature?



a. "....John Calvin’s and Martin Luther’s emphasis on individual responsibility, hard work, thrift, providence, honesty, and deferred gratification at its center—shaped the spirit of capitalism and helped it succeed…religions chiefly of the middle and working classes, and the virtues they promoted led to a new kind of affluence and upward mobility, based not on land (which was largely owned by the aristocracy) but on productive enterprises. The bourgeois values had helped to sustain Weber’s “rational tempering” of the impulse to accumulate wealth: they helped put the rationality in “rational self-interest,” or, as Tocqueville put it, “self-interest rightly understood.”


b. Whereas in Europe aristocrats and gentry often scorned labor, in the United States, in both the culture and in education, the writings of Benjamin Franklin, whose well-known maxims, now considered quaintly old-fashioned, recommended to citizens of the new country a worldview that promoted work and the pursuit of wealth.

And in schoolrooms they appeared in McGuffey Readers, Horatio Alger, and even in parlor games: the most popular game of its time, “The Checkered Game of Life,” produced by Milton Bradley in the mid-nineteenth century and sold door-to-door, challenged players to travel through life and earn points for successfully completing school, getting married, and working hard, while avoiding pitfalls like gambling and idleness.


c. After the Civil War, this secularized version of the Protestant ethic served as a lodestar for millions of poor immigrants. Many absorbed their Franklinesque code from the American Catholic Church. Catholic schools taught Irish children not just the three Rs but also a “faith-based code of personal conduct. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Irish had largely shaken off poverty and joined the American mainstream.

Waves of Southern and Eastern European Catholics followed them, as well as Eastern European Jews—some 20 million immigrants between 1890 and 1925—who quickly replicated the success of the Irish in a country whose institutions emphasized and rewarded hard work, thrift, and self-improvement. Within a single generation, one study shows, the average early-twentieth-century immigrant family had achieved income and educational parity with American-born families, so that the children of these immigrants were just as likely to be accountants, engineers, or lawyers as the children of families rooted here for generations."
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic by Steven Malanga City Journal Summer 2009




Seems that "Protestant capitalism" resulted in success, rather than ".......people are happiest when placed in a social and political hierarchy ...."

Shouldn't Pope Francis know this?

 

[PoliticalChic]

8. "[Pope Leo VIII's Rerum Novarum] taught that competition is spiritually demeaning. Therefore, business, labor and the state must work together in vertically connected bodies of the economy calledcorporations. Each corporation, comprised of a group of Catholic leaders within a specific industry, manages the economy by setting quotas, prices and wages. The corporations regulate individual behavior to protect the social order and provide an equal standard of living for all. Abuses of power are prevented by the guidance of an ethically superior elite—individuals supposedly made moral and selfless by the teachings of the Catholic Church."
Much More Than an Economic Plan - theTrumpet.com


See the Pope's misunderstanding's of human nature?

'Selfless people' in positions of power?
Ethically superior elite....Woodrow Wilson's 'experts' and technocrats? Really?




Jouvenel's understanding applies:

a. " Socialists, however, appalled by the anguish of the poor, blamed the rich and sought to rectify the glaring "injustice" through income redistribution. What they found, of course, is that the wealth of the "rich" was insufficient to eliminate the poverty of the poor. So ordinary workers had to be taxed as well as government planners seek to provide everyone "maximal satisfaction."

In the process of redistributing the wealth, the State becomes increasingly powerful."
"The Ethics of Redistribution,"by Bertrand de Jouvenel

 

[PoliticalChic]

".......people are happiest when placed in a social and political hierarchy ...."


As is true of all political and economic plans that are based the view that people don't want to determine their own course of action, Francis' plan takes away personal choice, and gives the determinations to the church and to corporations.



9. "Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung, in a paper titled “Corporatism and the Ghost of the Third Way,” explained how Catholic corporatism applies a “principle of subsidiary.” “THE CHURCH SAFEGUARDS SOULS, AND MUST RETAIN POWER OVER ALL MATTERS IT JUDGES NECESSARY TO THIS END, but should leave other matters to the prince,” they wrote.


“The prince retains power he deems necessary for governing his realm, but other matters subside to the corporations. These retain powers they deem necessary to setting their just wages, prices and quotas, but other matters subside to the industrialists. Industrialists retain such powers as they need to govern their businesses, but details subside to shop foremen. These charge master tradesmen with task, but leave them to get on with it, and so on down to the lowest worker …” (Capitalism and Society,Vol. 5, Iss. 3, Art. 2).


.... economy would be governed by the state, divided into distinct departments, or corporations,but under the moral and spiritual influence of the Roman Catholic Church.


10. .... this Catholic corporatist system, this “third way,” was just Catholic-dominated feudalism for the industrial age.

Unlike free-market capitalism, Leo’s system prevented individuals from establishing private enterprises outside of society’s established hierarchy.Rerum Novarum purported to defend the poor by creating a fair and equal system.


But it denied the realities of human nature. Just like Marxist socialism, Catholic corporatism presumes the reliability of a moral and righteous, a “benevolent” and “compassionate,”Catholic state."
Much More Than an Economic Plan - theTrumpet.com



Recognize the similarity with the corporatism of Benito Mussolini and Franklin Roosevelt?

 

[PoliticalChic]

11. How about a reminder of the corporatism of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, before Pope Francis, and after Leo VIII.


Corporatism has its roots in Catholic doctrine. In 1891, the papal encyclical ‘Rerum novarum’ proposed corporatism or syndicalism in response to the Industrial Revolution. As a backbone of progressive Catholic social thought, the Church thought that corporatism was the best way to revive medieval social arrangements, giving man a greater sense of meaning in his life.


The intellectual descendants of those who worshipped Bismarck’s Prussia or Mussolini’s Ministry of Corporations…the lodestar of enlightened economic policy….in a quest for the holy grail of government-business ‘collaboration.’


a. “Corporatism” was a term for dividing up industry into cooperative units, and associations, that would work together under the rubric of “national purpose.” Corporatism simply seemed a more straightforward attempt at what social planners and businessmen had been moving toward for decades. It embodied a new sense of national purpose that would allow business and labor to put aside their class differences and hammer out what was best for all. It represented an exhaustion with politics and a newfound faith in science and experts."
“Liberal Fascism,” by Jonah Goldberg

 

[PoliticalChic]

12. Corporatism, the Pope's 'Third Way,' Roosevelt's socialism......all are variations of feudalism.



"Feudalism....the dominant social system in medieval Europe...was based on the ownership of land.

...a monarch- empowered by the pope and the Catholic Church- would divide his kingdom into chunks of land called fiefs, and then place a lord, a duke, or other nobleman in a position of ownership over each one.

Each nobleman would divide his fief into manors, and appoint a vassal or knight to manage each....

Under each vassal or knight were peasants of serfs, who were required to live on the fief and to pay homage, labor, and a portion of all they produced to those above them....although they weren't allowed to own land or pass anything down to their children, were given a place to live and to work....[and] received protection."
Brad Macdonald



In the above, and in the Pope's economic plan, there is a low opinion of the peasants and serfs, who, it seems, were required to know their place.



David Mamet sums up the essential nature of capitalism, in which individuals order their own lives:
"In the free market, every man, woman and child is scheming to find a better way to make a product or service that will make a fortune!"



So.....if one would rather be taken care of by the king, or the state......feudalism is for you.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Pope Francis is a fucking Communist who can go fuck himself

 

[HenryBHough]

It will all show itself to be sincere when they strip all the gold out of the monster church in Rome and sell it off to buy a day or two's worth of free food for all the world's poor. Won't have to buy them phones, though; their other Messiah's got that covered!

 

[ogibillm]

so much hate for a guy just because he loves and cares for the poor and believes others should as well.
where have a heard a story like that before?

 

[PoliticalChic]

so much hate for a guy just because he loves and cares for the poor and believes others should as well.
where have a heard a story like that before?

'Someday you can build a boat from meaning well and see how it floats.'
joe abercrombie.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

David Mamet sums up the essential nature of capitalism, in which individuals order their own lives:
"In the free market, every man, woman and child is scheming to find a better way to make a product or service that will make a fortune!"

I don't think that's accurate. It seems to me they do it to please other people not themselves by making a fortune. That's why the rich don't stop working. The value is in the work, not in the money that results from the work.

Capitalism is not about selfishness, but rather about giving.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Pope Francis, they're calling him the Obama of Popes

 

[ogibillm]

David Mamet sums up the essential nature of capitalism, in which individuals order their own lives:
"In the free market, every man, woman and child is scheming to find a better way to make a product or service that will make a fortune!"

I don't think that's accurate. It seems to me they do it to please other people not themselves by making a fortune. That's why the rich don't stop working. The value is in the work, not in the money that results from the work.

Capitalism is not about selfishness, but rather about giving.

wow. that's a bunch of bunk.
capitalism is driven by greed. it doesn't work without greed

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

so much hate for a guy just because he loves and cares for the poor and believes others should as well.
where have a heard a story like that before?

of course we know from China's recent history that if you don't believe in capitalism you're more likely to kill the poor than help them!!

Liberals care but in a very deadly way because they lack the IQ to understand capitalism.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

capitalism is driven by greed. it doesn't work without greed

100% pure and perfect liberal stupidity. If one businessman is greedy and another really cares about his customers which business will succeed. Capitalism is about caring; about pleasing others. Its much like love! You're a brainwashed, anti-American, treasonous, Marxist but too stupid to know it.

 

[PoliticalChic]

David Mamet sums up the essential nature of capitalism, in which individuals order their own lives:
"In the free market, every man, woman and child is scheming to find a better way to make a product or service that will make a fortune!"

I don't think that's accurate. It seems to me they do it to please other people not themselves by making a fortune. That's why the rich don't stop working. The value is in the work, not in the money that results from the work.

Capitalism is not about selfishness, but rather about giving.

wow. that's a bunch of bunk.
capitalism is driven by greed. it doesn't work without greed

No wonder no one ever copied off your paper.

How does the "greed" claim fit with the fact that, unlike with government, folks willingly give their money in exchange for goods and services that they need and want?

 

[alpine]

"The ideology of Marxism is wrong. But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don't feel offended," Francis was quoted as saying. Defending his criticism of the "trickle-down" theory of economics, he added: "There was the promise that once the glass had become full it would overflow and the poor would benefit. But what happens is that when it's full to the brim, the glass magically grows, and thus nothing ever comes out for the poor ... I repeat: I did not talk as a specialist but according to the social doctrine of the church. And this does not mean being a Marxist."

Pope says he is not a Marxist but defends criticism of capitalism World news theguardian.com

 

[Mad Scientist]

Pope Francis is a fucking Communist who can go fuck himself

Oh no Frank, NO! Don't you know you'll go to Hell for even SAYING such a thing?

We should all bow down and kiss His Holiness's ring and do whatever he says!

He wears a fish mouth hat for gods sakes Frank! What more proof do you need that he is to be worshiped?