Wall Street’s take on Pope’s critique of capitalism

CAPITAL IDEAS  William McGurn (left), a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, spoke about how capitalism advances social justice in his talk, “Pope Francis and Capitalism: The Enemy or the Answer?” on May 3 at St. Paul Inside the Walls, Madison. With McGurn is Allan Wright, St. Paul’s academic dean.

MADISON  Pope Francis has generated goodwill with his friendly, welcoming style that has made him the world’s most beloved religious leader, but he also had received considerable criticism for his pointed critique of capitalism — his condemnation of its real or perceived greed, materialism and cutthroat business practices.

But according to William McGurn, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, perhaps the Pope does not grasp that the very capitalism that he criticizes actually promotes the social justice for the poor that he seeks, unlike the state-controlled economic systems of socialism and communism. That’s because free market capitalism provides the poor around the world with greater opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty utilizing their God-given talents to improve their standard of living thanks to global access to better and cheaper goods and services, he said.

McGurn made that and many other observations May 3 in his well-attended presentation, “Pope Francis and Capitalism: The Enemy or the Answer?,” at St. Paul Inside the Walls: the Diocesan Center for Evangelization at Bayley-Ellard here — the second of the center’s two-part series that explored the Pope’s views on capitalism. After his talk in St. Paul’s auditorium, he fielded questions from the audience.

“You don’t have to be an economist to recognize that economies that open their markets to the world are better feed, better housed and offer better opportunities and upward mobility for their people than societies that remain closed and bureaucratic. Nor does one have to be a religious believer to recognize that the source of all man’s wealth has been just this: that we do not take the world as a given but use our minds to find new and creative ways to take from the earth and add to its value,” said McGurn, a parishioner of St. Vincent Martyr, in Madison. “But if we do believe, should we be surprised to learn that the Almightily, who created us in His image, bequeathed to us a world where we are most prosperous when we are most free?”

McGurn also trumpeted dramatic results — that capitalism has been lifting billions of people out of “grinding poverty” the world over in our lifetime. The World Bank stated that the percentage of the world’s people, who live in poverty, has steadily declined. In 1981, 43 percent of people lived in extreme poverty, compared to less than 20 percent today, said the speaker, who holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, Ind., and a master’s degree in communications from Boston University.

Free market capitalism has achieved these amazing results, because it “values human beings as the ultimate resource.” By contrast, the other economic systems consider each person as “just another mouth to feed,” said McGurn, who spent a decade of his long journalistic career in Brussels and Hong Kong — which he called a “bastion of unfettered capitalism” — and also traveled to developing nations.

“Hong Kong is about as free and completive society as you can get. Far from producing the dog-eat-dog society that the Pope associates with capitalism, Hong Kong has always been a beacon for those with nothing. It is precisely the most unfettered market in the world, where the poor do better and the most controlled markets where they suffer the most,” said McGurn, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “Perfidious Albion: The Abandonment of Hong Kong 1997,” and a monograph on terrorism.

In a free market economy, those in the U.S. are entitled to compete with businesses around the world and they are entitled to compete with them. A global trade war can inflict its pain on many nations but it does not cause poverty, said McGurn, who has written for publications, such as Esquire, the New York Post and the National Catholic Register.

“Instead, poverty is what you get when poorer governments keep foreigners from coming in to sell better products at better prices or from coming in to set up their own factories and businesses to offer people jobs. Poverty also comes when wealthy nations leave poor countries out, which happens a great deal. This deprives them of the opportunity to use their talents to sell or buy from across their boarders,” McGurn said. “Too many people — and I suspect that the Holy Father may be one of them — believe that the opposite of competition is cooperation. If you are stuck in a poor country, then you know the reality: the opposite of market competition is collusion. A lack of competition allows those in the government to scheme with the wealthy to rig the system in their favor,” he said.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many Catholics — possibly Pope Francis as well — championed a “third way” economic system, which McGurn called a “golden mythical mean between the extremes of capitalism and socialism.” By contrast, St. John Paul II, who had suffered under the yoke of communism, espoused a strong pro-market philosophy and helped “shift the solution from regulating capitalism to positioning it within a larger culture that would define both its ends and means,” said the speaker, a married father of three daughters.

“The ‘third way’ never worked, because there is no halfway house in freedom,” said McGurn, who donated his honorarium for talk from St. Paul’s to St. Vincent Martyr School. “Regulation is important in any market, but if we wish to reap the market’s efficiencies without surrendering to materialism, our culture matters far more than our law. If we shy away from this, it’s because changing hearts is much harder than changing laws. It’s like raising a child — often the effects are visible long term and only after the fact,” he said.

McGurn’s talk took place after the first presentation of Pope Francis’ view of capitalism at St. Paul’s on Oct. 1 by Philip Brach of The Catholic University of America, Washington. He noted that the Pope has praised business as a “noble vocation,” while also criticizing business practices — regardless of the economic system — that place the pursuit of profit over the needs of people, especially the poor.

After McGurn’s talk, Allan Wright, St. Paul’s academic dean, said that one of the reasons the evangelization center exists is to “invite faithful Catholics like Mr. McGurn to come and speak about integrating faith into the workplace.”

“By allowing a dialogue to take place and trying to understand the vantage point of Pope Francis, we can examine our own lives and how we are faithful stewards of the gifts and resources God has given us,” Wright said. “Mr. McGurn provided us with some great food for thought as he drew from his own experience not only as a ‘newspaper man’ but also as a husband, father and parishioner as St. Vincent Martyr.”