The pope tweeted this gem:
Inequality is the root of social evil.
I guess he hired Barack Obama’s speech writer. The great thing about Twitter, is that there is no room to elaborate on what you’re trying to say. Since any believer would have to admit that God didn’t create a bunch of clones who are all equal in ability, I’ll infer that “his Holiness” (as Catholics and politicians refer to him) means economic inequality. I guess Jorge thinks governments (or maybe the Church?) should decide how much wealth everyone gets and divide everything equally. Hasn’t that been tried before?
Apparently he had an earlier take on so called “Capitalism” that went like this:
“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.”
Now people throw around the word “Capitalism” to mean different things. Perhaps Jorge meant the economic fascism we enjoy here in 21st century United States of America. I have plenty of issues with it myself, although I’m not overly concerned with inequality per se.
But let’s set that aside for a minute and just think about what he’s saying. Does he really believe the poor have not benefited from Capitalism? Does he think the poor were better off before all of the technological advances created by Western Civilization over the past 500 years? Were people better off when half of them died as children and the other half were lucky to make it to 50? Are the poor people in countries that have had bigger government and less economic freedom enjoying a better quality of life than poor Americans? Poor Brits? Poor Germans?
Catholicism tends to do much better these days in dirt poor, third world, backwater countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. It’s dying in Europe, the world’s richest continent. Perhaps the pope just wants everybody to be equally miserable so they’ll turn back to the Church. Or maybe I’m too cynical and he’s just plain dumb when it comes to basic economics. After all he is claiming that the “glass magically grows.”
Full disclosure, I am not now, nor have I ever been a Catholic. Still, I can’t find the part of the Bible where Jesus named a Pope and told everyone to listen to everything he says as if it was God himself talking. Maybe it’s in there somewhere. I haven’t read it cover to cover.
My prediction: The Fed will raise rates after the election. They’ll have to. It will crash the markets and we’ll have a bad recession.
