The Popes Meets Libertarianism As An Equal

Throughout her life, Ayn Rand wore a brooch in the shape of a dollar sign on her lapel. It wasn't ostentation that led her, the founder of a philosophy based on radical capitalism, to incorporate the symbol into her personal style(Not that she would have had a problem with that.) "Money is the root of all good," she wrote. Rand despised religion, superstition, and all deviance from self-interested rationality. For her, the concept of money filled all of those roles by representing the closest thing to sanctity she recognized: the human intelligence to accept a bond instead of a good as payment. When she died, her casket was adorned with a floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign.

Rand's goal was not to replace religion, but to eradicate the human impulse towards it entirely. Unfortunately for her and her philosophy, that instinct doesn't go away easily. If anything, it tends to redirect into other areas of conviction and metastasize, leaving those who actively scourge superstition especially vulnerable to other, equally ridiculous broadsides — the entirety of Rand's body of work being a prime exhibit. The modern school of libertarianism often falls into this trap.

One hallmark of religion — possibly its most important — is a zealous urge to conquer evil with an esoteric yet self-evident truth. This is exactly what one gets reading the gospels of Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and their ilk: prophecies of the utopia that will bloom upon attaining an environment of complete freedom, and revulsion at the evil of collective action. "Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad," wrote Friedrich Hayek in 1960. Faith indeed.

That sentiment was echoed by an unlikely source this week, but in the form of a harsh criticism. "Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system."," Pope Francis wrote. 

Wow, the "sacralized workings" of marketism. It's a withering but entirely appropriate aspersion to cast on the radical right's devotion to laissez-faire economics. It denigrates their political philosophy, founded so heavily on quantifiable and numbers analysis, as a common superstition like any other. Rail against your imagined devils as much as you want, libertarians — Keynesianism, regulation, taxes, there are many to choose from — your gospel and your proof is as imagined as any religion's.

The fact that the critique was written by the Ppope Francis, the leader of the world's largest purveyor of superstitious gospel, signals an important shift in the terms of our social contract.

In a manifesto published on Tuesday, the pontiff lengthily criticized the results, if not the utopian goals, of unrestrained capitalism, which he called "a new tyranny." In doing so, he seemed to meet the specter as somewhat of equal stature to his own Catholicism — equal and opposite, that is. In the document, called an apostolic exhortation, the Ppope Francis regarded our current consumerist culture not as the product of poor discipline and weak morality, but, correctly and perceptively, as a self-contained system of ethics unto itself.
"Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape,."he wrote. 

What the Ppope presumably sought to clarify was the direct conflict between the teachings of the Beatitudes and the teachings of profit maximization, two philosophies that were never harmonious but which have been jockeying for prominence in our society since the Enlightenment. Unstated but equally evident in this document, however, is the Church's capitulation in that fight. The Ppope's strained reminder of Catholic ethics outlines the gradual usurpation that has, by now, become nearly complete. The official ethics — and therefore language — of power has fully swapped Judeo-Christianity with economics.

"It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new," wrote Francisthe Ppope. That something is a wholesale relegation of God and all hHis attendant commandments to the used bin. From the heights of Catholic governmental power, when its injunctions were interpreted as the bases for inquisitions, lucre, and wars, it has been stripped of its institutional political power. In its place is the gospel of the dollar.
And in a society that has collectively agreed to such a shift, the most dogmatic, cultish offshoot of the state religion are the libertarians. They promote an economic zealotry that tends to alienate those of us who generally support the transformative, peace-engendering effects of trade, but who acknowledge the humanistic cost of a system in which "Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded," in the Ppope's eloquent phrasing.

There are people on the right who see the commodification of people (and capital, for that matter) as a wholly positive development. Finally, they say, this is an honest way to gauge people. Forget judge lest not ye be judged — the opposite, in fact: you now have a concrete worth. (Note that most of the adherents of this religious-grade marketism are well-prepared to be judged based on their status.) It is an easy rubric and an abdication of the personal responsibility upon which Christian ethics used to insist. This, I believe, is the appeal of doing what Rand did: trading in a cross for a dollar sign, in life and in death. The larger culture has followed suit.

The gist of Tuesday's statement is more or less a sign that the Vatican has gotten the message. Bereft of its political clout, the once mighty Church's attention is reverting to the unglamorous principles that founded the whole enterprise, namely, social justice. It's an interesting new tension: by championing the less fortunate against the wealthy, the Church must wade into long-unpracticed territory and directly confront the pedestal on which it relatively recently sat. The instruction to "Render unto Caesar" has given way to this: "The idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy [lacks] a truly human purpose. ...…. Man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption." A change of tune, to be sure.