The Pope and the Poor

[Magnus]

There have been numerous news articles describing Francis I, the new Supreme Pontiff, as a "champion of the poor" and an exemplar of simplicity and economic humility.  For example, the new Vicar of Christ was reported to have immediately followed his ascension to the office of Governor of the World by stopping by his hotel to pay his bill and collect his luggage.  His Holiness is also said to have vacated the splendid palace provided for him as the Cardinal of Buenos Aires to live instead in an ordinary apartment. The Servant of the Servants of God is also said to routinely travel by taking the bus instead of a chauffeured car. The Holy Father's rejection of consumption is conspicuous, indeed.

However, despite the fact that the Father of Kings has made poverty the center of his work as Cardinal, the Shepherd of the Universal Church has also, we are told, rejected the doctrine known as "Liberation Theology," which is essentially churchified Marxism. 

So, the question on the minds of religious people (a.k.a. 99% of the people of the world, including secularists like Obama, whose religion is economic vengeance) is -- What does the new Bishop of Rome propose as the best way of eradicating poverty?

The first thing that the Supreme Pastor suggested, apparently, in his new role as Successor of St. Peter, is to take the money that his fellow South Americans would have spent on traveling to Rome, and instead give that money to the poor.

I've been experiencing all sorts of feelings in light of these news stories.  On the one hand, I'm a stone cold atheist, so the theater of it all is in equal parts annoying and amusing. 

But the discussions of alleviating poverty has really gotten under my skin. I spent many years of my young life in a kind of voluntary poverty.  (OK, well, it was partially involuntary, too.)  I see the same revolting displays of wealth that everyone else sees -- assholes with all kinds of trinkets, toys meant for overgrown children, and all the usual crap that socialists, from Veblen on down, have decried as consumerism.  I get it. 

I don't live that way anymore, because I realize now that having a fetishistic attitude toward poverty was an expression of my own problems, but I understand where the anti-rich sentiment is coming from.  I grew up with a lot of those people -- about half of my grade school classmates were third- and fourth-generation inheritors of passive wealth, primarily oil revenue, which (through no effort or skill of their own) happened to be located underneath otherwise near-worthless land that their great-grandparents owned and had been trying to farm to scrape out a living off of, when a smart guy in Germany named "Benz" happened to invent a machine that happened to need oil in order to run.  So, about a hundred years ago, a lot of multimillionaires were created, virtually overnight, and their descendents are still living in the same part of the world, living off the proceeds.  (Without exception, by the way, by the time this oil money had trickled its way down to my age group, everyone who had inherited vast sums of money grew up to be absolutely miserable, divorced, on anti-depressants, with multiple experiences with substance abuse treatments.  These are not happy, stable people.) 

But on the other hand, I am also a 100% market anarchist.  I would never in a million years use force, governmental or otherwise, to encumber, inhibit, or appropriate a single penny of someone else's money or property.  I have no doubt that such tactics have been amply proven to cause nothing but economic decline, and yield (if at all) only a VERY minute, and temporary boost of cash to the recipient of ill-gotten gains.

I also completely reject the church's system of anonymous donations as a means of alleviating systemic poverty.  It does virtually nothing, and can make problems worse.  If anything, welfare payments forestall the implementation of real changes in people's lives that could actually help them.  Poverty exists for specific reasons -- usually a lack of property rights (government), or an extremely high rate of violence (slums), or both (when government creates ultra-violent slums).  Poverty is systemic, not the result of a lack of cash at the moment. 

Consumerism does not cause poverty.  Aggressive violence causes poverty.

Also, it's all too easy to ignore or overlook real wealth, and pretend that it's not there. For example, the bus that the new Rock of the Church used to take to get around town?  It's actually an extraordinary piece of machinery.  It's made from 10,000 moving parts, all made in hundreds of places by thousands of people.  I'm sure the original St. Francis of Assisi, if he could have been transported to modern times, would have thought that the "humble" bus was the most amazing object he could ever have conceived of.  It's a marvel of markets that such a thing could even exist.  Riding a bus is hardly an example of poverty, as I'm sure the shoeless children in East Africa who walk several miles back and forth to their un-air-conditioned schools would attest.  To them, a bus would be considered pretty nice, I suspect. 

So, the theater of church and state continues, pretending to care about poverty, much as it has for a couple of thousand years.