Pope Wrong About Capitalism
When Pope Francis decried that the culture of prosperity deadens us all and blamed it on capitalism last December, that riled more than a few capitalists. One of them is Marian Tupy, senior policy analyst at the Cato Institute and editor of the website Human Progress, who tells Reason.TV’s Nick Gillespie that Pope Francis is wrong on two counts.
“First of all, the Pope is under the impression that the markets are free. That the markets are unfettered. He uses the expression ‘totally autonomous markets.’ In fact, over the past 20 years Washington alone has produced some 80,000 regulations … we don’t really have free markets as such. And secondly, what we see in countries with a level of great economic freedom, the poor are richer, they own a greater share of national wealth, there is less corruption and there are greater political and civil liberties.”
