Sorry, Christianity and socialism do not mix.
Maybe you are a kind-hearted softie who wants peace, love, and justice
for everyone. Or perhaps you are a
political opportunist seeking an attractive platform. Or maybe, economics and history are just not
your thing.
Christianity and socialism are ice cream and pickles.
·
Jesus sacrificed his life for the benefit of
mankind.
o Socialism killed countless millions
·
Jesus
multiplied the loaves and
fishes.
o Socialism creates famine, shortages,
rationing, and starvation.
·
Jesus
said, “The truth will set
you free”. He invited dissenters to
question him.
o Socialism puts dissenters in jail, labor camps, and gulags. It “disappears” them.
·
Christianity says Do not put your trust in princes, in
mortals, in whom there is no help”
o Socialism cedes authority to The State and its bureaucracy.
· Christianity accepts material inequality but calls the well-to-do to extend voluntary charity to the poor
o Socialism makes everyone poor.
·
Jesus
gave all glory and honor
to his Father in Heaven.
o Socialism is a secular faith that worships idols like Marx, Lenin, and
Mao.
Marx and Engels envisioned communism to be the
historically logical successor to advanced capitalism. They conceded that capitalist investment
created the most effective system of material production the world had ever
known. They argued that once the
capitalist “means of production” - the factories, mines, mills, ships, and
railroads were built, the “exploited” workers would revolt and take control of
this established infrastructure.
It didn’t
work out that way. As the capitalist
investors made money, their workers grew richer as well. For workers, this meant increased wages,
improved working conditions, fringe benefits, shorter workdays, five-day
workweeks, greater leisure time, and the wherewithal to have more fun when away
from work.
The
Revolution never happened in the prosperous West or any advanced economy. Communist revolutionaries only succeeded in
backward agrarian nations, most notably Russia and China. Nor was the
revolution in these countries a proletariat workers' uprising as
predicted. Communist revolutions were
always coups by a small band of elite agitators who displaced existing
governments and installed themselves in power.
Undeveloped
and backward Latin America was the next logical target.
The
bastard Liberation Theology was conceived in sultry South America when Satan
crawled into bed with some Catholic clergy.
What is it?
“Broadly speaking, liberation theology is a social and political movement within the church that attempts to interpret the gospel of Jesus Christ through the lived experiences of oppressed people
…some strains of liberation theology used Marxist economic theory, applying it to the gospel. In this interpretation, Jesus becomes the “liberator”
Two
recent Popes grew up under the boot of totalitarian socialism, Pope John Paul
II under communism and Pope Benedict XVI under the Nazis.
Before he
was Pope Benedict, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, smelled a familiar rat. First
Things reports that as the prefect for the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger endorsed Liberation Theology's goal of aiding
the poor,
“But
he also found elements that could not be reconciled with Christianity. He
issued two instructions on liberation theology, in 1984 and 1986, warning
against ‘uncritical borrowings from Marxist ideology’ and the ‘politicization
of the tenets of the faith.’”
In the same article, Gerhard
Cardinal Müller observes:
As
for Marxism, it began in an analysis of the Industrial Revolution and its
tremendous social impact. But in its ideological form, in its militant atheism
and its reduction of human beings to an amalgamation of social conditions, it
contradicts the personhood of man in his relation to God and necessarily ends
in the anti-humanism or post-humanism of political or technocratic
totalitarianism. Communism is the history of its own refutation.
If this weren’t damning
enough, Fr. Clodovis Boff, one of Liberation Theology’s original architects, has
recanted in his new book, The
Crisis of Liberation Theology in the Catholic Church.
Per the publisher’s
statement:
Boff
argues that while Liberation Theology performed a genuine service in calling
attention to the poor, it often lost its grounding by subordinating Christ to
social and political aims. The result, he contends, is a "dense mental
fog" that has obscured the true nature of faith and weakened the Church's
witness.
Our two
most recent Pontiffs both served for decades in Latin America. It seems the Liberation Theology bug bit both.
Yes, the Church
teaches a “preferential option for the poor.”
But, Your Holiness, this doesn’t
mean that we need to create more poor people.
That’s what socialism and state--imposed poverty relief programs do.
Why not make them rich instead? That’s done by giving them liberty to create, buy, sell, trade, invent, innovate, invest, succeed, and fail to their hearts’ content.
If you
follow the logic of Isabel
Paterson in her masterwork, The
God of the Machine, the Brits who settled the northeast of North
America lived in a "Society of Contract” while the Iberians who colonized South
America imported a "Society of Status".
A Society
of Contract is grounded in the recognition of an individual’s inalienable,
God-given right to life. Per Google AI,
this implies:
- Voluntary Agreement:
In this framework, individuals are completely free to act, produce, and negotiate
agreements on their own terms.
- Role of Government:
Government exists solely as a necessary evil or a "police
organization". It has no intrinsic authority of its own and acts
strictly as a neutral witness to a contract, holding a forfeit for the
parties and enforcing penalties only when individual rights are infringed
upon.
- Energy Flow: Because
individuals have the agency to move and create on their own initiative,
this society acts as a high-potential conductor for human energy and
economic productivity.
On the southern
continent, its Society of Status was a system of coercion, stagnation, and
state supremacy. Likewise, this Implied:
- Permission Over Rights:
In a status-based system, individuals have no inherent rights; they exist
purely on sufferance and require permission from political authorities to
act.
- State Monopoly: Government
functions as a monopoly that imposes rigid restrictions, controls the flow
of goods, and attempts to "ensure" or regulate competition.
Paterson notes that this intervention fundamentally misinterprets human
nature: "The vital functions of a living creature do not wait on
permission; and unless a person is already able to act of his own motion,
he cannot obey a command."
- Lower Economic Potential:
Because human energy is choked by regulatory approvals, top-down commands,
and political expropriation, a Society of Status is inherently geared to a
much lower potential of energy, leading to poverty and economic collapse.
Three hundred
years of history testify that North America, with its Anglo traditions, flourished
while most of Latin America languished.
In South
America, the transition from colonialism to Marxism was just a substitution of one
taskmaster for another. Things never improved. In one
exception, Venezuela, where life did get markedly better, it crashed and burned
under the communists.
In her Bourgeois
Trilogy, Deirdre McCloskey
examines the Great Enrichment, which is the roughly 3,000-percent increase in
real income per capita that started around 1800 in northwestern Europe and
spread globally. The world got rich,
she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a
new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism. The Bourgeois Trilogy is condensed in a summary
volume: Leave
Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich
McCloskey
means liberalism in the classic sense. Allow
me to repeat myself. This means liberty
to create, buy, sell, trade, invent, innovate, invest, succeed, and fail to their
hearts’ content.
This came about due to a new respect accorded to the Bourgeoisie in the West. Heretofore, those who prospered by buying, selling, inventing, and innovating were looked down upon as something unnatural and unholy by the ruling castes: the Nobility and the Priests.
Ludwig
von Mises destroyed socialist theory over a century ago. The Economic Calculation Problem lies at the
heart of his critique. Mises’s central
thesis is that rational economic calculation is impossible in a socialist
economy. Without private property in the means of production, there is no
competitive market for capital goods, which means no genuine market prices can
form for raw materials, machinery, or intermediate inputs. Without these price
signals, central planners cannot measure relative scarcity or determine whether
a production method is efficient or wasteful.
In fact,
the central planners' decisions often prove to be disastrous and deadly. Witness the starvation in the USSR and Red
China that was brought on by bad central planning decisions. Witness the long lines and shortages in all
centrally planned economies throughout the world.
Holy Father,
you have the charlatan, Karl Marx, whispering in one ear. Please give equal time and careful consideration
to what Mises has to say. The advice of
Mises and McCloskey will advance the Church’s mission to lift the poor from
misery. Any other way makes things
worse.
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the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
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