Blogs For Victory

At least one banker is getting it:

The president of Etica Bank in Italy, Fabio Salviato, said this week that the new encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI, “Caritas in Veritate,” is a guide for redefining the world economic system.

In an interview with Vatican Radio, the 51 year-old executive and author said the encyclical is a “guide that can enlighten us in this phase of individualization of a new economic and financial system.”

He noted that the new encyclical calls for “a cultural change founded upon the centrality of the person.”

“By responding to the needs of the person, fighting against poverty, and respecting the environment a redefinition of the economical financial system will emerge,” he added.

“I believe the Holy Father has truly offered us not only a light but also a great gift, a guide for economic leaders,” Salviato continued. “And not only for them but for all those who bear responsibility in the world of politics, finance and civil society. It is a cultural point of reference and directory, of almost a technical nature, on how to build, or rebuild, the new system after this crisis and these difficulties,” he said.

There is nothing wrong with being rich but there is very much wrong with the way we’ve attempted to get rich – and if we are to build a dynamic, prosperous and equal opportunity economy, we must attend to core, moral principles in our economic dealings. We must remember that we are stewards of the things we are given – even when we assert ownership of, say, property we are really holding it in trust for the actual owner, God. We must learn that an 8% return is worthless if we haven’t actually served others by gaining it.

The error our socialist friends make is to presume that the economy is a zero sum game and that if some are well off they have done so invariably at the expense of others. This attitude leads to appeals to envy while attempting to “fix” things with programs which invariably make things worse. While there are financial sharks out there who do profit off the un- or partially-requited toil of others, we must not fall in to the immoral trap of assuming that all men who are well off are the beneficiaries of ill-gotten gains. We additionally cannot presume that all people who are poor are mere victims – some people are, indeed, shiftless. Our economy should be built to honor hard work and give such work its proper reward – even if this means that some people will have vastly more wealth than others. As long as the person is the central motivator in economics, we’re at least some what on the right track. As soon as mere accumulation of money becomes central, we’ve lost our way.

Among the things which will be noted in a moral economy is that there will be no corporations “too big to fail” – in fact, a properly functioning economy won’t have any of the monstrous, multinational corporations today’s economy has. How can a CEO in, say, New York know what the needs are in his subsidiary in Calcutta? He can’t – and he’s bound to make policy which will not help, even if it doesn’t directly harm, the people in the remote corners of his economic empire. We conservatives have correctly identified big government as the main culprit in today’s ills – but big corporation is also a problem and, in reality, big government and big corporation go hand in hand…knock out the one, and the other goes with it. We can see in the servile way that big corporations are lining up for Obama’s largesse just how closely intertwined the two things are.

We can and must build a moral economy – an economy built for people, not for bureaucrats, corporations and the manipulators of same.