Demagogues' Dream

"It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining." 

"Poverty is automatic, but prosperity requires many things - none of which is equally distributed around the world or even within a given society."  (Thomas Sowell)

Sowell goes on to explain how geography, demographics, cultural and historical differences all mitigate against equality and fairness. Social scientists have documented the phenomenon of an inverse relationship between the natural resources of a country and its level of prosperity. Natural abundance can make a society lazy and dumb.

But which has a better track record of helping the less fortunate - fighting for a bigger slice of the economic pie, or producing a bigger pie?

By 2001, most Americans living below the official poverty line had central air conditioning, a motor vehicle, cable television with multiple TV sets and other amenities. 

A scholar specializing in the study of Latin America said that the official poverty level in the United States is the upper middle class in Mexico.

The much criticized market economy of the United States has done far more for the poor than the ideology of the left.

Pope Francis' own native Argentina was once among the leading economies of the world, before it was ruined by the kind of ideological notions he is now promoting around the world. (Thomas Sowell)

Rapacious Capitalism?

Matt Ridley, author of "The Rational Optimist," notes that coal supplanting wood fuel reversed deforestation, and that "fertilizer manufactured with gas halved the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of food."

The capitalist commerce that Francis disdains is the reason the portion of the planet's population living in "absolute poverty" ($1.25 a day) declined from 53 percent to 17 percent in three decades after 1981.

Even in low-income countries, writes economist Indur Goklany, life expectancy increased from between 25 to 30 years in 1900 to 62 years today.

"Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides derived from fossil fuels," he says, "are responsible for at least 60 percent of today's global food supply." Without fossil fuels, he says, global cropland would have to increase at least 150 percent - equal to the combined land areas of South America and the European Union - to meet current food demands.

Francis grew up around the rancid political culture of Peronist populism, the sterile redistributionism that has reduced his Argentina from the world's 14th highest per-capita gross domestic product in 1900 to 63rd today. Francis's agenda for the planet - "global regulatory norms" - would globalize Argentina's downward mobility. (George Will)

If there were any examples of socialism and other redistributionist schemes actually lifting millions out of poverty, rather than miring hundreds of million in misery and despair, and killing over a hundred million more...  and if pigs had wings...

Has America done enough for the benighted of the world? 

 I'll close with the wise words of blogger buddy Z:

Another thought I had when hearing the Pope feels America must hold up its end "To those given much, much must be given", I couldn't help but think of all the work we do around the world for tsunamis, hurricanes, healing in Africa and teaching new ways of planting, finding water there, and WWII and Japan and saving so many people there, having taken in millions of immigrants since our founding....etc etc etc...the list is long....... And we haven't been 'given much,' we've worked hard to be get it...with God's help.

Pope Francis, show us a country which has always done more around the world in positive ways than America...