On the opening page of your website today you ask readers to register their agreement or disagreement with this statement of Pope Francis: “This is our sin: Exploiting the Earth and not allowing her to give us what she has within her.”*The above originally appeared at Cafe Hayek.
This claim is laughable. History testifies unmistakably that the earth is extremely stingy in volunteering to humans “what she has within her.” Indeed, what the earth has within her are mere raw materials, by themselves useless unless and until human creativity discovers not only how to transform them into actual resources and outputs that improve human well-being (Ever try fueling your jet with crude oil?) but also how to “exploit” the earth so that she releases her materials to us at a reasonable cost.
The Pope is vocal about helping the world’s poor. I believe that he’s sincere. So I sincerely hope that he comes to realize that the greatest sin of all against humanity would be the suppression of those capitalist institutions that have proven to be the only practical means of transforming what the earth has within her into a bounty of goods and services that allows the masses, for the first time in history, to live lives of material abundance and dignity upon her.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
Monday, September 21, 2015
Pope Francis’s Fanciful – and Dangerous – View of Nature
Don Bodreaux writes WaPo:
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─“This is our sin: Exploiting the Earth and not allowing her to give us what she has within her.” This claim is laughable. History testifies unmistakably that the earth is extremely stingy in volunteering to humans “what she has within her.” ─
ReplyDeleteThe Pope would insist that the nature of our sin rests in our conceit that the Earth is ours. He's talking about a new religion.
─ [...] The Pope is vocal about helping the world’s poor. I believe that he’s sincere. ─
He's not sincere. The Pope is not a stupid man. he understands perfectly what is it that makes poor people be lifted from penury. But he's not interested in lifting people from penury; he's interested in proselytizing to the poor. If you run out of poor people, your gig is done.
Are these letters being published in the Washington Post? Or just Cafe Hayek?
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