Why Pope Francis’ “Joy of the Gospel” Is Important to You

Who cares about what some Pope named Francis has got to say?  Especially when he writes a letter that is no more than a outline of his game plans.  Think of a new coach who has made the measure of his team and the competition they will play against, and comes up with his game plan for how he will play as long as he is coach.  That is all this letter is.

But something is going on.  These times are different. The iron is hot, and depending on how it is struck we’ll have the shape of things to come.  This Pope is different.  He has decided to strip down, lather up, and wade into the fight.  He is striking while this iron is hot. Stalin sneered at the Pope’s lack of military divisions, but Gorbachev found out what the Pope’s armies can do.

I’ve read the letter.  It is an amazing document, and it is very easy to misread, willfully or unwittingly, as I pointed out in my rebuttal to Judge Napolitano.  There are also translation problems.

Rush Limbaugh has attacked the letter in the same way Napolitano has, so we know the tack of the right wingers.  The left wing has been rather silent, but here comes another tactic: embrace and extend.  

This writer,David Simon, does not mention the Pope’s letter, but his article tracks the letter as it  mentions points the Pope mentions.  So in this case, we have an implicit agreement of the Pope's letter but he takes what the Pope teaches somewhere that the Pope has not gone.

David Simon and I agree in a way on Marx, the way I would put it is Marx has his facts right, but his policies are bad.  Simon goes on to decry Marx for “platitudes” about the state withering away, etc.

What wrong with the state withering away?

The word trickle down is very 1980s, so I was surprised to read it in the Pope’s document.  Here it is again.

Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.

That may be what libertinism says, but not libertarianism.  Libertarians say there is a better way than force and fraud to provide for fire suppression, roads, education.  So Simon is as dishonest here as his TV show.

This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.

(Frances?  As in Pope Francis?)  Why?  Don't we have a split Israel?  Two Koreas?   Don't we have that in USA with the Indian reservations. although to genocidal purpose?  In China, one country, two systems we have, with much better results.  So why is what actually works implausible to socialists?

The idea is not implausible, since the only solution is to break the leviathan up what is failing.  Simon wants a North Korean state, and the rest want something more liberal, and some of us want a Hong Kong.

And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

Odd he leaves out the targeting in these liberal programs of people of some African heritage.  The big beneficiary of these programs are the state employees.

I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.

No, the argument regarding capitalism is not over.  Capitalism with redistribution is the problem today, that which Simon is advocating.  The redistributing part of capitalism is how we get crony capitalism, which results in all of the horrors Simon catalogs.  Simon has not advocated for any change, but then he directly benefits from the status quo.  We all love a system that works for us.

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile.

This is a straw man since, at least in the 40 years I’ve been reading economics, no one says the market is a solution to all problems.  So this is another straw man argument, or straw boy in this case.

If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level.

Thank God for that. What you call healthcare for the poor I call death panels for the poor.  And global warming is a hoax, so I truly do not want to solve that problem that does not exist.

And here is the problem: the contradictions are not negotiable, there is no room for compromise in Simon’s view, and nor on the other side.  That split is necessary to save the peace and prosperity.  Let Simon and his ilk have the Northeast, and let freedom come to the south west, and anarchy to the northwest, and we’ll watch Simon's tribe become like North Korea.

Like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela has been captured by Hollywood and the west is scrambling to hide his message.  He moved from embracing terrorism to truth commissions, and amazing change.  With truth commissions, and more facts out, the pretenses of the David Simons of the world are deflated.  Then there can be movement toward unification,or at least some sort of modus vivendi.

The document the Pope wrote is remarkable in many ways, and I’ll break up my review over several days.  I recommend you read it.

Paragraphs 98 to 175, about 1/3rd regards an attitude shift relating to preaching the Gospel, so it an be skipped if you are looking for what is applicable outside the church, as opposed to inside.

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