.
"States have something more dangerous than even the
most ruthless operator in a free market: coercion." Pope Francis, Nota Bene
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11/29/13, "The Problem of Selfishness," NRO, Kevin D. Williamson
"Political self-interest is no less selfish than economic self-interest."
"On
the eve of Thanksgiving, the president (Obama), a guest of Magic Johnson’s,
chided the nation on how “selfishly” it conducts its politics....
What could it possibly mean to be lectured on selfishness by a man whose
entire career has been dedicated to no cause other than the cause of
himself? “Selfishness” has been conflated with materialism and greed,
but the literal meaning of the word is excessive devotion to one’s self
and one’s interests. To be unselfish is to be ready to give up that
which one holds most dear; for some men, that is money, but what is
money to a president of the United States, who knows that in retirement
he can support himself in ducal style with one day’s work a month at
Bill Clinton rates, in princely style with two days’ work, and in
imperial style with three? Money is an abstraction to a retired
president. But the thing that he really cares about — power — Barack
Obama guards in a fashion more miserly than that of any mythical dragon
watching his horde....
When you think like that, it becomes difficult to tell the difference
between the public good and one’s own political good. In extreme form
this is megalomania. In less extreme form, it leads to things like
passing health-care bills either not knowing what they contain or
knowing and not caring, on the theory that any shortcomings can be
worked out post facto — which is, if you think about it, only another
way of saying that the content of the law is not important, only the
transference of power from the legislative to the executive branch, from
the people’s house to the president. Put another way: This means that
adding to presidential power is by definition in the public interest, so
long as the president is Barack Obama. But to a man like our president,
that does not look like selfishness; after all, he is not trying to
make himself rich, and if he’s trying to make himself powerful,
he has what he believes are impeccable reasons for doing so. At some
point, though, he must, if he has not entirely lost the capacity for
introspection, meditate upon the fact that he was forced to lie to the
public and bribe his colleagues to get his health-care agenda passed.
For a man with a more robust capacity for self-reflection, that would
temper his belief in the identity of his own political good and the
public good.
The notion that the pursuit of power is somehow less selfish than the pursuit of money found its way into Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium,
in which the pope rehearses some ancient Catholic criticisms of market
liberalism that have excited anti-capitalists throughout the world, who
are always eager for any scrap of economic encouragement from an
institution and a man with views they otherwise detest utterly....
As the chief executive of the largest and most successful institution in
human history, Pope Francis naturally takes an institutionalist view of
things; like all of his predecessors, at least so far as I am aware, he
fails to appreciate that the actual result of the free-market economy
is not to transfer power away from states to corporations but from
states and corporations to people. The “truly human purpose” he seeks
may be found in many millions of households in poor countries, where
bellies are more full and roofs more secure than they were a generation
ago, owing mainly to the expansion of global trade. The pope writes that
it is an error to believe that “economic growth, encouraged by a free
market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and
inclusiveness in the world.” This is true. But then, neither will the
building of churches, legislatures, or courthouses. People still have to
be good. But it is easier to feed the Lord’s sheep where food is
plentiful.
The pope is a very good man, and what very good men have in common with
very bad men is that they tend to assume that the world is full of men
who are similar to themselves. Thus, his rhetorical reliance upon
“states, charged with vigilance for the common good,” an aspirational
sentiment rather than a factual statement. States should act in the
public good, but there is that problem of selfishness, which
everybody sees in the market
but overlooks in politics.
Political self-interest is no less selfish than is economic
self-interest, and states have something more dangerous than even the
most ruthless operator in a free market: coercion. Pope Francis might
consider the case of President Obama, whose vision of the public good
includes millions of federally subsidized abortions, and ask himself
whether “vigilance for the common good” explains what politics is or what he wishes it were....
If ever the Church’s economic thinkers get over their 19th-century model
of the relationship between state and market, they might appreciate
that spontaneous orders and distributed economic forces could produce
some truly radical outcomes in a world in which a billion or more people
shared a vision of justice and mercy. The pope’s job in part is to
supply that vision; unhappily, the default Catholic position seems to be
delegating economic justice to the state, under the mistaken theory
that its ministers are somehow less selfish than are the men who build
and create and trade for a living rather than expropriate. Strange that a
man who labored under the shadow of Perón has not come to that
conclusion on his own." (end of article) via Free Rep.
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Added: Also from the article describing Obama's selfishness: "The man is mired in self, positively suffocating in self: self-importance, self-regard, self-aggrandizement." Perfect. This isn't to say Obama is unique among radical leftists. The radical left billionaires who've anointed and enabled him since his earliest days are the same.
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