Care for the vulnerable is not unique to one religion. All major philosophies share this goal, religious or otherwise. But how does religious belief intersect with capitalism?
Many goodhearted people mistrust markets. They believe that free enterprise worsens inequality and encourages greed and materialism. Many worry that capitalism sows division and economic exclusion. These fears are reasonable.
But rejecting free enterprise is the wrong approach. In a recent essay in American Magazine, I wrote that free enterprise is not inherently moral or immoral. However, it is humanity’s best tool for alleviating mass-scale poverty. It empowers billions of people to build happier lives filled with work and security.
I know you care about these big questions as much as I do.
Here are a couple excerpts from the article about my journey toward Catholicism and the free market.
As a Seattle-born bohemian living in Barcelona, my political views were predictably progressive. But my thinking began to change in my late 20s upon returning to college, which I did by correspondence while working as a musician.
I fancied myself a social justice warrior and regarded capitalism with a moderately hostile predisposition. I ‘knew’ what everyone knows: Capitalism is great for the rich but terrible for the poor. The natural progression of free enterprise is that the rich and powerful accumulate more and more of the world’s resources while the poor are exploited. That state of affairs might be fine for a follower of Ayn Rand, but it is hardly consistent for a devotee of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Right? …
As I taught about the anti-poverty properties of free enterprise, a common objection—especially among my Catholic friends—remained. ‘Okay,’ many said, ‘I see that markets have pulled up the living standards of billions, and that’s great. But they haven’t pulled people up equally. In fact, capitalism has created more inequality than we have ever seen.’ This spawns ancillary concerns about the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor, and the rising inequality of opportunity. My challenge as a Catholic economist was to answer these questions in good faith.
The evidence on income inequality seems to be all around us and irrefutable, particularly in the United States. From 1979 to today, the income won by the ‘top 1 percent’ of Americans has surged by roughly 200 percent, while the bottom four-fifths have seen income growth of only about 40 percent. Today, the share of income that flows to the top 10 percent is higher than it has been since at any point since 1928, the peak of the bubble in the Roaring Twenties. And our lackluster ‘recovery’ following the Great Recession likely amplified these long-run trends. Emmanuel Saez, a University of California economist, estimates that 95 percent of all the country’s income growth from 2009 to 2012 wound up in the hands of the top 1 percent.
Taking this evidence on its face, it is easy to conclude that our capitalist system is hopelessly flawed. Digging deeper, however, produces a more textured story.
Please read the essay and let me know what you think on Twitter @arthurbrooks. If you enjoy it, pass it along to a friend or colleague — especially someone who is skeptical of capitalism.
