Give a Man a Fish

Pope Francis set the political blogosphere afire with words that apparently condemn capitalism and free markets in a recently released manifesto. Much has been written by many about this, so much so that I felt uneasy pulling quotes of the manifesto from the press or from blogs. Fortunately, the Vatican offers the manifesto in English on the Web. The relevant passage (page 45):

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised Ð they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and na•ve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us some- thing new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

This excerpt strongly suggests to me that the Pope doesn’t actually understand the concept of and the principles underlying free markets, that he falsely conflates free markets with the much more prevalent system of corporatism that people all over the world endure, and that the desire to end inequality has led to the rise of the most oppressive, destructive and murderous nations and regimes in the world’s history.

There is mention of stock markets, an implication that they represent capitalism. Yet – how capitalistic are the stock markets? They are massively regulated by government, they are funded by money borrowed from government at interest rates completely detached from any sorts of market forces, and they are populated at the top by companies who have either implicit or explicit guarantees and protections against failure and loss from government. Yes, markets in the abstract are capitalistic structures, and yes, the activities and transactions therein are capitalistic in that they are voluntary exchanges of wealth, but can we truly consider the excesses that many decry to be the product of capitalism?

There is also the “trickle-down” bogeyman, which by its sound and its derogatory past use invokes images of wealthy elite allowing scraps from their overfull tables to land on the floor for the masses to scramble after. Yet capitalism is not about trickle-down, it is not about the exploitation of many by a few. Capitalism is about the free exchange of goods and services for mutual benefit. The billionaire capitalist who employs people in his factories, businesses and offices pays those people. Those who work for him, or those who sell him goods and services outside of direct employment by him, all do so voluntarily in a capitalist system. Furthermore, he must compete for their labor, their goods and services with others, rich and not-rich. What of exploitation and predation? Dig in just a bit and you’ll overwhelmingly find some factors that facilitate that exploitation and predation – factors that are decidedly NOT capitalistic. Factors such as protectionist laws, rules that favor the oppressor, government interventions that work against the mobility and freedom of contract that are hallmarks of capitalism and free markets, corruption, lack of property rights, lack of recourse in contract enforcement, and the like. These factors can be divided into those that arise from political corruption and oppression and those that arise from well-intentioned efforts by government to help.

Yet the latter is what the pope is calling for, from what I gather. Reading on, we find this gem:

This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.

Any form of control? In the USA alone, the Federal Register, the compendium of all federal regulations in effect, is nearly 80,000 pages long. The US federal tax code is 74,000 pages long. There are well over a thousand government agencies (no one, not even the government, seems to know exactly how many). Autonomy in the marketplace is virtually nonexistent. Every economic transaction is regulated in countless different ways – none of these represent “capitalism.” One might think that, with so much regulation and oversight, the nation and the world would have achieved that wonderful end state where there was no poverty, no one was left wanting, no elderly homeless persons dying of exposure. Even without the Pope’s lament, we know that hasn’t come to pass, either in the supposedly capitalistic nations and societies of today or in the socialist and communist utopias of the last century.

Yet, even with the ever-increasing burden imposed by government, it is the forces of capitalism and the free market that have created all the wealth the pope is decrying and that have elevated billions from poverty and subsistence living. It is the creation of wealth by human action and the voluntary exchange of that wealth with others, not the trickling down of largesse from up high, that elevates people’s standards of living.

Consider a bushel of fish in possession of a fisherman. It is a thing of value. It has value because the fisherman bought, rented or built a boat, bought, rented or crafted a net, or a hook and line, or a fishing pole, or a spear, and went out in the ocean or river or lake or stream and harvested the fish. If he gives part of that bushel of fish away, he is charitable. But, once the fish is consumed, neither he nor the recipient have anything to show for that act of charity, apart from getting the recipient a few hours further along in his life. The fisherman is still on the hook, so to speak, for the time and effort he invested in harvesting that bushel of fish. The recipient, after he has digested the fish, is in the same predicament as before. The fisherman has had his efforts diluted by feeding an extra mouth, and the recipient remains in need or want of charity.

Teach the recipient to fish, or invite him onto the boat and have him assist in the harvesting of fish, and now both the fisherman and the other man are working productively to harvest fish. Together, they can harvest more fish in the same amount of time than the fisherman alone could. The fisherman can then pay the other man for his effort, and both the fisherman and the recipient are better off. Both have created wealth, both have done so in their own interests, both have prospered, yet neither has engaged in charity.

Simplistic? Yes. But simplicity doesn’t obviate truth.

Now consider some “complications” in the relationship between the fisherman and the worker. The fisherman comes to shore one day and finds a group of men, all armed, waiting for him. They inform him that he is to hand over half his catch every day. They also inform the worker that he has to forego part of his wage every day. Neither is given a choice, so they comply. The next day, the fisherman comes to shore and finds a different group of men, all armed, waiting for him. They inform him that they are there to check over his boat and make sure it is seaworthy, that the sails are made from proper materials, that the mast’s dimensions are consistent with numbers they have in a book, that the boat has a lavatory that’s of certain dimensions, that the steps going into the hold are spaced in an appropriate fashion, that the rungs of the ladder up the side of the boat are wide enough and not too far apart, that life preservers and first aid equipment is not only present, but approved by their cohorts, and so forth. The fisherman has no choice, so he allows them to check everything. They take a part of his harvest as their “fee” for doing what they did, and write him a set of instructions on what to correct. Again, he has no choice, so he borrows money to make the corrections. A month later, yet another group of armed men greet the fisherman at the doc, They are there they tell him, to ensure that the worker is provided with adequate and nutritious meals while on the boat, that the wage he is paid is at least a certain amount, that the worker is provided with certain equipment, that the hours he works do not exceed a certain total, that he is provided with certain other compensation, and so forth. Again, the fisherman has no choice, so he complies.

At this point, the fisherman finds that he and the worker together cannot harvest enough fish to pay the armed men who demand their share, to pay the loan needed to satisfy the demands of the second group of armed men, to pay the worker as has been dictated by the third group of armed men, to cover the expenses of going out to fish every day, and to feed the fisherman and his family. He figures out that he can get by if he goes back to fishing by himself, so he lets the worker go. The worker is out of a job now and cannot earn enough to feed himself. Nor can the fisherman offer him fish as an act of charity, since he has barely enough for his family.

The worker does find that there is a large fishing boat, one that employs hundreds of workers, that will give him a job because of what he learned from the fisherman. He considers himself lucky, because there are many others who don’t have the skills he has, and are unable to find work. He doesn’t worry about them too much though, because the first group of armed men is giving some of what they take from the fishermen to them so they can eat. That group of armed men does so because those unemployed people are the ones who put them in power in the first place. Yet, he wonders how long that can go on, because the unemployed, unlike him, aren’t helping harvest fish. He also laments the plight of the fisherman, seeing in that plight his own future – a future where he might have once hoped to build or buy his own boat and train and employ his own workers, but no longer. He knows that his future will be forever one of working on that or another boat, for a very wealthy owner, with little or no hope of rising above the rank of worker.

Again, simplistic in its own fashion, but therein lie the causes and sources for all the problems that the Pope mistakenly lays at the feet of capitalism. The wealthy large boat owner is all too happy to have the armed men impose all those rules and requirements on the lonely fisherman, because without them that lonely fisherman would better be able to compete. All those rules, justified under the guise of helping the unemployed and unskilled and protecting the fisherman’s worker, serve to benefit the wealthy boat owner. And, make no mistake, there is NOTHING capitalistic or free market about those rules or their imposition by force. The wealthy boat owner, who very likely had a hand in writing all the rules that were imposed on the fisherman, benefits and becomes wealthier. The fisherman, on the other hand, finds it much harder to become wealthy and the worker is all but certainly destined to remain in his current economic stratum for the rest of his life.

Does it always work this way? No. Does government have a purpose in our lives? Yes. Yet how much government do we need? Does the continued failure of government to rid the world of poverty and want justify ever more government? Does the growth in the size and scope of government suggest that, perhaps, it isn’t the solution? Does the stated goal of ridding the world of inequality have any connection to reality, any chance of actualization? Is it even something to be desired, let alone achieved?

There is a terrible misunderstanding out there about what capitalism actually is. It’s one that is happily propagated by statists, both altruistic and selfishly nefarious, in furtherance of their ideas and goals. It has long been fashionable to excoriate capitalism, to blame it for anything and any situation that seems unfair, unjust or unlikeable. It is constantly linked with the sins of greed, gluttony and pride, a very powerful link given the Judeo-Christian values of the West. Yet what of the proposed alternative? Isn’t forced redistribution as actually sinful as capitalism is purported to be? Isn’t redistribution rooted in envy, sloth, wrath and even lust? Isn’t redistribution associated with its own versions of greed, gluttony and pride? How often do you see statist politicians claim the government has taken enough, redistributed enough, “knocked down” the wealthy sufficiently? How often do they decry those that demand to be given the wealth of others as slothful, or envious, or greedy? Isn’t the greater sin to covet that which another has? Shouldn’t the Pope’s message be about the ills and evils associated with the forcible taking of that which one has earned?

Statism and redistribution have been so widely used, so prevalent in the past century of human history, that we should have witnessed by now the achievement of many, if not all, the goals that the statists claim to seek. Certainly we haven’t. Yet despite this lack of success, and despite many examples of disastrous failure, statism and redistribution are still the clarion calls of so many world leaders, even those who embrace peace and love. The lack of awareness and illogic of it all is breathtaking. The blindness to the truth can only be explained by confirmation bias, by an inherent certainty that one’s ideas are correct in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary.

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. The act of giving is charitable, it is extolled by leaders religious and secular, and it satisfies an innate biological imperative (we feel good when we help others). It’s not a bad thing to do, especially if the man’s need is immediate and if you possess surplus fish. But it is an ephemeral act. It gets the man through the day, but the next day he will still be in need. It also, if repeated and if institutionalized, disincentivizes the man from taking action to reduce or eliminate his need for charity. It discourages the creation of wealth – wealth that the man could create through his own effort – and wastefully expends some of the wealth you have created. It also severs the link between you and the man you’re helping, and makes it more difficult to teach him, to employ him, to involve him in the creation of wealth. On the other hand, helping the man get through the day and teaching him to fish will benefit you both.