Pisspoor Guardian gets it wrong again

Adam Brereton writing in the increasingly pisspoor Guardian either in ignorance or wilfully fails to understand Pope Francis on Capitalism. He doesn’t like Rerum Novarum – an old favourite of this blog – either, almost certainly because it limits the lawful authority of the State over man, making human duties and obligations of those things that socialists imagine should be enforced and imposed by an all-powerful State. 

And Rerum Novarum comments on the same world as that of Burke and Adam Smith – a world in which a man who invests his savings in tools and his time in acquiring skills, to sell the products of both on his own account, is a Capitalist. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker owe their livelihood to the communities they serve; they have an interest in the wealth and well-being of their fellows, as customers and purchasers of the products of their craft, to ensure their own wealth and well-being. Their belonging to the ‘little platoons’ creates bonds and obligations in common that act for the common good. Rerum Novarum provides a spiritual wrap for Burke and Smith and it all fits together in a very localist way. 

Brereton and those like him repeat the most stupid of mistakes. The village butcher and Global Mega-Pharma plc are equivalent capitalists under Brereton’s construct, there being no Germanic compound words in English to distinguish small local responsible capitalists and large global rapacious and predatory capitalists. But let’s be clear – the two are very different creatures. 

This is clear in the Pope’s Apostolic Exhortation; it is the de-humanity of the global mega-firms, the international banks, the corporates and conglomerates to whom his comments are addressed. Francis says ‘No’. No to an economy of exclusion, No to a new idolatry of money, No to a financial system that rules rather than serves, No to the inequality that spawns violence and No to selfishness and spiritual sloth. I have no problem at all with any of this; it’s a break from the Marxist Catholicism of the South American ‘liberation’ movement and from an Argentine Pope excellent stuff indeed. 

Brereton hates all of this. A doctrine that Man must have authority over not only the State, but of global Statist corporations, is directly at odds with left-wing authoritarianism and Central Statism. Well, let him pick the bones from it – Francis has found an echo and hit the spot, and thank God for it.