“Humanae Vitae” Seen as Answer to Economic Crisis

Miscellaneous General
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http://www.omearaferguson.com/in-house-news/humanae-vitae-seen-as-answer-to-economic-crisis/

Financial Woes Said to Spring From Denial of Human Dignity

ROME, JULY 13, 2011 (Zenit.org) – To stop the economic problems of the world, it’s not the instruments that must change, but the people who use them, says the president of the Vatican’s Institute for the Works of Religion.

Gotti Tedeschi made this claim Wednesday at a conference on “Consequences of the Economic Crisis,” held at the Italian embassy to the Holy See.

“Benedict XVI tells us that we must not blame the instruments when in reality we are the ones who used them badly,” Tedeschi said, commenting on “Caritas in Veritate.” “It is not the instruments that must change, but man. Medicine, the economy, etc. are instruments; what makes them ethical or not is how man uses them.”

At “the origin of this crisis is not having respected wholly the life and dignity of man (‘Humanae Vitae’), and the type of progress that many must follow, an ideal progress (‘Populorum Progressio’),” he proposed.

In other words, the crisis was born from the gradual loss of awareness of the dignity of the human person, which in the end is reduced to one problem: “Is man a child of God or the evolution of a bacteria?” Tedeschi asked. “And if the end justifies the means then, consequently, life has no meaning. The difference lies in the fact that, in the secular vision, life does not have a supernatural” dimension.

He considered how the wager was “on the growth of the GNP in a consumerist way, namely, with the reduction of births.”

This has resulted in the rapid growth of the number of elderly, who thus “cannot be endured from the economic point of view.”

Rules or people

The vice president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Maurizio Lupi, stressed that the crisis is yet to be surmounted; hence, it is appropriate to ask: “What is the judgment on our responsibilities.”

The “Pope states that our weakness is not pausing to judge, when judgment is what enables us not to be removed from reality,” he said.

In “Caritas in Veritate,” the Pope destroyed that concept that for years spread in the West on the ethical neutrality of the economy, because man must be the central figure, Lupi affirmed.

He also suggested that the solution is not in bigger government.

“More rules, more state and less market” is a temptation to resist, Lupi stated, “especially if we understand that it is the person who is able to come out of the crisis. The problem is not to add more rules but to elicit the best from the person.”

To illustrate his point, he offered the example of two businessmen in north Italy who received compensation for a natural calamity that destroyed their businesses. The older one received the funds and closed down, the younger one, instead, reopened. Lupi said that in the second case, the businessman chose to reopen because he was not just thinking of himself, but also of his family and the workers of his small village.

“The underlying challenge, therefore, is to reinforce the fundamental nucleus, the family,” he said. “Economic policies that ignore this divide the ethic of the economy. It is not a Catholic thesis, though we Catholics propose it forcefully.”

The Italian official also considered the educational challenge. It is not just a question of laws and economic aid, he suggested, but of having a proper concept of the person, the family and the business, elements that give life to the very foundation of action.

Looking for help in trying to first interpret this gibberish and then deconstruct it from the Austrian perspective…

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I don’t think it’s quite fair to call it “gibberish”. Commentary of this theological nature is often deliberately nonproscriptive and predicated towards a general principle of action, rather than proposing specific plans and solutions, which is obviously not something which clergymen should be in the business of doing. It’s certainly far better than anything I’ve ever read in the mainstream secular media on the subject, which is naught but constant interventionist drum beating and organized hysteria against “speculators” and other Emersonian hobgoblins.

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I coined it gibberish because it makes little sense to ME the way it is written. Maybe something was lost in translation?

I interperate the first half to be a veiled insinuation that somehow the advent of modern birth control is to blame for population demographics which has too many old people to be supported by the young working people. The number of elderly that can be supported by those who are still productive has more to do with accunulated capital than the ratio of young to old.

I also get this sense that there is some sort of retribution fom God happening because we are depraved and not following His moral law and suffering financial meltdowns because the world is populated with evil sinners.

Throughout the whole piece I see judgment being passed on people for having individual preferences that are not congruent with the way the pope thinks our preferences should be. So what if the one business man wants to take HIS capital and retire? Why should he have a duty to reopen his business?

One thing I do like is that the author gets that more government is not the solution. But overall, I find this piece contradictory and confusing.

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It would be all fine and dandy hadn’t financial institutions directly controlled by the Vatican been involved in some pretty big scandals of their own, scandals which seem to point to a certain disregard for human life, let alone dignity. Do as I say, don’t do as I do…

You are right in calling this gibberish. It’s the usual attempt at trying to appear on higher moral ground all the while pushing for politics very dear to the Vatican itself. Business as usual.

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A lot of the stuff you get from the Vatican is hard to understand.

The gist I get is that no system will work without the people involved having a good moral compass.

When the Church tries to get into specifics is when trouble arises -see Thomas Woods for examples.

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Random points:

  1. Where is the evidence for all this, empirical or praxeoligical?

To stop the economic problems of the world, it’s not the instruments that must change, but the people who use them,

This is just another way of saying greed is to blame. The usual reply is that people are always pretty much the same, so how come greed only caused a recession now, and not earlier? Ergo the reasoning is flawed.

AE thinks just the opposite. In a free market economy [changing the instruments now in place, which are interventionist] things will get much better with no change at all to the people.

the crisis was born from the gradual loss of awareness of the dignity of the human person, which in the end is reduced to one problem: “Is man a child of God or the evolution of a bacteria?”

So before Darwin the Christian world was hunky dory? Not what history teaches us. On the contrary, people seem to be gradually, with many bumps in the road, getting kinder and less bloodthirsty as time goes on. The belief in evolution doesn’t seem to have ended that trend.

He considered how the wager was “on the growth of the GNP in a consumerist way, namely, with the reduction of births.”

This has resulted in the rapid growth of the number of elderly, who thus “cannot be endured from the economic point of view.”

Does he really think somebody planned to reduce the number of births as a way of increasing GDP? That a decrease in the pool of labor means more work will get done?

And how does less kids mean more elderly? If anything its the opposite. Yesteryear’s baby boom is today’s elderly.

Maybe he means that the elderly are so many, and the young so few because of birth control, that the young cannot feed the old anymore. This assumes that it is the job of the young to feed the old. But it need not be so. If the currency retained its value as the years go by [= gold standard], unlike what we have now, then everyone could save up for his retirement. The way it used to be. Plus, if the currency retained its value, prices would naturally go down, making it easier to support the elderly, either on their own or with some voluntary help from the young. So it’s the institutions that are messing things up here, too.

He also suggested that the solution is not in bigger government.

“More rules, more state and less market” is a temptation to resist, Lupi stated,

He got that 100% right. And it’s the single most important statement in the whole speech.

“especially if we understand that it is the person who is able to come out of the crisis. The problem is not to add more rules but to elicit the best from the person.”

Not exactly. The solution is not to add more rules, nor to elicit the best from the person, but to get rid of the existing rules that crush the economy.

  1. The tale of two businessmen seems contrived to me. The first one is not to be blamed for not wanting to work. Work is a curse imposed on mankind, according to the Bible. Conclusion: do as little as possible. And do we really know why the second one wanted to keep working? Does it matter in the least?

  2. Even if all families were rock solid, and all men were angels, it would not change anything. How can even loyal family minded angels keep the value of their money from dropping in a world of fiat money? Same with all other problems caused by intervention.

Come to think of it, the whole thing sounds a bit like blame the victim. You are poor because you don’t believe in the dignty of man and you don’t have family values and you don’t care about anyone but yourself.