{"id":362232,"date":"2018-05-22T04:43:51","date_gmt":"2018-05-22T03:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/vaticanonomics-lewrockwell\/"},"modified":"2018-05-22T04:43:51","modified_gmt":"2018-05-22T03:43:51","slug":"vaticanonomics-lewrockwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/vaticanonomics-lewrockwell\/","title":{"rendered":"Vaticanonomics &#8211; LewRockwell"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t                            \t<!-- S3 Cache --><!-- S3:S3:Original -->\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p>The Vatican recently released a report on \u201cthe present economic-financial system\u201d of the world that is typical of all pronouncements about economics from the Catholic Church bureaucracy:\u00a0 It is astoundingly ignorant of even elementary economic concepts, and is written in the language of a C-\/D+ high school writing assignment. \u00a0There is confusion over the definition of very simple economic concepts like profit and GDP.\u00a0 \u00a0There are 49 footnotes, but none of them makes reference to <em>any <\/em>economic literature.\u00a0 They are mostly speeches by Catholic clergy who don\u2019t seem to have much knowledge at all of the subject they are pontificating about.<\/p>\n<p>Entitled \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/press.vatican.va\/content\/salastampa\/en\/bollettino\/pubblico\/2018\/05\/17\/180517a.html\">Oeconomicae et pecuniariae quaestiones<\/a>\u201d, the report expresses alarm about \u201cthe growing influence of financial markets on the material well-being of most of humankind\u201d and urges more government intervention, more regulation, more politics, more welfarism, more central planning, more taxes, and less freedom.\u00a0 As I said, it is typical of all such pronouncements about \u201cCatholic social teaching\u201d in the area of economics.<\/p>\n<p>The first assumption the report makes is that there are no ethical guidelines in markets.\u00a0 The report then declares that the economy \u201cneeds ethics in order to function correctly.\u201d\u00a0 And the kind of ethics needs to be \u201cpeople-centred (sic),\u201d says the Vatican.\u00a0 Well, yah.\u00a0 Is there any other kind of ethics other than human-centered?\u00a0 Robot-centered??\u00a0 Does <em>no one<\/em> in the business world have <em>any<\/em> ethical guidelines, as the Vatican asserts?<\/p>\n<p>There are almost too many straw-man arguments in the Vatican report to count.\u00a0 One of the first ones is the contention that in \u201cour contemporary age\u201d the \u201chuman person\u201d is understood \u201cindividualistically,\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lewrockwell.com\/2018\/05\/thomas-dilorenzo\/vaticanonomics\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Vatican recently released a report on \u201cthe present economic-financial system\u201d of the world that is typical of all pronouncements about economics from the Catholic Church bureaucracy:\u00a0 It is astoundingly ignorant of even elementary economic concepts, and is written in the language of a C-\/D+ high school writing assignment. \u00a0There is confusion over the definition [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-362232","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}