RUTHFULLY YOURS

Right or wrong in its economic specifics, the Pontiff’s Laudato Si encyclical draws attention to the wide material gap between rich and poor and to the insuperable problem of bridging it. The Pope surely has a point, even if his nostrums are not wholly of this world.
We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against caricatures we make of them.

—Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 1954

Reading can be a pleasure and sometimes, as we all know, a chore. I confess as a Christian—albeit not of the Roman Catholic persuasion—to having not read a papal encyclical before the latest, issued on May 24. On my rough count, Laudato Si’ (On care for our common home) ran to a daunting 40,000 words or so. The flesh is weak. I was deterred. However, my interest was piqued by media commentary on the Pope’s condemnatory views, or so they were portrayed, on the role of free market forces in guiding economic affairs. It turned out to be a rewarding read.

A first thing to say is that when Pope Francis is on his “home turf”, discussing spiritual matters, he is inspirational. I had to put his words down at times because they were so powerful and moving. On the other hand, his wide-ranging comments on the environment, to which the encyclical was primarily directed, were unremittingly one-sided. The way he begins sets his unchanging compass: “This sister [Mother Earth] cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods which God has endowed her.”

Instructively, as you read on, it becomes increasingly clear that the Pope’s perspective on the environment stems from, and is caught up with, his perspective on economics and capitalism. But stop here. Economics and capitalism take us down the road apiece from where the Pope starts. I think it is safe to say that the Pope starts with God. As you might expect, a number of conservative writers and broadcasters, in passing comment on the encyclical, started further down the road. And this, I believe, and as I will later explain, has led them into being more sharply critical of its economic content than is justified.

At one point John Maynard Keynes broke off debate with some of his contemporaries after the publication of The General Theory in 1936 because he did not believe that they were engaging his arguments with an open mind. Those who write with good will, hoping to persuade, are entitled to an open-minded reception. The Pope is no exception.

How can you explain why Germany, which in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?

The police water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against women. Instead they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of people opposed to such violent attacks on women.

The late Robert Conquest once laid out a set of three political rules, the last of which read, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” This rule comes in handy when trying to understand the otherwise clearly insane and suicidal policies of Chancellor Merkel’s government in Germany. These policies only make sense if the German government has in fact been taken over by a cabal of people intent not on holding Germany together but on pulling it entirely apart. Consider the evidence.

Muslims had the habit of slaughtering “infidel” Muslims for centuries when there was not a country called Syria or any “Islamophobia.”

The main lack of logic seems to be that innocent people are attacked repeatedly by Muslims, so they become suspicious of Muslims; this suspicion is then called Islamophobia — but it does not come out of thin air.

President Erdogan is explicitly saying that even non-terrorist Muslims have the potential to become terrorists if they happen to feel offended. So easily?

Pro-Sunni supremacists, such as the Turkish president and his top cleric, do not understand that cartoons do not kill people. But some of their friends do kill people.

There is hardly anything surprising in the way Turkey’s Islamist leaders and their officials in the clergy diagnose jihadist terror: Blame it on everyone except the terrorists. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the inventor of the theory that “there is no Islamic terror,” recently warned that “rising racism and enmity against Islam in Europe[an] and other countries” will cause great tragedies — like the Paris attacks.

TransCanada took Uncle Sam to court last week to reclaim some of the damage done by the Obama Administration’s multiyear, drawn-out rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. It may not come up in the litigation, but someone should point out that the same Obama Administration that rejected Keystone seems to have no problem supporting a new oil pipeline project in Africa.

That was the story last week out of Kenya, where U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec told Kenya’s energy minister that Washington would help Nairobi raise $18 billion to finance its PowerAfrika project. The pipeline would stretch from Kenya’s Rift Valley to Lamu on the coast. “Kenya needs $18 billion worth of financing,” Mr. Godec said, according to a dispatch in Oilprice.com, “so one of the questions we are discussing is how we can work together with the private sector and governments to raise that sum, to find ways to make certain that this financing becomes available.”

Has Mr. Godec checked with Secretary of State John Kerry, or, perhaps more important, anti-oil Democratic financier Tom Steyer? Kenya and Northeast Africa could certainly use the investment and jobs that would come from the oil project. Then again, so could the United States. What’s with the double standard on pipelines?