 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Robert M. Wapels, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, co-editor and managing editor for the Independent Review and professor of economics at Wake Forest University. He is the editor of Pope Francis and the Caring Society from the Independent Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Robert. Thanks for having me on. In 2015, Pope Francis issued his second encyclical, which I'm probably gonna butcher this Laudato Si. Laudato Si. Laudato Si. What did he say in that encyclical? So the encyclical is widely known kind of as the Pope's environmental encyclical, but if you dig into it, it's at least as much about the poor and the rich and economics as it is about the environment. But if there's a big picture, it's that we're of using the environment and it has to do with the fact that we're also abusing each other. The richer are abusing the poor and the rich are missing out on their true calling and in the process the environment is being turning into a giant pile of filth. So that's kind of the brass knuckles picture. So before we dig into your critique of the Pope's views on these matters, I want to ask a dumb, non-Catholic question, which is what is an encyclical? Yeah, so an encyclical is like this document that is meant to be read, especially by other people in the church, but also by the laity and people outside the church. It's kind of a position paper, if you will. This is what follows in a long train of ones on social teaching. They date back to the late 1800s, Rerum no Verum in 1890s, kind of considered the first one of those. And this follows in that tradition, where we're trying to explain to society what problems are and think about how we can turn our lives around and help solve it. I know that in Catholicism, there's a lot of distinction between official church doctrine and these official church doctrine, is that the Pope speaking as the conduit of God, or I don't know the right term? Yeah, he's definitely speaking from his position of authority as the Pope. You have probably heard of this Catholic teaching of papal infallibility. That is a doctrine that says the Pope can speak with infallibility on matters of faith and morals. That's actually only been officially said once by a Pope, since that doctrine came around that this is an infallible teaching. So this encyclical is not meant to be an infallible teaching. In fact, it's much more meant to be a dialogue. He uses the term dialogue in there something like 20 times. And basically, he wants to dialogue with everyone in the world, all the faithful on these issues. Does that mean that it's, I guess, as a Catholic, is he trying to open up a dialogue with other Catholics who might disagree with him? Is it an invitation to say, here's what I think, but within the broader Catholic community, there might be disagreement? Actually, I think what he's trying to do is not aim so much about disagreements, but actually finding common ground among Catholics, but also people of all faiths and non faiths. There's a train of these, you mentioned, going back to 1891. And is this one unique in its positions on markets and environmentalism? What did, for example, John Paul II or Benedict, did it diverge from those? And so it's unique, I think, in that it's focusing to such a degree on environmental questions, but it is in a very long and broad tradition of Catholic social teachings on issues like this and a set of teachings that goes back through the Middle Ages and all the way back to Christ a couple thousand years ago. And so if you look at that long tradition of social teaching, I guess the best word is it's broad. And it isn't a set of strictures that the economy must be set up exactly this way. No, it's an overriding set of principles about human, how human action should be. And then we can kind of try to, well, we are gifted with the ability and the duty of trying to live out those teachings in setting up our lives and setting up our own societies. And so that tradition is broad enough so that at one point, it was okay with monarchies and it's also okay with democracy. In recent years it's kind of said, democracy is the way you should go. It's also historically been moving over toward the direction of close to socialism but not socialism and in other times closer to free-or-market capitalism. And you mentioned, Pope John Paul II, and I think if you read his encyclicals, you'll get over toward the side of the river that's toward free-or-market capitalism being something that really, really works well. But now I think Francis is moving us a little bit over on the other side, not toward socialism per se, but much more toward government having a role in regulating that capitalism and structuring that capitalism and questioning and critiquing and not just government but everyone. Over the longer stretch of history, how has the Church generally viewed issues of free markets and private property? I mean, as it was a player in Europe as capitalism and merchants spread out throughout the continent? I'm not a scholar of that but my reading of it is that the Church has been always very adamant about the importance of private property. After all, it's in the Bible as being important, as far back as, you know, that shall not steal. Thomas Aquinas, if you read him, you know, writing in the 1300s, he's talking about something like an economist could really dig into why private property works better and talking about incentives and talking about like if everybody owns it in common, nobody's really going to take care of it very well. If you own it yourself, you do. In that encyclical I mentioned, Rerum Noverum from 1890, the Pope goes as far as to say that private property is invaluable. He doesn't mean no strings attached, you know, that private property doesn't have to answer to anybody. But he's basically saying that you just can't steal people's property from them. And he was pretty strong in denouncing socialism. And part of the dialogue nature of Pope Francis' encyclical that then you put together this edited volume of people entering into that dialogue on different issues. But I mean, some of it is, most of it is highly critical. One of the contributors, Andrew Jungert, I think is probably how you say it, I thought why he had differentiated it from other encyclicals in this way. He wrote, I know of no other social encyclical going back to Rerum Noverum by Leo XIII in 1891, in which the truthfulness and motives of any party were questioned as relentlessly as the honesty of businesses and market advocates is impugned here. I haven't read the encyclical, but it doesn't have that sort of not just saying markets are bad, but it going after the people who advocate and work in markets or build them. I think that's a pretty fair summary that it shows a hostility that hasn't been shown in earlier ones, but it's not overboard. So for example, here is a line from LaDate Si, from paragraph 128. It says, business is a noble vocation directed to producing wealth and improving our world. It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for areas in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good. The broader objective of helping the poor should always be to allow them a dignified life through work. How much does Pope Francis' background, his upbringing in Argentina play into his views, markets? Yeah, I think that they're really crucial in understanding, just as John Paul's background was crucial in understanding where he was coming from. John Paul, of course, raised behind the iron curtain, saw communism and how it suppressed human dignity and how it just didn't work in satisfying people's material needs and said about some of the strongest things that have been said about the importance of business and freer economies and entrepreneurs and that kind of stuff. But of course, Francis was raised in Argentina, and if you want to kind of look at the 20th century's most dismal economic performance, Argentina began the 20th century as one of the most prosperous economies in the world. So just kind of GDP per person, it would have been up there in the top handful. And then its relative ranking fell and fell and fell. Of course, absolute standards of living rose because there was worldwide economic growth during this period. But Argentina's relative status just kind of slipped further and further and further down. And most economists who study Argentina, I'm not an expert on it, say they made a series of policy choices that led them into that path. And it was, you know, the moving away from markets, the moving toward the Peronist, corporatist kind of model where the government takes more and more control in the market. And the markets become more and more crony capitalism instead of what you and I would consider to be actual capitalism. And so Francis was raised in that environment, seeing that the market to him, a free market to him means, I think, what he saw in Argentina, which is, you know, not a very useful kind of market economy in the minds of most economists. He also, of course, is from a Jesuit tradition. And I think that probably colors a lot of his views on these things. And there's a quote that I give in my introduction that he says something to the effect of he developed an allergy for all things economics that he got from his father, who was an overworked accountant. So a lot in his upbringing and his Argentine experience, I think can kind of explain some of his hostility and also some of his, I'll say, misunderstandings of how a market economy can work effectively. Before he was Pope, which this I did, I found this to be very interesting that he wrote a book or that was called Dialogos Entre Juan Pablo II and Fidel Castro dialogues between John Paul II and Fidel Castro when John Paul II went to Cuba. And in that he wrote, no one can accept the precepts of neoliberalism and consider themselves Christian, which is a pretty big, strong condemnation. Yes, that is very, and so I think that when somebody, when he says that or when somebody on the left says that, they just have a different picture of what neoliberalism means than somebody who's more a fan of free markets. They consider it to be just kind of this soulless thing where the businesses run amok and corrupt everything. So in that sense, then how should Catholics, not being Catholic myself nor Aaron, how should Catholics view markets? Or I mean, it seems that it's important if they pull you away from God or if they direct you toward human suffering, then Catholics should not be for markets, it would seem. And so my answer to that would be that Catholics should view markets the same way they view everything else on earth. And that is something temporary that is going to be there to either help or hinder us in a longer term goal, of course, which is eternal, which is getting to know and love God and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. And so what's the best way to do that? This capitalism have a good track record and getting us to know and love God better and getting us to love our neighbor better. And so the first one is hard to answer, but I'm going to return to that. But the second one, I think most people who are fans of free markets would say, in fact, we'll look at the track record of capitalism. It's pretty good at people trading with each other, giving mutual gains to those trades. And so as I'm pursuing my quote unquote self-interest in the same time, I'm actually helping my neighbor. And so we can grow prosperous together, unlike happened before societies adopted the kind of capitalism that we have today. Does it matter to them? Yes, but the motivations, does that matter? I mean, that's a big part of looking at actions and deciding whether or not they're good. I think in the Catholic tradition, so if someone is pursuing profits... It's not from the benevolence of the... Yes. And then Adam Smith, it's not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker. Is that problematic? If it directs you toward bad things? They see it as problematic, but again, there's a very broad Catholic tradition that doesn't see it as problematic at all. And so I have not read the dialogues between John Paul and Fidel Castro and seen what was said in that. But if you look at broader Catholic teaching throughout the years, you'll have people like the Michael Novak's of the world, and he wrote the forward to the book, that talk about to have a flourishing society you need to have a flourishing culture and you need to have a democratic political system, and you need to have a market economy to allow people to actually do those kinds of things that are going to help one another. There's a chapter in the book that talks about charity and points out that people have more and more resources to give to their needy brethren. You're in a market economy because the market economy just generates so much more wealth that then you can share and many many people have shared that wealth, including people who were considered malefactors during their life. John Rockefeller's of the world and he ended up giving away most of his wealth for the incredibly worthy causes of eradicating diseases and all these kinds of things. So wouldn't be able to do that without a flourishing market economy. I'm curious about the role of, I guess, non-Catholics in this because it's one thing to issue statements about how Catholics ought to live their lives if their goal is to tee up eternity and get closer to God and so on. But when you're talking about something like whether we should have markets or not, whether capitalism is good or not, you're talking about, I mean, that stuff that has an impact on an extraordinary number of people and the quality of their lives and most of those people, given that the world is not mostly Catholic, are not going to share the goal. So they're not going to say, well, yet markets might lead me away from God, but they're going to say that's not a problem for me because that's not my goal in the first place. And so should that factor into how someone like Pope Francis approaches these questions, that most of the world does not share his goals in the purpose and direction of life? And so in writing an ethical like La Datta, I think he does consciously try to speak to both audiences, also tries to convert those who aren't Catholic and those who are non-believers to the position of pulling them in. And I think there's a lot of that consciously going on here, especially in what he was saying about the environment because now there's these environmentalists who probably aren't Catholic and maybe not even Christians who are going to be reading this, seeing that the Pope has the same, that the church has many of the same goals as them and maybe kind of pull them in under the tent as they become more and more interested in it. But going back to your question, one of the things you said about, you know, might not share the same goals. And I think that almost everyone around the world whatever faith they are, shares a goal of eradicating absolute poverty or a goal of allowing people to be prosperous enough to lead flourishing lives. And so he definitely shares that goal. I think any reader of that will share the goal. And so then the debate becomes what's the best way to eradicate poverty? And I think the economist that we had in our symposium mentioned that the Pope has a number of blind spots in this area and continues to at least rhetorically say that absolute poverty is on the rise when in fact the numbers strongly suggest that it's on the decline and that we as economists have had lots and lots of research papers and books written that show that there's a link between freer market economies and that, you know, elimination of poverty that a free market is one of the things that is going to be most strongly correlated with generating all that kind of wealth. But actually let me go back to the other part of your question, which was what if you don't share the Pope's view at all about, you know, that first goal, which is to know and love God. I guess the key point there is that the Pope is arguing. And so let's see how you respond to this argument. The Pope is arguing that in many ways capitalism for the rich has been a victim of its own success in that it's generated so much prosperity that the rich, and that would include probably most people in this country by world standards, has been so successful that the rich just kind of gets sucked up into what he calls this whirlwind of consumption. And all they're doing is leading these lives of frantic consumption. Gotta buy this and get it and get rid of it and buy the latest newest thing. And that is distracting. Those lesser lights are distracting people from the true light, you know, the light of the Trinity. If I was personally responding to that, I guess I would take two approaches. The first would be to say, well, you know, if they don't share his view that the true light is the Trinity, then that objection is not going to carry much weight. But the second one on the former point of it's they're bound up in consumerism and that that is somehow a less fulfilling, less virtuous life. I'm in general skeptical of those kinds of arguments. You know, like we like to say consumerism, but I think a lot of people are critical of consumerism don't really have a clear handle on what they mean. They generally, I think what people tend to mean, critics of consumerism tend to mean is there are people out there buying things that I personally am not interested in. So it's, you know, when the person who buys hundreds and hundreds of records, I'm looking at Trevor or I'll keep looking at Trevor, you know, buys lots of guitars and guitar pedals, they find that fulfilling in the same way as the person who buys lots of books. But to some put to the outsider that looks that could be that's just consumerism. He can't stop buying the records. It's like consumed his life and it's all, you know, that's interesting. Consumerism consumes. The Pope talks about this almost as an addiction that we have that we just can't turn away from it. And the interesting thing is that there's an overlap here between Pope Francis and say that guy, you know, we knew and everyone knew in high school who was the kind of socialist who said, man, you know, just like the corporations want you to buy all these things and they're really just running you down, you know, like don't listen to the corporations and be a consumerist sheep and like, and then go get ad buster magazine and subscribe or protest the WTO or things like that. It's odd that there's that parallel, which is, and I, and that parallel is sort of undergirded by both for the socialist and the Catholics to some degree is that an idea that the world is run by false values and that things that are moving toward false values are not actually enriching. And so one point the Pope makes is that every purchasing decision is moral. It's a moral decision, not simply an economic one. And I think that's actually useful for us all to think about whether or not you are religious or not. So one of the goals of the Pope writing this is to, you know, prick people's consciousness and get them to think more deeply about every action they take in their lives. And one of the contributions by Gabriel X Martinez, he kind of, it's in the volume, it's the most least critical in its own way because he sort of says that, well, the way I read it, because he says that the actual quote is, the Pope does not mean to criticize rising prosperity and economic liberty in general. What Francis criticizes and said is the use of a theory to justify indifference, the view that eventually the poor will be all right if we just leave them alone, the market will take care of them. And then he quotes a Bill Clinton quote, which just sort of struck me as kind of anodyne about how markets help poor people kind of thing. And do you think that's an, do you agree with that character? You don't have to agree with everything in a book that you edited, but having edited a few books myself. And what's actually interesting about that particular chapter is that Gabriel himself is from South America, like the Pope, he's Ecuadorian originally. The quote you've got is one from Bill Clinton. Yeah, we have to reaffirm unambiguously that open markets are the best engine we know of how to lift living standards and build shared prosperity. Bill Clinton saying that. I mean, and that's totally true. And to be like, this is, that's an example of the kind of attitude, the politics of indifference to injustice. He writes that the Pope is criticized, not necessary prosperity. This all makes me wonder, that Pope Francis ought to try reading some Deirdre McCloskey. Yes, I agree. But it strikes me as, I think he's criticizing more than that as you point out. I mean, Pope Francis for having read the book, but not the encyclical in the sense that we were discussing that it's deeper, it's about, it's almost an alienation from our true selves kind of argument and that includes the environmentalist aspect of it. And so going on to that, back to that point about the indifference that can sometimes creep in. The Pope goes back to one of the parables in the Bible, the one about Lazarus, who's this poor man and sits outside the door of this rich man. And the rich man never, you know, gives him a scrap of bread or anything. Poor Lazarus, who's like lame and can't send for himself. And then Lazarus goes to heaven and he sees this poor man in hell. And he's like, is there the poor man in hell sees Lazarus and he's got like, can't he come and help me now? And the parable is like, no, you had your chance, you know? But what Pope Francis says is that we're like that nowadays. Many, many people are, they drive around in their cars with their tinted glass. They don't even notice the people outside who are poor. They live inside gated communities. They do that kind of stuff that he's warning us that we're turning into those Lazaruses and that we can't be indifferent to the poor because like the poor, you know, we are all children of the same God. It strikes me then that, I mean, I am more sympathetic to that argument than I think a lot of people might be. And I do think that there can be a tendency to think that the proper way to live within a free market is the, we'll call it the caricature of rugged individualism, which is the, you know, what's mine is mine and the best thing for me to do is just do whatever is immediately in my interest and to not feel a connection to other people or a responsibility to them or the burden of helping them. And I tend to reject that. And, but it's interesting because that's not to me, that's not like the response to that is not to attack capitalism and markets because it's capitalism and markets that will provide us with the resources should we choose to live a different way and should we choose to try to help the poor directly, it provides us with the resources to do that in a meaningful and effective way that it's, so there's, it's almost like there's a, there's a deep confusion of the economic system for the cultural system setting aside the issue of how widespread that, that call it sick cultural system might actually be. I think we tend to, we tend to imagine it's much more widespread than it really is. And so many of the authors in the book, as you know, rightly make a point very similar to that and say that, hey Pope Francis, you're missing the fact that this economic system we've set up has benefited the poor immensely. It's allowed us not only to benefit them through their, just their economic interchanges with everyone else and earning higher wages, but also if they are truly needy and they're this person who just could not offend for themselves, we're wealthy enough now to take care of people like that. And we have an immense amount of charity that we do are successful people in the economy. The Pope though would go one step further and he would say that's not enough. It's, you know, money isn't the only part of the issue. He uses this word frequently of encounter that we need to encounter each other. We need to encounter people who are on the margins of society and just be physically close to them, talk to them, live with them, let them know we care about them, let them get to know us, let us get to know them so that we have this kind of sympathy for one another. And so much in our modern society and our capitalist system kind of breaks down that. Yeah, it's interesting because there's a parallel there between two Herbert Spencer, which I imagine that Pope Francis would not think himself a fan of Herbert Spencer. But that kind of goes the question of when Herbert Spencer is criticizing forced charity, that the biggest thing you're missing in forced charity is the actual care and interaction with there's a part of and I think social statics where he talks about how much forced charity will sap the soul and you know someone like a Ebenezer screwed walking past will say, you know, I gave it the office, are there no workhouses kind of thing as opposed to actually looking people in the eye giving charity. So how should in that light Catholic's view redistribution forced redistribution as a method of quote unquote charity? Yeah, that's a very good question. And again, I think there's a wide range of opinion. There are people who lean toward the more libertarian end of Catholicism. And they go that, you know, if the government's pointing the gun at my head and saying fork this money over or else, and welfare state, that's not real charity. The only real charity is if I'm doing it myself. But then of course, there's many over on the other side who don't know that is a legitimate form of charity. So I think a lot of debate about that. And of course, the pope would be over on that other side where he seems to be quite a proponent of the welfare state. And I think in an expanded welfare state, and even maybe in globalization of such things. In terms of the environment, there's a chapter in the book about why Pope Francis mischaracterizes the effects of markets on the environment. Where does he go wrong with that? Yeah, and I think our main point of not just that chapter, but other authors in the book is that again, a blind spot of the pope is that he just doesn't understand how property rights can be so crucial in solving economic problems. In fact, there's many economists I know who say that any environmental problem you have is due to a failure of property rights. And so he just he seems to have a view of property as when somebody gets property, they say it's mine. I'm not going to share it with anybody else. But instead, most economists have a view of it's my property. I'm going to try to put it to its highest value to use. And therefore, it's going to benefit much of the rest of society. One of the authors gives kind of the classic case of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which you can see from the sky as you're flying in that on one side of the border, things are pretty brown looking. And the other side, they're much greener looking. And it's over in Haiti, where there's been lots of corrupt governments for many generations and very, very insecure property rights that people knew that if I've got some thing valuable on my land, some freeze might be that some friend of the government that comes and just cut them down. And so I'm going to cut them down before they get a chance to. On the other side, where we got the secure property rights, I know that nobody can get away with that. And so I'm going to husband my resources. I'm going to nurture them. And the value will continue to be there rather than turn it into one of these tragedies of the common. And so a really important message about what property rights mean and how they get people to look toward the future and the conservation of their resources just seems to be missing in so much. The insights of someone like Eleanor Ostrom just seem to be missing in Laudato Si and the Pope's vision of these things. You mentioned earlier that there's the argument that every purchase is to some extent a moral choice and that morality plays a large role in the decisions and how we should approach things and how we should think about things and what we should aim at. And so given the not just the errors in the reasoning here or the lack of knowledge about there's actual evidence and studies and lots of scholarship on these questions and that should have informed what he wrote, but also that the very people, the very areas of the world that are most Catholic, where the people are going to be most inclined to listen to what he has to say about markets and capitalism and the environment and so on, are those areas that are most desperate for and in most need of free markets and capitalism to the areas that have been most damaged by the lack of it. So throughout South America, for example, and so what obligation is there for like the moral obligation to get this stuff right on his part? Well, very well put. Just as you said, every consumption decision is a moral decision, but also our decisions about what to to learn and what to pay attention to our moral decisions. And I think you're entirely right that he could have listened to some other voices when he was putting together this encyclical. And if you look at some of the, you know, folks have all these advisory boards on science on, you know, all this that kind of and they have the economist on the advisory boards. And so they're historically people like Gary Becker have been on these advisory advisory boards. But I think that this particular hope just, I don't know exactly who's on his board at this point or like, and so whoever whoever he's listening to just isn't getting the message that most economists understand so well across to him. And in your introduction, you sketch out how Pope Francis due to his views about the harms of consumption has to be kind of pushing back or worrying against some fundamental assumptions of economics, especially the one that consumption, when consumption is undertaken freely, the both people are better off and that even occurs up the curve, you know, more good is always better in the non satiation. But you kind of seem to you seem non committal on whether or not that's that might be true is the way I read it. You don't actually come out. I mean, they said this is this you describe Pope Francis's views. But I mean, could it be possible that our views of non satiation are incorrect in some way? Yeah. And so I will put my opinion on the line here. And that is that I do agree with the Pope on this, that the well being can and often does go down when consumption gets too high. And so I think if you look at lots of different data like a happiness, there's debates about these things, but it definitely slows down its increase and maybe even plateaus once you get to a certain point. But a deeper one than that, just on the mere material level is that as a about Catholic, I see a lot of evidence that as we get richer and richer, we care less and less about these eternal things. And society has gotten richer and richer and the role of religion and the importance of religion and people's lives seems to wane as societies get richer. And so I think maybe we've passed the bend on that curve. We've gotten too rich for our own good and producing more is a wonderful thing. But then we consume more and it seems to be like that consumption pulls us in the wrong direction. And so my little graph was kind of like we could be better off individually if we gave away more of our wealth. It's not an argument toward us not being producing as much, but it's an argument toward us using our wealth wisely. We could eat too much. Yes, we could fill in almost any blanket type of consumption too much. We could just consume in general too much. And I think there are many times where many of us do that. And so we could be better off if we divested ourselves of some of these things. That makes me wonder then how we deal with particular sorts of trade-offs in this area. So how should, from within a Catholic perspective, should think about a situation say where we generally agree that it's better for a society to be wealthier than poorer, that you have access to more options and your life is longer and healthier and less violent and so on and so forth, and that all of those things can enable those people who want to pursue the eternal say, want to live the prescribed lifestyle of Catholic or of any other religious faith to do that in a easier, more meaningful, more successful way. But at the cost of some people, maybe it's these, as you described, the wealthy people who over-consume or whoever else, or the people, it's going to slightly turn more people away from this path, that's going to happen and that there is no way to create that degree of wealth without instituting the mechanisms that will also cause those results to turn away from God. To turn away, should, I guess, so does one trump the other? How do we think about weighing them? Yeah, the tension here is kind of this, right? Having a budget constraint that's further out is awesome. It allows you to get more of everything and to pick the things that you think are really important. But having that budget constraint that's further out, when everybody does it, and everybody consumes more, maybe warps our preferences in some way and so that we end up making consumption decisions that aren't in our own best interest. And so if that's true, in other words, if people can be fallible and maybe are sinful by nature because of the fall, if those things are true, then we do have a lot of really hard decisions to make about the best way to order our lives and to order our societies. And I'm over in the direction of having somebody forcibly tell me what I should be doing in a situation like that is not a good idea because they're sinful and fallen just like I am. I'm going to have to make those hard choices by myself. Does that make sense? Yeah, this might have been related to Aaron's question too, but if from the church's standpoint, it would seem to me that at least some Catholics would think that moving towards God is more important than alleviating poverty if that's an actual trade-off. Because if people turn away from God because of institutions that are alleviating poverty, let's just say that that's Norway. Stipulate that relationship there where they're satiated, they have false idols, every sort of thing. And so the religious levels of a place like Norway, which is just shockingly low, and in the Catholic tradition, those people can't be saved. So is it a trade-off that a Catholic would say, okay, well, if this alleviates poverty but turns people away from God and therefore puts them in the bad place, then we should choose God over poverty alleviation. And so I think I guess there's two levels of the answer to that. One is on an individual basis and then the other is on a societal basis. And so I think just about any Catholic would say that yeah, it's getting riches pulling us away from God. Just stop worrying about alleviating poverty if it's actually so much given our current levels of wealth because it is leading people away from God. But then what do you do at the societal level? Are you going to impose those things on other people? And so the first one seems pretty clear the answer. The other one then there's a huge amount of debate. So what do you hope people will take away from the book or especially if they're Catholics? The book is a reply to the pope's call for dialogue and the very act of us writing it is part of that dialogue. The very active people then reading it, they have this other part of the dialogue. You have an internal dialogue in your head as it goes on. We have a had a dialogue with each other now. And so what we're really hoping to get out of it is people to think about the importance of these issues, but also to maybe have somebody in positions within the church to listen to this, to understand that economists have learned a lot of things about how to arrange incentives so that we actually solve many of the problems that the pope has pointed out here to maybe pick some of these things out of the pope's blind spot or the church's more broadly blind spot so that they can move away from maybe some traditional misconceptions about the market toward that are understanding how the market can't help solve so many of these problems. Free Thoughts is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoyed today's show, please rate and review us on iTunes. And if you'd like to learn more about libertarianism, find us on the web at