In what appears to be an attempt at wit, Diogenes writes in his blurb entitled “Adam Smith, call home“:
To elimate [sic] poverty, the learned archbishop says, we need..
..an integration between the mechanisms that produce wealth and the mechanisms for the distribution of its benefits…
We have one. It’s called the marketplace. And you’d like to replace it with….?
Good call, Diogenes! Obviously Adam Smith is our guide to diagnosing and eliminating global poverty! That’s right, Adam Smith who, following closely his philosophical mentor David Hume, declares that humans beings have no selfhood, lacking any form personal identity. All the better to construct an ethical system from his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and reduce human interaction to the exchange of commodities as depicted in The Wealth of Nations!
Honestly, I have no idea how some Catholics got the impression that an economic system based upon epistemological and ethical fragments of the British empiricists/Scottish economists is somehow the ideal guardian of the acquisition and distribution of goods. Heck, even Michael Novak promotes a conception of social ethics largely based upon Hume’s An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals. It really makes me wonder whether these Catholics have actually read Hume or Smith or, if they have, whether they just believe other Catholics are too ignorant and gullible to question such pathetic socio-economic worldviews.
Thanks Diogenes, but I’ll stick with my preference for economic systems that promote justice and respect personhood. You can have Smith and Marx.
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