Pope Francis on The Way of All Capitalists: "Be good, or goodbye!"

MANILA: No matter how much wealth and military might you have, you cannot have peace if you have the poor with you. If you cannot make peace, you can only make war.

Did you know that Pope Francis has an Anti-Capitalism Manifesto and it was issued last year yet, when we were not paying attention much? He is against exploitation of all kinds, but especially of the poor by the rich.

Paul B Farrel was paying attention, and he noticed, and came out with an article titled "Pope Francis's 'holy war' on capitalism and toxic inequality'" where he called The Joy of the Gospel the pontiff's "anti-capitalism manifesto" and where he said (18 November 2014, marketwatch.com):

Yes, Pope Francis is celebrating his one-year anniversary since laying down his anti-capitalism manifesto for his army of 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. He’s also been removing conservative cardinals and bishops from leadership roles. He’s hell-bent on changing the world fast. And his mandate is unwavering and unequivocal. He’s drawing clear moral and political battle lines against repressive capitalism, excessive consumerism, rigid conservatism.

Paul quoted from the Joy of the Gospel:

Inequality is the root of social ills ... as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.

Not capitalism per se but the "absolute autonomy of markets" as well as "financial speculation" are enriching the rich and robbing the poor of the wealth of the Earth.

So how do you combat myopic and amoral capitalists? Use your creative faculties, as Pope Francis always does. That includes market watchers; so, while we were not paying attention, Paul extracted from the Joy of the Gospel what he called:

Pope Francis' 10 strategies to guide the economic war against inequality and capitalism:

1. Solve economic inequality fast... or capitalism dooms whole world.
2. Never trust the greedy Invisible Hand of free-market capitalists.
3. Trickle-down economic ideology of the Super Rich is massive hoax.
4. New tyranny of capitalism gets rich stealing from the public.
5. The new Golden Calf Idolatry is capitalism’s worship of money.
6. Capitalism fuels excessive consumerism, undermining social morals.
7. Obsessive competition to amass personal wealth destroys democracy.
8. Capitalists treats humans as leftovers in their throwaway world.
9. Extreme conservative individualism is killing democracy worldwide.
10. Capitalism rejects God, morality, ethics... loves total anarchy of money.

Capitalists, be good, or goodbye to all that!

Pope Francis is just thinking of the poor in relation to the rich. The needy poor we shall always have with us if we shall always have the stingy rich.

So, what can the poor capitalists do to rectify the error of their ways? The Pope of Software has the answer and, borrowing from Pope Francis' exhortation, we can call it The Joy of Capitalism.

In 2008, more than 6 years ago, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, super-billionaire Bill Gates called on the rich to march to a different drummer he called Creative Capitalism (gatesfoundation.org). Why did it take a computer programmer to think of the poor? Why did not 1970 "Future Shock" futurist Alvin Toffler or 1992 "The End Of History" Francis Fukuyama or 1995 "Left Behind" Tim LaHaye & Jerry B Jenkins or 2007 "The Conscience Of A Liberal" economic thinker Paul Krugman think of it? Or any of the disciples of Ayn Rand or John Maynard Keynes or any member of the American Economic Association? Why did not Donald Trump?

Because if you love money, money will love you back. Not the poor.

So: How many poor loved you today?

Why is Pope Francis now a champion of climate change? Because he is most concerned with the poor, because the rich can take care of themselves. Because it is the needy poor who are most vulnerable to man-made climate change. Because it is the greedy rich who are most guilty.

Bill Gates knows all that. The year before he speaks at Davos, 2007, climate change campaigners Al Gore and the IPCC have jointly won the Nobel Prize for Peace. So, Bill Gates is giving the filthy rich a way out by way of climate change in capitalism.

Speaking of the millions rich (we) and the billions poor (they), he tells his Davos audience:

If we are going to have a serious chance of changing their lives, we will need another level of innovation. Not just technology innovation – we need system innovation. The world is getting better, but it’s not getting better fast enough, and it's not getting better for everyone. The great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy see the least – in particular the billion people who live on less than a dollar a day. There are roughly a billion people in the world who don't get enough food, who don't have clean drinking water, who don't have electricity, the things that we take for granted. Not only do these people miss the benefits of the global economy – they will suffer from the negative effects of economic growth they missed out on. Climate change will have the biggest effect on people who have done the least to cause it.

We need capitalist innovation to save the planet from climate change, rich and poor included. 

Pope Francis is talking of inequality; Bill Gates is talking of inequity, a more accusative term. And both are talking about climate change and its impact on the poor. And who has contributed the most to man-made climate change? The capitalists investing on unrenewable resources, such as convincing the farmers to invest on artificial solutions to soil and pest problems. Encouraged by marketing ploys, farmers out there over-fertilize their fields, and that is why we have up there somewhere so much methane, which is 30 times deadlier than carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas (Morgan Kelly, blogs.princeton.edu). It is as if the rich capitalists are selling climate change to the poor farmers who don't know any better!

We must invest billions more on the billions poor. Why? People are renewable resources; they have to renew themselves, and if they do that, they renew society, all of us. Bill Gates also says:

As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in helpful and sustainable ways, but only on behalf of those who can pay. Philanthropy and government aid channel our caring for those who can't pay, but the resources run out before they meet the need. But to provide rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.

Capitalism, Bill Gates says, is designed to serve selves and ignore the others, especially the poor. If you cannot pay, you are not part of the system. What we need are creative capitalists who make happy money and happy people within the system.

Bill Gates also mentions the public sector:

Another approach to creative capitalism includes a direct role for governments. Of course, governments do a great deal to help the poor in ways that go far beyond nurturing markets: they fund research, subsidize health care, build schools and hospitals. But some of the highest-leverage work that government can do is to set policy and disburse funds in ways that create market incentives for business activity that improves the lives of the poor.

And now let us allow Abraham Lincoln to speak from the grave as we borrow from his eulogy of the martyrs of Gettysburg:

Capitalism must be of the people, for the people, by the people, so that Capitalism will not perish from the Earth.