Monday, May 01, 2017

The Fascist Pope

Fresh off a hate-filled rant against populism (a.k.a. consent of the governed), Pope Francis recently delivered another mean-spirited, hateful diatribe about the “grave risks associated with the invasion of . . . libertarian individualism at high strata of culture and in university education.”  He said this before the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, as reported by Breitbart.com.

This is exactly the opposite of reality regarding university education:  University education has been almost completely taken over by the pope’s fellow leftists whose true “religion” is cultural Marxism, or left-wing political correctness.  He must be the only person on the planet who thinks universities are hotbeds of libertarianism.  When it comes to spewing hatred toward free markets, economic freedom, limited constitutional government, and other non-socialist ideas, reality apparently has no relevance to Pope Francis.

The pope is an Argentinian Peronist, which is to say, he is a fascist.  Juan Peron was the fascist ruler of Argentina whose brand of national socialism involved restricted international trade, wage-and-price controls, seizure of private property, nationalized industries, and spending lavishly in fine Keynesian fashion by printing mountains of currency.  The inevitable economic ruination led to his being deposed by a military coup in 1955, after which Argentina continued to print money for decades to bail out its disastrous government regime, creating 12,000 percent hyper-inflation by the 1980s.

Only the “libertarian” ideas of the virtues of private property, markets, and economic freedom – the ideas that the pope routinely denounces with a passionate hatred – could have prevented the destruction of the Argentinian economy.  He seems to think that the only problem with Peron was that he didn’t go far enough with his brand of socialism (fascism – “national” socialism in the twentieth-century German variety — being just another variety of socialism, as Friedrich Hayek explained in detail in The Road to Serfdom).

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