Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter;  a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place.

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Laurel
Kenner

4/3/2005
Pope John Paul II, RIP

I see my own late father in the photographs of the pope: serious eyes, open smile, tough Polish face, big hands that worked with stones and wrote poetry, hearty energy for skiing, running, working. 

I'm not a woman of faith, but I admired John Paul. He made me proud of my Polish ancestry. And he tried within his framework to "see things as they are," my personal idée fixe. The first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first Slavic pope ever, he was an outsider who rose to the occasion.  The pope genuinely liked people and forsook the traditional papal "we" in favor of "I." He unhesitatingly confronted the powerful in their lairs. He also forgave the man who shot him, and apologized for the horrors perpetrated by the church over the millennia. When he went back to Communist Poland as pope, he touched off the Solidarity freedom movement as people were emboldened by his example and decided to no longer be ruled by fear. Perestroika followed, the Iron Curtain came down, history was made.

John Paul's pronouncements on economics represent good intentions rather than prescriptions that would truly improve people's standards of living. Yet the survivor of Communism had some sharp insights. The following is a passage from a 1987 encyclical, "On Social Concern":

It should be noted that in today's world, among other rights, the right of economic initiative is often suppressed. Yet it is a right which is important not only for the individual but also for the common good. Experience shows us that the denial of this right, or its limitation in the name of an alleged 'equality' of everyone in society, diminishes, or in practice absolutely destroys the spirit of initiative, that is to say the creative subjectivity of the citizen. As a consequence, there arises, not so much a true equality as a 'leveling down.' In the place of creative initiative there appears passivity, dependence and submission to the bureaucratic apparatus which, as the only 'ordering' and 'decision-making' body if not also the 'owner' of the entire totality of goods and the means of production, puts everyone in a position of almost absolute dependence.

Ayn Rand could hardly have said it better.

The pope went on to draw a parallel between dependence on the state and "the traditional dependence of the worker-proletarian in capitalism." He also spoke of the dangers of the individual quest for profits. Here I part ways with him, as the rhetoric is old-fashioned Marxism.

Vic, the most articulate living advocate of freedom, says capitalism is a moral system because people have the right to their own life and to the fruits of their labor. Life is not to be lived for others not state, not church. The freedom to seek and maintain individual profits is what allows people to be benevolent and to widen the circle of happiness and productivity and achievement and invention.

Pope John Paul was said to have been a formidable debater. I almost regret not being a believer, for I would dearly enjoy hearing a Pope-Chair debate -- and now it would be possible only in the Other World.