Directions: Read the following article below. Then, turn to the Capitalism vs. Socialism chart on page 303. Using this chart and the article below describe the advantages and disadvantages of both capitalism and socialism (min 18 sentences).
New York Times, Sept 28 2015: Francis Sees Both Sides of Business
Pope Francis has from time to time been accused of communism, socialism, radical leftism. But his carefully sculpted words during his whirlwind visit to the United States suggested a bold, label-defying political philosophy all his own: Francisism.
Businesspeople were right to tremble at his arrival. He was coming from Cuba, of all places. He elects to live in a simple Vatican guesthouse, not the official, ornate papal apartments. He has published an encyclical chiding unbridled capitalism.
But then, standing before a joint session of the Congress, he called business a “noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving the world.”
“The right use of natural resources,” the pope said, “the proper application of technology and the harnessing of the spirit of enterprise are essential elements of an economy which seeks to be modern, inclusive and sustainable.”
Perhaps out of relief, the legislators in the room — many of them millionaires; nearly all of them dependent on millionaires’ and billionaires’ donations — stood and cheered.
That isn’t to say the pope went easy on capitalism on his visit to the place that perhaps best exemplifies it. He criticized “a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity,” a “quietly growing culture of waste” that blithely discards things and people, and a “growing and steady social fragmentation” in a globalized world “so apparently connected.”
Francisism seems, then, to be a curious mix of what we might call pro-business and anticapitalist. Business, in its view, is a necessary human activity, a way of relishing God-given bounties and, above all, a means to an end greater than business. This is what Pope Francis suggested when he said business was especially useful “if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service to the common good.”
What Francisism takes issue with is not business but capitalism, which it seems to regard as an ideology verging on idolatry, on serving a false god. What upsets the pope is not commerce itself but rather the elevation of commerce above other values — not merely above the worship of God, but also above democracy, law, fraternity, environmental stewardship.
One element of this pro-business, anticapitalist worldview is the pope’s argument that powerful interests err when they seek to eliminate countervailing sources of power: “No human individual or group can consider itself absolute, permitted to bypass the dignity and the rights of other individuals or their social groupings.”
Though it is perhaps expected for the bishop of Rome to warn against the idolatry of money, what is striking is how Francis suggests that not only God but also secular politics must outrank economic imperatives. In lines included in the pope’s prepared remarks before Congress but not uttered out loud, he was to say, “If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance.”
At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, the pope warned of the business mentality seeping into nonbusiness domains: “We can get caught up in measuring the value of our apostolic works by the standards of efficiency, good management and outward success, which govern the business world.” He added, “The cross shows us a different way of measuring success.”
The question one is left with is: When does business cross over into this excessive capitalism that the pope describes? When does the vital become the dehumanizing?
His words offered hints, if not outright answers. He described the dangerous possibility of the wealthy “becoming self-enclosed, frozen into elites, clinging to their own security.” Business is an engagement with others. Capitalism, in elevating business as the ultimate good, walls us off and wards off others, giving a “false sense of security,” filling us with “apathy,” which in turn puts the heart at risk of “growing numb, becoming anesthetized.”
“Life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort,” the pope said.