A Counterpoint on “Catholic Socialism”

Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker, Trent Horn.

It’s been over a year since I had that debate with Sam [Rocha 00:00:19] on whether a Catholic can be a socialist. I still see people talking about the debate, or at least talking about the issue of Catholicism and socialism online, so it’s definitely a very live issue and one that I enjoy talking about. I think that the intersection of our faith, ethics and economic theory is just really fascinating. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed reading about. That’s why I wrote my book with Catherine Pakaluk, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? The Answer Is No – Here’s Why, so that’s been great.

I was really excited then when William Hemsworth, who is a blogger at Patheos Catholic… I think his blog is called In Pursuit of Holiness. He also has a podcast as well. And so, he had invited Sam to come on to talk about why a Catholic can be a socialist. And then he graciously invited me to come on to offer a counterpoint of why a Catholic can’t be a socialist.

So I would definitely recommend, go to William’s podcast. If you’re watching this on YouTube, I’ll try to find a link to it and leave it in the description below. I would especially recommend listening to Sam Rocha’s full interview on socialism, and then listen to mine, especially if you’re on the fence about this issue. So definitely check all that out.

But, I want to thank you guys once again for listening, thank our patrons for making all this possible. If you want to support us and to help the podcast to grow, help the YouTube channel to grow, be sure to go to trenthornpodcast.com, become a subscriber. Otherwise, even leaving a review at iTunes, Google Play, or clicking subscribe on the YouTube channel is always a big help. So without further ado, here is my interview with William Hemsworth on why a Catholic cannot be a socialist.

William Hemsworth:

Great. I watched your debate last year with Sam Rocha about socialism. I really wasn’t aware about how popular it was on the Catholic left. I’ve done some research into it and, wow, it’s exploding in popularity.

Trent Horn:

Well, it’s popular just among regular people in general.

William Hemsworth:

Right.

Trent Horn:

As I point out in my book, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?, socialism and communism… because there is also people on the Catholic left who are arguing for communism. Dean Dettloff, for example, recently published in American Magazine, the Catholic Case for Communism. So I mean, I don’t think Rocha, Sam, would go as far a Dean. I think they-

William Hemsworth:

No.

Trent Horn:

… disagree on things. But it’s part of the same slice of people who want to promote this kind of collectivism. It’s quite, very popular among young people in general. As I said, as I pointed out in my book, “Socialism is very popular during times of economic instability.”

William Hemsworth:

Right.

Trent Horn:

So the times where we’ve had it most popular in this country were in the 1930s during the Great Depression, and then a resurgence during the Great Recession in the 2010s, and now with the economic things were dealing with the pandemic, well, moreso from the government imposed lockdowns.

William Hemsworth:

Right. Now, in your book, in the introduction, you discussed the story of Pope Saint Sixtus II, Valerian. Can you tell us that story and recap it? I mean, is that the birth of what some Christians may say socialism is from a Christian standpoint?

Trent Horn:

I’m not sure what you’re referring to exactly.

William Hemsworth:

Okay. So in your introduction, you talk about the story of Pope Saint Sixtus II and how Emperor Valerian was demanding him to hand over the treasures of the church.

Trent Horn:

Oh, yes, yes, yes, hand over the… yeah, right.

William Hemsworth:

No, I’m sorry.

Trent Horn:

It’s coming back to me. [crosstalk 00:03:45].

William Hemsworth:

My apologies.

Trent Horn:

That’s fine. Right. So this was during the persecution of the church during the Roman Empire. Well, the emperor is demanding him to hand over the treasures of the church. He just puts out his hand to the poor and says, “Well, these are the treasures of the church.”

When we look at Christian teaching and we go all the way back to the New Testament onward, it is clear that Christians have a overriding moral duty to help the poor, to help the least among us and to fight the evils of poverty.

I mean, in Matthew 25, Jesus says, “Separating the sheep and the goats, the ones who will go to life and ones who will go to damnation are those who… Did you feed Christ when He was in the poor, when He was hungry? Did you visit Him when He was sick, cloth the naked? If you ignore the poor, you ignore Christ.” That’s something the church fathers have always taught. They’ve always taught that the money we have is not our own, but it’s given to us as a gift from God for us to bless other people.

Trent Horn:

And so, I certainly understand people on the Catholic left who might take this condemnation of excess wealth or riches in scripture… Though I will say that the rich in Jesus’s time, 99% of them got that way through extortion, fraud, theft. You could not create wealth in the ancient world. You could only take it from other people or inherit it from people who took it.

There was a Mediterranean proverb at that time that said, “Every rich person is a thief or the son of a thief.” But, it didn’t mean that everybody was evil. You have wealthy people in scripture like Abraham, Job, Joseph of Arimathea, who could afford a tomb for our Lord, so I get that. As we’ll talk about here in our discussion about socialism, the problem I think that arises is that we all agree, like I, or Catholic socialists, other people, we all agree we ought to help the poor. I think that all of us agree-

William Hemsworth:

Right.

Trent Horn:

… on that, if we’re faithful Catholics. Where we disagree is, what is the best means to help the poor? I think where the crux of the disagreement is those who defend Catholic socialism, they are operating under good intentions, but someone like myself who might see capitalism or free markets as being the best way to help the poor, I’m operating from what the data and history show. Both showing that this is a proven way to lift people out of poverty and that socialism, it just doesn’t work. It leads to disastrous consequences, which is something the popes have actually said over and over again for about 150 years.

William Hemsworth:

[inaudible 00:06:28]. Now, can you define socialism for us? There is hard times of some people defining that term.

Trent Horn:

Yes. I think that was one of the things that was difficult in my discussion with Sam about socialism. I even saw that he came on your show and talked about it. We need to have definitions of it. I’m not going to comment too much on what Sam said on your show because I’m not going to make this a rebuttal or anything like that.

William Hemsworth:

Right, right. No, I understand.

Trent Horn:

But even there, he chose to not offer a definition. Rather, Sam’s approach, as he showed in the debate and then since then, is to say, well, here are some Catholic venerables. They call themselves socialists. I’m not going to give a definition. This is an example, and he points to these Catholic figures who identify themselves with socialist language. That’s just not helpful.

For me, if we’re going to go down that route, I would say, okay, if we’re not going to use a definition and we’re just going to use examples, then I would like to use examples, and that would include, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Algeria and then in more recent times, things like Venezuela. Though, people usually counter that and they say, “Well, that’s not real socialism.” To which I then say, “Well, what’s your definition,” because socialists, they disagree about a lot of things.

But the main thing with socialism is that… And actually, I should have it here, let’s see, The Dictionary of Economics, it says that, “Socialism is where the major part of the means of production of good and services is in some sense socially owned and operated.” So the difference with capitalism and socialism is, okay, we have the means of production, factories, businesses, housing, enterprises, land, intellectual capital, the things that we use to generate wealth. Who owns them?

Capitalism would say that individuals and firms should be the majority owners of these things, private companies, private individuals. Though, of course, there is going to be government regulation of that. Some people will say, “Oh, well, I don’t believe in laissez-faire capitalism. Government, hands off.” Well, I don’t either, because in many parts of the world, you can’t have capitalism without strong private property rights. Because in some parts of the world, you start a business, the government or someone else comes in and says, “That’s my business now.” Well, that’s not capitalism.

Socialism would say however, instead of private individual and firms owning the means of production, it should be society that owns them or the workers who own them, the people who own them. But, in practicality, what ends up happening is that the government owns the means of production on behalf of the people. Venezuela would be a good example of this. The majority of their industries had been nationalized. The government took over farms, took over manufacturing plants and told them, “Here’s what you have to make. Here is what you can set the prices at.” And then we see what happens there.

So to give another quote, Frances Fox Piven is a political scientist and a democratic socialist. This is what she says, “The academic debates about socialism’s meaning are huge and arcane and ripe with disagreements. But what all definitions have in common is either the elimination of the market or its strict containment.”

So if I had to just summarize it, what socialism is, is that instead of individuals owning firms and companies and then exchanging with consumers on an open market where prices are set based on that free activity, the community, which in practice ends up being the government, owns these things and then sets the prices based on their central plan [inaudible 00:10:10].

As I show in my book, that just never works out in history. It creates, what Pope Leo the 13th called, “a harvest of misery.” And so, that’s why I am concerned about this. I know it sounds counterintuitive to people on the Catholic left, but because I care so much about the poor, I feel I have a moral duty to oppose socialism.

William Hemsworth:

Okay. Now, is there a difference between socialism and communism? It seems like those terms are used interchangeably sometimes.

Trent Horn:

Sometimes they are, and so it can be very confusing. Well, a very common thing people will do is that they’ll say, “Well, the difference between socialism and communism is that communism is authoritarian.” We don’t want to have authoritarian secret police and stifling freedom. So we want freedom and we want socialism. It doesn’t work like that, because if you say that the community owns the means of production, not individuals, then the community, which ends up being the state, tells the individuals what they can and can’t do. So among socialist literature, the terms socialism and communism are sometimes used interchangeably. Authoritarianism is not the difference, and it doesn’t really explain the two of them.

It’d be like if I said, “Well, the difference between a [Redicker 00:11:30] and a Mosler is that a Redicker is faster.” You’d just say, “Okay. Faster at what?” We still don’t have a definition. Under those terms you’d say, “Well, wait. Well, what are those things? Okay, one is faster, but what do they do?”

It’s the same thing with socialism and communism. You could just say, the difference is one is authoritarian and one isn’t. That doesn’t tell us what the things are. But the problem is, what ends up happening is that, socialism ends up becoming authoritarian because the community says, “You can’t sell things at this price. You can’t sell things to these people. The community decides that.”

So if you go back to the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin wrote in a book called, The State and Revolution. This is interesting what he says, “In the first phase of communist society usually called socialism, bourgeoisie law is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained.”

So for Marxists, socialism was essentially the state trying to create a worker’s country. It was a midway point to getting to communism, where the goal under communism was, there is no employers, employees, no rich and poor, no government and citizens. The goal of communism is a classless society. The idea is that if there are no classes, there is no conflict and we’ve reached the maximum of human flourishing. Socialism is a midway point where we still have government. We still have employers, but government manages everything, which once you see in the Soviet Union, it didn’t work out well.

William Hemsworth:

Right, in other countries too. You pointed out Venezuela as another one recently.

Trent Horn:

Yeah. What’s interesting there, Venezuela is a very helpful example, because many people who, Catholics who defend socialism, are quick to say, “Oh, well the Soviet Union and Maoist China, that’s not real socialism,” even though people at the time did say that it was.

You look at Walter Duranty, for example, was a reporter for the New York Times and he was a Marxist. He loved communism. But he hid the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s. He hid it from the world, essentially, and said that we should… “All economies should be like Russia and it’s a worker’s paradise here.” But, five to six million people starved to death in something called the [Ukrainian 00:13:56]. That means, to murder by starvation in Ukrainian, because all the food production had been collectivized. You couldn’t just do individual food production anymore. So the point is that back then, they did say this is great until the atrocities came forward. Now, William, what people say is, “Well, that wasn’t real socialism. That’s not real socialism.”

But with Venezuela what’s helpful is, we, I show in my book, in the early 2000s, I love we got the internet now, you can show people on the left saying, “This is socialism. It works.” Because prior to 2013, hey, Venezuela was thriving. The supermarkets were subsidized by the government, so food was dirt cheap. Utilities were supposed to be free. Hey, it’s all great. People were saying, “We don’t always agree with Chavez’s strong arm tactics, but hey, they can teach us what a humane economy looks like.” So you get people saying, “This is socialism that’s working.”

Then after the economy has collapsed in 2013, everybody wants to backtrack. “Oh, we never said it was socialism.” Yeah, you did. And then they try to say, “Well, it’s not because of socialism. It’s because oil prices plunged and that’s why Venezuela went down the tube.” Yeah, but Kuwait didn’t go down the tube. The United Arab Emirates didn’t go down the tube. They’re primarily oil exporters. Or they’ll say, “Well, no, it wasn’t socialism. It was the fact that Chavez and Maduro grossly mismanaged the country.”

But socialism is the idea that the government, the community, manages everything. That is socialism by definition. So that’s why I think that when people are talking about it, if we’re going to use examples, we shouldn’t use examples of Catholic blesseds or venerables who describe themselves in so-called socialist language. We should use examples of countries that call themselves socialists and see what happens in them.

William Hemsworth:

Okay. Now, also in your book, you describe the confusion between social programs and socialism. Can you go over that for us? I think that’s a big thing.

Trent Horn:

Absolutely. There is a lot of people who endorse socialism. Frankly, I believe that this is the fault of a lot of self-described Republicans and conservatives who cried wolf. Anytime that they hear government is going to do this food stamp or entitlement program or is going to be spending money on this healthcare program, they say, “Oh, this is socialism.” Well, it’s like the boy who cried wolf. If you say it long enough that, “Socialism is evil. Socialism is evil,” and you look and say, “Well, I don’t think food stamps are evil. I don’t think that Medicaid is evil,” then people say… Then when real socialism comes along it’s like, oh you… People stop listening to you.

So as I say in my book, and as I said in my debate with Sam, “Socialism is not what government does, per se. It’s about what government lets you do.” So the fact that government spends its tax revenue on public goods, that is not what makes a socialist country. If you compare the Soviet Union, for example, and the United States during the Cold War, both of them had public parks, public libraries, public hospitals, but clearly, we had different economies. The idea here is that in the Soviet Union, they also controlled the majority… The government controlled the majority of the industries.

So an analogy I would give is, imagine you went to an actual fair, okay. There are little booths like a Renaissance Fair. You go to the booths, one’s got your chili, one’s got your turkey legs. You got these little booths at the fair, right. One of the booths is run by the government and they say, “We’re going to sell turkey legs for $2.00 a leg, but you got to make less than $40,000 a year.” Fine, that’s great. Okay. That’s your booth. I might want that. This other booth might do really great turkey legs and I got to pay more for it, but I want really good turkey legs, big [inaudible 00:17:52] ones.

But even if the governments says, “We run this booth, and we also have a rule that says, every booth at the fair needs a fire extinguisher.” Okay, fine. That’s a sensible thing, so that we can have a fair at all, okay. But if it turned out that every booth, even though it has different names on the top of the booths, they’re all still run by the government and all the prices are set the same by them and it’s all essentially one company, the government running them or the majority of them, and the government, said, “You can’t set up your own booth. You have to set it up through us and according to our terms,” that would be socialism.

When we see that happening, and in the modern terms, Venezuela, Cuba, what ends ups happening is that government is not in a position to know what people’s needs are. And so, when they try to set prices for things, which we can even get into later to talk about, they aren’t able to accurately price things, and so this lead to abundance of things people don’t want and shortages of things that they do want, including vital groceries and medicines and food stuffs. And then that’s what we’ve seen in Venezuela and every country that has tried socialism, real socialism.

William Hemsworth:

Well, it’s good. And get in it now, because I saw a documentary similar to what you talked about and they were talking about Cuba.

Trent Horn:

Right.

William Hemsworth:

They talked about the glory days where the groceries were stocked. Now, you can barely find a loaf of bread. How does setting the prices factor into that?

Trent Horn:

This is where I think I’ll run into a big divide with people with Catholic socialists or other people who describe themselves as socialists, and including some people, more conservative individuals who reject socialism, but embrace Chestertonian distributism. I think a big thing that they align with the socialists on that is that we disagree about the role of prices. What is a price? What does it mean when I say a loaf of bread is $3.00? What does it mean when I say a grocery store worker, their wage is $12.00 an hour? In basic economic principles that are outside of Marxism, or things like that, a price is a signaling device. It’s just a way to tell you something about the supply or demand of that thing.

It’s like I wanted to take my kids to a monster truck show on Saturday, all right. And so, I was going to buy tickets for them. In the stadium, there is different prices for the seats I sit in. There is sup luxurious seats that are $200 bucks a seat. I’m not paying $200 bucks to take my kids to see monster trucks, but some people will. Is it unfair that it’s priced at $200? No, because those are the primo seats and there is very few of them. That $200 tells me, there is not a lot of these things. So if I want it, I’m going to have to pay a lot to get it. But the ones that are $15, well, hey, there is a ton of these. They may not be great, but there is a ton of them. And so, that also tells the monster truck show, hey, if nobody is… if no one’s buying… If you set the price at $50 for regular seats and no one’s buying, that shows you, you haven’t met… There is no demand for $50 monster truck seats, but there may be demand for $15 ones. And so, prices are set dynamically. Producers set them in response to consumer demand and also to economic supply.

Let’s say, your rye fields get wiped out. You have barely any rye bread, so what do you do? Well, if you raise the price, then you show people, hey, we don’t have a lot of rye bread. If you want more, you’re going to have to pay a lot more to increase its production, because if you don’t, then people will say, “Oh, well, I’m going to… It’s cheap now, I’m going to buy a ton of it, even if I don’t need it,” and that creates the shortages.

So you look in a place like Cuba, why are there shortages in Cuba? Some people will say, “Well, during the Cold War there was… The Americans placed an embargo on Cuba for trade. That’s why they have these shortages.” That doesn’t explain how the Soviet Union propped them up and they were a very large exporter there. The big problem is, when you go into Cuba, almost because the government essentially controls the economy, there is a black… Everything is a black market. If you want to get a pipe fixed, you have to wait for the state plumber to come and do it. It could take six weeks. You can’t just say, “I’m going to set up a plumbing shop.” You can’t do that without the government’s permission.

In Cuba, it’s amazing. I mean, it’s crazy. There are people who face 20 years in prison for selling eggs and chicken on the black market. That if the government tries to plan the whole economy, the government can’t… If they say, “Well, we want fair prices. We want fair wages,” What that means is, you can’t set up your own business with prices and wages that everyone agrees on and thinks is fair, because the government says that they’re not. And so, if everything becomes part of the black market, then you create these shortages where regular entrepreneurs would be able to fill the void and help people.

William Hemsworth:

Yeah. Also in your book you talk about what you called, “The Nordic Myth,” Scandinavia, how they’re propped up as this model of socialism. Why is it a myth?

Trent Horn:

Well, it’s a myth because, remember, what is our definition of socialism? Socialism is not just government benefits for people. The Nordic countries have very generous social benefit programs for their citizens, though that comes at a cost with a trade-off. They also have very high tax rates. They have health insurance plans that can have significant waiting times. In many of the Nordic countries, they restrict private and homeschooling education. In any economic plan, there is always going to be trade-offs that you’re going to have.

But at the bottom line, the Nordic countries, the government does not control the majority of industry. If someone who says, “We should be socialists. We shouldn’t have billionaires. We should be like Sweden.” Well, I got news for you. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the United States. I mean, all that Ikea money is going to go somewhere. Right? [crosstalk 00:24:08].

William Hemsworth:

Exactly.

Trent Horn:

But it’s true. They have thriving industries. They tried socialism 30 or 40 years ago, more socialists policies, and it didn’t work. They’re also relatively small. People will say, “Why can’t we be like Sweden?” Someone asked President Obama this during the financial crisis. They said to Obama, “Why don’t you just nationalize the banks? They did that in Sweden.” Obama said, “Well, Sweden has like five banks. We have thousands of banks. The capital markets are too vast. We just can’t do that.” I mean, there is like five to eight million people in each of the Nordic countries compared to 330 million people here in the United States.

I mean, people will say, “Well, the Nordic countries have such a high standard of living.” Well, actually, the country with the highest standard of living is Monaco, but there is only like 800,000 people, and they’re all just rich people who drive around in their race cars. It’s easy when you have a really small country. The smaller the country, it’s easier to manage the standard of living. When you go to countries with more than 100 million people in them, the ones with the highest standard of living are Japan and the United States, both of which are fairly capitalist.

As I say in my book, the president, prime minister of Denmark in 2015 said, “We are not socialists. We’re capitalist countries.” And so, as I say in my book, “The Nordic model is not socialism.” So Catholics can reasonably disagree about it, but don’t try to say that’s what it is. Instead, let’s look at the actual models where it’s been practiced throughout history, and you see that it doesn’t work.

William Hemsworth:

So regarding socialism, the church has said a lot, especially during the 1930s and well, even up until now. What are some of the things the church has said about socialism about how it’s… why it’s wrong?

Trent Horn:

Sure. What it said, even in the 1930s, but also this was reaffirmed in Mater et Magistra in the 1960s saying that, “No Catholic can even subscribe to moderate socialism.” The same things are reaffirmed in [Santosa 00:26:09] [Mesanos 00:26:09]. And even today, Pope Francis has said, “Marxism is a failed idea.” He says, “I know some nice Marxists, but Marxism itself is a failed idea.”

The church has outlined several reasons. If you want to get the bulk of the reasons why the church opposes socialism, Pope Leo the XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum really speaks to that. It was published in the 1890s. He says, “The community of goods must be rejected.” This is the idea of the community owning the means of production not individuals. So what Pope Leo said is that, “What we should give the poor an opportunity to do is to be able to work, have a life of thrift, and for a poor man to be able to own his own farm, his own tract of land to be able to tend to it, and then to be able to give it to his children by inheritance to then set them further ahead than he was.” And that was what Pope Leo recommended for wealth as well as to protect these workers and unions and things like that, especially if they’re not agricultural, if they’re farmers, if they’re manufacturers, things like that.

But he said that, “The community of goods, the idea that if everything is… if the means of production are owned communally and essentially you work on behalf of the state, it destroys initiative, industry.” Pope Leo is very clear, there is a right to own private property that does not come from the state. We should be able to take care of ourselves. This also goes to the principle of subsidiarity, that the families should be the central unit of society, not the state or the government.

So I’ll give you an example of this with something modern, because some people will say, “Well, Trent, that was socialists 130 years ago.” But even then you had people, non-Marxists socialists, who were saying that the national income should be divided equally among people. Good luck getting people to work at the crummy jobs if everybody makes the same. Right?

William Hemsworth:

Yes.

Trent Horn:

Or the highly skilled jobs. Why go to med school for eight years if you make the same as the guy who works at the movie theater? Now they’ll say, “Well, we’re not talking about that now. We’re not talking about those things.”

Well, I was watching an interview the other day. I’m sorry. I was reading an article about the housing crisis. It’s hard with the pandemic. People are losing their jobs. They’re worried about getting evicted. And so, the housing authority in New York was taking… placing a moratorium on evictions. We can debate the merits of those policies. But one of the government housing officials in New York said, “Ultimately, my dream for housing policy would be this,” this is something she said just a few months ago, “that everyone pays 30% of their income towards housing.” So everyone has a right to housing.

I mean, try to think of this as a solution. Everyone pays 30% of their income to housing, and then you are guaranteed housing. So if you don’t have a job, if you have made zero dollars, you pay zero dollars, you get housing. If you make $500,000 a year, let’s say a million dollars a year, you pay $300,000 a year and you get housing and the government plans and organizes this. If you just stop for two seconds, you would see, okay, wait a minute, well, I’ll tell you what, I loved living in San Diego, but I moved. I’m in Texas now. But if that was the plan, I’d say, “All right, here’s my 30%,” which is higher than I pay now for housing, “I’d like to live in San Diego, please.” Well, everyone is going to want that.

William Hemsworth:

Sure.

Trent Horn:

Just like everybody wants the $200 seats at monster truck show. Well, then who decides who gets it? Well, it’s going to be the people who have connections to the bureaucrats. That’s how it’s always been throughout history.

What I think Leo would say, even moreso than this plan being unfeasible, Pope Leo would say, “Wait, instead of a man being able to own his own home and being able to be self-sufficient, you just turned him into a permanent renter at the mercy of the government. He’s always dependent on government to put a roof over his head instead of living a life of thrift to do that for himself and for his children.” And so, that would just be one very moderate example of this attitude persisting and why it’s not good for the human person.

William Hemsworth:

Okay. Now, what would you say to someone who says, “Well, the popes that were condemning it, they were only condemning the totalitarianism and they weren’t condemning, I guess what they called democratic socialism?”

Trent Horn:

Right. I would say, “Well, what is your definition of democratic socialism and how does that relate to their condemnations?” It’s not my fault if the socialism that was practiced in the time of the popes, if it then and now, it invariably turns into totalitarianism. It’s like well, first of all, they’re not just condemning. That’s just a feature of it, but that is not the main thing. If totalitarianism was the problem, they would just say, “We condemn totalitarianism.” There is a word for that. Just condemn that, not the system itself. But the system, it leads to that because you cannot have…

Think about it, what is totalitarianism? It’s when government has total control. Okay. Who controls the economy under socialism? The people. Imagine if we said, there is two variants here. You could say, well, you and I and every person in America, we control the whole economy. Do you have time to go to the meetings every night to decide how the economy is run? I have kids. You have kids.

William Hemsworth:

No.

Trent Horn:

No. No. So what would you and I end up doing? We’d probably say, “This guy, Jake so and so, he shares my values. I’m going to vote for him to vote on my behalf because I trust him to manage these things.” So it just would never work. The community wouldn’t do it. We would want elected officials to do it on our behalf because we just, we do not have time to go through everything to plan the economy. So we would give these elected officials total control over the economy. It is totalitarianism because it always ends up being that way, if the thing you’re talking about is total control or majority control of the economy.

Now, some people will say, “Okay, I’m not saying that we all control the whole economy. I’m just saying, workers control the companies they work for.” You know what? In a capitalist system, you can do that. Companies are free to have worker cooperatives and that’s good. The Catholic Church would say that’s great. The problem comes when the government tries to impose that on every business, because that doesn’t work for every business. It can also be fundamentally unfair in some cases.

I’ll give you an example. If the idea is that, well, the government is going to pass a law, every worker is an equal owner in a company. Imagine if I want to start a company, okay. The Counsel of Trent is its own company, yada yada. So I scrimp and save and I saved my money and I take out a loan. I make all these sacrifices and I take risks. I take out loans. I open my shop. Let’s say it’s not Counsel of Trent. Let’s say it’s Trent’s… I had an idea for a restaurant where they treat you like a child and serve you kid food in a gourmet way.

William Hemsworth:

Right.

Trent Horn:

I think it could be a dumb idea. It could fail, but hey, it’s my right to start a business that could fail.

William Hemsworth:

Right.

Trent Horn:

Right?

William Hemsworth:

Sure.

Trent Horn:

So I start my gourmet kid restaurant for adults. I’ve taken out loans and risk. It’s like, all right, here is the restaurant that’s open. And then the first person I hire, they come into be the cook and they say, “Okay, I want 50% of the company. We need to be equal owners of this.” But how is that fair? I took all the risks. I took all the [inaudible 00:33:48]. If the business fails, the cook can just quit and get another job. I’m stuck with the loans. I’m stuck with the debt. I’ve taken on the risk.

William Hemsworth:

Right.

Trent Horn:

And so, I have no incentive. If I can have ownership in a company without taking risk, I’m going to do that. That’s the problem with socialism. It destroys the incentives for people to take risks, to specialize, to create industry. And so, when people take those risks, there is going to be inequalities. Some people are going to make more money than others.

But what I’m concerned about, William, is the rhetoric of saying about income and wealth inequality. I will put it here. People can take me out of context, I don’t care. I don’t care about income inequality. For me, if no one lived in poverty, but there were many billionaires, I would be happy. I’ve asked some socialists, and I’ve asked some, “Would you want a world where no one is poor, but there are a few people who own lots of wealth? Would that be better than what we have now?” And they say, “No, it wouldn’t be, because we still shouldn’t have billionaires.” But that bothers them. I don’t care how rich some people are. I just want to make sure that everybody has the basic needs that are met and dignity as being a human being. And so, that’s why I’m concerned these economic systems focus so much…

Well, I mean, I’ll give you an example of income inequality. Imagine I could snap my fingers and make everyone twice as wealthy without destroying the economy, no inflation. Do you think I should do that? I snap my fingers, everybody is twice as wealthy without negative effects. Would that be good?

William Hemsworth:

Well, everyone will say, “Absolutely.”

Trent Horn:

But notice what would happen here, income inequality would double, if I did that.

William Hemsworth:

It sure would.

Trent Horn:

If I did that, the rich would be twice as richer. You would have more income inequality, but people would be better off. That’s what we need to focus on and I think gets lost in these discussions about socialism sometimes.

William Hemsworth:

So how do we get to that point with capitalism then?

Trent Horn:

Right. Here is the other thing that is hard for me is that socialism, people always get to say, “Well, that’s not real socialism. That’s not true socialism. That’s socialism that has been distorted. This is my ideal socialism we should have.” They compare that to realistic capitalism. Excuse me. They compare it to realistic capitalism. And so, that’s not a fair comparison. You should either do ideal socialism and ideal capitalism, or realistic socialism and realistic capitalism. When you compare the realistic things, capitalism always wins. And then we have great comparisons, because you can compare North and South Korea. You can compare East and West Germany, similar cultures, similar histories, but radically different economic policies. Collective policies lead to ruin or malaise. Malaise at best, ruin at worst. Free policies lift people up.

Now, the problem is, it’s a bumpy road. It’s going to be a bumpy road and it’s not the only thing. Now for me, capitalism and free markets, they’re not a panacea. They’re not going to solve everything. They give a framework of nature for grace to build upon. That’s why the church has been very critical of capitalism, because it allows people so much freedom. Because we’re sinners, we often abuse the freedoms that we have. So it would be like saying, how do we make sure people have holy romantic relationships and marriages and we avoid fornication and bad marriages and things like that? Well, we could have the government just arrange everybody’s marriages, and things like that, but that would be horrifying. But when you let people freely do that, we get the messes we have now.

The answer is to keep the freedom, but change people and encourage them to live lives of virtue to be able to love one another, even in the economic sphere. So that means as an employer doing your best to understand to meet the needs of your employees. For many Christian employers, that may be including being charitable. You might pay more than market value to help your employees.

Pope Leo is very firm about this in Rerum Novarum. Charity is not something government mandates for all of us. That’s a Christian virtue. But the government can help the poor and do things like that. I would say that, it’s just important in the markets to treat other individuals as human beings, and also for consumers as well to be mindful of that and to use the money we have been blessed with for charitable and business enterprises in a way that maximizes human flourishing and helps to build people up their… the basic elements and the things that they need. But I would say, ultimately, the more freedom we have to be able to do that and respect the basic right of others, things naturally tend in that direction since the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of capitalism.

In 1820, about 94% of people lived on less than $2.00 a day. Today, that’s less than 10% of people. Again, East Asia, just back in the 1960s, it was like 40% of people lived in extreme poverty. That’s dropped to 10% because of the ability to increase markets and allow people to build and create wealth. I think that’s a way forward, but we have to understand that it’s a framework. We always have to add grace upon that to reach its maximum benefits.

William Hemsworth:

Okay. [inaudible 00:39:32]. For those that may say, “I’m a socialist because I just want to care for the poor,” and obviously, we can do that in capitalism as well-

Trent Horn:

Right.

William Hemsworth:

… but how could you and I as individual Catholics help with that?

Trent Horn:

Well, there is a variety of things that we can do. I think that once again, if we’re going to help the poor, we have to understand, good intentions are not enough. That’s the main problem with socialism, because good intentions can lead to very negative consequences.

So for example, there is Tom’s Shoes. Tom’s Shoes, you buy a pair of shoes from Tom’s for $60 bucks. He donates a pair to Africa for kids who don’t have shoes. At first, you think, “Oh, that’s great. That’s going to be really helpful. If I get shoes, a kid in Africa gets free shoes. What could be bad about that?” It’s great for Tom’s Shoes because it costs them, what, $8.00 to make a pair of shoes.

William Hemsworth:

Right.

Trent Horn:

It’s like they’re selling you a $60 pair for $52. They’re still making a profit. Here is the problem, what about all of the people in Africa who make shoes? What about everyone who owns a shoe making business in Africa? The person who works in a shoe making factory or business there, what will happen to them? They cannot compete with free Tom’s Shoes. The people of Africa who can’t just go to the store and buy shoes, they’re dependent on us for the shoes to come from America to cloth them. We’ve created a perverse dependency that actually keeps people poor. That they still aren’t wealthy enough to buy their own shoes.

The problem in many, in African countries, Greg Mills has a great book on this, Why Africa is Poor, is you have kleptocracies. You could start a business and it’s thriving and the government comes in and says, “We’re taking over your business. We think it’s in the country’s interest. We’re taking your profits. We’re going to run your business now. Sorry, it’s ours.” In Africa, people, we don’t know who owns which land. A major thing in the developing world why farmers and others are poor is, nobody knows whose land belongs to who. [inaudible 00:41:36] to take care of it because somebody will say, “Nevermind, that’s my land.” And if it’s not yours or you feel like you won’t be able to hold onto it, then you can’t invest in it. Or for me, as an American investor, I’m not going to give money to an African shoe store if, one, it has to compete with Tom’s, and two, in a month, the government can take it over and I lose my investment.

There is lots of things you can do. I’ll give you a few examples, one are microloans. I don’t like big charities. But giving $100 bucks to a Burmese goat farmer to buy… or to buy another thing that he needs to make goat milk, whatever, and then I charge, make it a zero percent interest loan, and then he pays it back. And then I use that to help another person who is starting a garment company. They just need a bit to get going to keep their business going. I think microloans are great.

I think charity though is ultimately another thing we should focus on, but be efficient about it. One of the things I like to give to is a group called Against Malaria. For $3.00, you can send a malaria net to Central America and that will save somebody’s life. Malaria kills tens of thousands of people every year and a $3.00 net will save somebody’s life. It’s just a simple thing that will end up being lifesaving and confront the greatest harms people face today.

So I would say that we should, in our local sphere, help people look locally. If you see someone who is homeless, give them a homeless bag, or give them resources to find a center. But then also, think globally of the people who are most in need and find very efficient ways to help them, which can obviously be very inexpensive and help many people.

William Hemsworth:

Right. I was in the banking business for 15 years and the micro loan thing would help so many people. There is a big market out there for it. I think we could help a lot of people with that.

Trent Horn:

It’s great. What’s great about it is, you can keep building, because if you loaned the $100, it comes back to you, you give it to somebody else.

William Hemsworth:

Right.

Trent Horn:

Rather than just giving $100, that you will maximize the good that you’re able to do.

William Hemsworth:

Right. Now, Trent, you’re a very busy guy, so what do you have next on your plate? Do you have any debates or writing anymore book or anything?

Trent Horn:

Yeah. I got a debate on the resurrection. Actually, I have a baptism I have to get off to very soon. So right after this, I got to go to a baptism. Godparents, very blessed to be that. I got a debate on the resurrection coming up soon. I’m writing a new book, a dialogue book on the faith, my first dialogue book, and then more podcasts. People can check me out at The Counsel of Trent on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play. I do three episodes a week. It’s a lot of fun. I’m keeping busy.

William Hemsworth:

All right.

Trent Horn:

I got my kiddos and some lite beer. I love it.

William Hemsworth:

All right, good. Well, Trent, thanks for taking some time to come on here with me. I really appreciate it.

Trent Horn:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I would love to come back on again.

William Hemsworth:

All right. [inaudible 00:44:23]. God bless.

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