In a letter to participants in a meeting of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund on Thursday, socialist Pope Francis told financiers they must help calculate the “ecological debt” the global north owes to the global south.
We cannot overlook “the ‘ecological debt’ that exists especially between the global north and south,” Francis said. “We are, in fact, in debt to nature itself, as well as the people and countries affected by human-induced ecological degradation and biodiversity loss.”
“In this regard, I believe that the financial industry, which is distinguished by its great creativity, will prove capable of developing agile mechanisms for calculating this ecological debt,” Francis continued, “so that developed countries can pay it, not only by significantly limiting their consumption of non-renewable energy or by assisting poorer countries to enact policies and programs of sustainable development, but also by covering the costs of the innovation required for that purpose.”
Recovery from the coronavirus pandemic “cannot be content to a return to an unequal and unsustainable model of economic and social life, where a tiny minority of the world’s population owns half of its wealth,” he declared. “This necessarily means giving poorer and less developed nations an effective share in decision-making and facilitating access to the international market… [W]e cannot allow the law of the marketplace to take precedence over the law of love and the health of all.”
Capitalism, or “the law of the marketplace” as he puts it, has lifted more people out of poverty faster than any other economic system. It is the only economic model that can create affluence and a flourishing middle class. Pope Francis’ socialism will only end up with everyone impoverished except an obscenely wealthy power class.