I have long followed Fr. Robert Sirico the Founder of the Actin Institute. Actin was founded in 1990 with the purpose of combining religious and economic education and providing the religious and laity academic communities with an historical liberal perspective, based on Biblical and Natural Law Principles.
I was first attracted to Fr. Sirico after I read his life story. He was born into a family of means in New York City. Like so many young people that grew up in the 60’s, his life was influenced by progressive ideological theories that were coming into the mainstream of academia especially in California where he and his family moved before he entered into college.
First at City College of LA, and then at USC he became a follower of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Though never a member of the Black Panther movement, he expressed admiration for the cause. He became a Protestant Minister and formed a church backed by a “well to do benefactor” in Seattle Washington. He is said to have married over 1000 gay couples in Seattle and then he moved to Cincinnati where he founded a similar church. Somewhere along the way he had an epiphany like Paul or St. Augustine—”please God save me but not today”.
He became a seminarian and continued his study of economics and political philosophy as well as his religious studies. He became a follower of Frederick Hyak, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises. While in seminary it became apparent to him that his entire life had been one of coddled,
“socialistic privilege”. His needs had always been taken care of by others. First his mother and father, and then in college by his family who paid for his tuition, room and board, and then in his churches where he always had benefactors, and finally in the seminary where the church took care of all his life needs. He concluded that not only had he been trained in the ways of socialism, but the means by which he was being kept were the fruits of capitalistic enterprises. Donations have to come from somewhere.
FR. Sirica’s economic epiphany occurred separately from his religious conversion. As he traveled the world, he noted that where capitalistic free markets thrived, so did the people. Poverty was being lowered in some countries like South Korea at an almost exponential pace. In socialized countries that embraced command and control mechanisms to allocate resources and make economic choices he noted abject failures and poverty. Stalin starved or murdered 70 million people, and in Communist China where Mao oversaw the death by starvation of over 100million people, socialism and communism failed the working class that they had promised to help. Only the oligarchs and the ruling classes benefited.
I taught a trauma course at Ft. Sam Houston for 24 years. Many times, I was the only civilian instructor. The military surgeons who taught with me were smart, talented, and energetic, but they had spent their entire professional careers in a socialized system where their needs were met by the Federal government. Their paychecks originated from the US Treasury. They never had to concern themselves with issues of cost, pricing, or marginal utility. They had no understanding of entrepreneurial risk. They absolutely had no concern for the issue of scarcity or even the allocation and distribution of resources. They worked for the government not for their patients or even a third-party payor. The doctor patient relationship was itself secondary to the needs of the command.
The situation that Fr. Scirica noticed at the seminary and that I noticed in the military was more ubiquitous than I could ever have imagined when I came into private practice. Think of all the people in our country who receive a government paycheck. In the old days, an employer or an owner or a professional person that hired a support staff had the company name on the upper left-hand corner of the check, and they signed the check on the lower right-hand corner. Today that transaction is handled as an electronic “proxy transaction” but still only the owner or her/his agent has signing authority. Same story with the head of a household, a single person business, or a ranch or a farm. Costs, prices, and net profits are carried in the owner’s brain and updated daily. A working-class mother or father with four kids knows what is going in and coming out. A government employee, or even many professional politicians working in government have no idea—even if they serve on JAFAC! It after all is not their money. It is not their risk!
The Democrats have put up two people—Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have absolutely no experience in the private sector. They have never owned or run a business or been a principle in a private sector project. They have never had any skin in the private sector game. Same thing with that genius of economic theory Joe Biden. Nancy Pelosi author of “the Pelosi Put-Option” made her money by influencing regulators on behalf of private interests in exchange for a piece of the action—either a discounted price on a stock or in the case of local politicians in a real estate project. None of them have employed, been accountable to, or had to fire an employee. None of them have had to take an economic risk with their own money. Their leverage is their influence. Their only risk is being caught. The damage of such political collusions and corruptions is the people will eventually lose trust in their government institutions—sound familiar.
Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have both experienced the ups and downs of owning a business, of feeling the responsibility for one’s own employees should they make a bad decision. They have each employed tens of thousands of employees. They understand capitalism and free markets. Being an owner forces one to be accountable not only to oneself and family, but of everybody that works for you and most of all your customers.
My bet is that very few people understand the connection between Biblical and Natural Law Principles and Capitalism the way Fr. Sirico, Milton Friedman, and Fredrick Hyak did. My bet is that few people that are lifetime politicians can understand and appreciate the difference between a balance sheet and a profit and loss statement.
I will also bet that both DJT and J. D. Vance can read financial statements, and I will bet, even if it is intuitively, they understand that liberty is a prerequisite for economic freedom and that the creation of capital can only be done privately. The redistribution of the fruits of another person’s labor never leads to economic growth or political liberty.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are Marxists. In their entire lives they have never produced anything or created utility in the marketplace and now they are asking for your vote so they can tax you more to create more government programs. They even have the temerity to call it “investing in ourselves”.
They are both economic MORONS. I would rather be led by the first 500 names in the Garden City phone book—notice I didn’t say Boise—than by the Tim-Kams. MAGA
