Meeting with global-finance students recently at the Chartreux Institute in Lyon, France, Pope Francis warned them “to remain free from the lure of money, from the slavery in which money traps those who worship it.” He also counseled them not to “blindly obey the invisible hand of the market” but rather to become “promoters and defenders of a growth in equality.”
Even though I'm a professional economist, I am sympathetic to Pope Francis's remarks. Indeed, I think many of my colleagues are too quick to dismiss criticisms of the market as being unsophisticated, and they ignore the wise sentiments that motivate the popular distrust of capitalism. In the Independent Institute's new collection of essays, Pope Francis and the Caring Society, my fellow contributors and I did our best to grapple with the pope's calls for social justice as we unapologetically defended the benefits of private property and market prices.
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