El Presidente Barack Hussein Obama estuvo esta mañana en privado con el Papa Francisco durante 52 minutos. De inmediato han comenzado a circular conjeturas acerca del contenido del diálogo pero probablemente nunca se llegará a conocer su exacto contenido.
A menos, claro está, que haya ex abruptos de parte y parte. Del lado de Obama, si acaso en alguna conferencia de prensa se desmarca del texto que le preparan para los teleprompters o del lado del Papa, si de pronto lanza otro de sus enigmas que alguien tiene más tarde que aclarar.
Obama dijo, antes de su encierro con el Papa, que lo admiraba mucho. No es verdad. Si se admira a alguien es para imitarlo. Y lo último que quiere Obama es eso. Al contrario, desde la Casa Blanca se ha convertido en el principal promotor del aborto, el homosexualismo, el matrimonio gay y la distribución gratuita de anticonceptivos.
Tales prácticas son condenadas no solo por el Papa Francisco sino por la Iglesia Católica, no de ahora sino desde su fundación hace casi 2000 años. El actual Papa ha emitido declaraciones para algunos ambiguas en torno a estos temas, pero con seguridad habrá sido claro y firme en su diálogo con Obama esta mañana.
Si Obama admira al Papa, debe admirar o por lo menos respetar a la Iglesia Católica que él representa. No es así. Aparte de querer forzar a través de legislación y decretos ejecutivos el aborto y demás prácticas conexas, pretende obligar con su Obamacare a iglesias y corporaciones católicas y cristianas a que financien píldoras y otros fármacos abortivos a sus empleados.
Desde el comienzo de su administración en el 2009, además, ha tratado de minimizar el influjo de los principios y la cultura judeo cristiana en la fundación de los Estados Unidos, sugiriendo que igual fue el aporte del islamismo. Esta pretensión es totalmente anti histórica, pero ese criterio se extiende también a debilitar el tradicional apoyo de este país a Israel, en favor de los palestinos.
Calla de los continuos ataques terroristas del pueblo palestino a Israel y calla de las matanzas musulmanas contra los católicos en Egipo, Nigeria, Libia y otras naciones árabes. Prefiere continuar en su teoría de dialogar con Irán mientras este país sigue robusteciendo su industria nuclear y armando al Jezbolá terrorista.
En su charada con Putín, los resultados eran presumibles. El objetivo de Obama de acabar con el liderazgo mundial de los Estados Unidos se está cumpliendo con Crimea/Ucrania. Todos se han reído de las “retaliaciones” de Obama contra Putín. Este sigue tan campante con su Ucrania y su Crimea, que además no constituyen conquista alguna sino re-unión.
Se mofan cuando Obama justifica su “ira” al invocar la necesidad santa de respetar la ley. ¿Con su Obamacare que la aplica y desaplica a su antojo? ¿Con la deuda de 17.7 trillones de dólares que vulnera la Constitución? ¿Con su irracional e inconstitucional desprecio a la independencia de las tres funciones del Estado?
Hay quienes comentan que Obama buscó estar junto al Papa para intentar recuperar puntos de su perdida popularidad (60% de los encuestados ven negativamente su gestión), dado que el pontífice es un “rock star”. O porque cree que ambos comparten el criterio de que el capitalismo es el causante de la pobreza en el mundo.
Fue una de las aseveraciones ambiguas del Papa sobre el capitalismo, cuando dijo que hay que procurar combatir la pobreza y eliminar las grandes desigualdades del ingreso en el mundo. ¿Quién puede oponerse a ello? Nadie. Pero Obama y los suyos creen que la desigualdad se la logra hurtando la riqueza a los ricos mediante impuestos y confiscaciones, para trasladarla a los pobres a través del gobierno.
Es falso. La reducción de la pobreza solo se logra con más acceso de más gente a la riqueza. No con impuestos, no con más sino con menos intervención del Estado. La pobreza en el globo comenzó a menguar con el capitalismo, no a causa de él. Si se quiere más riqueza y menos pobreza de lo que se precisa es de más, no de menos capitalismo.
La absorción de más y más recursos privados por el Estado aparte de empobrecer a la nación, no reduce el número de pobres, los aumenta. En el decenio de 1960 el demócrata Lyndon Johnson lanzó su cruzada de la Gran Sociedad para terminar con la pobreza con fondos públicos. Luego del gasto de más de 52.000 millones de dólares ha crecido el gasto y la burocracia y...la pobreza
A continuación (y para facilitar su inmediata lectura) un artículo breve y preciso sobre el tema que despeja un mito en el cual puede caer Obama pero no el Papa:
Capitalism In No Way Created Poverty, It Inherited It
Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, Contributor
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Photograph from the records of the National Child Labor Committee (U.S.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The nineteenth century, many people believe, was an era in American history when workers were forced to toil in sweatshops twenty-eight hours a day for starvation wages. It was only when governments intervened, either directly on behalf of workers or indirectly by empowering unions, that conditions improved.
The facts tell a different story—one that reveals the unmatched power of capitalism to improve human life.
Remember the historical context. As Ayn Rand observed, “Capitalism did not create poverty—it inherited it.” For much of human history, the vast majority of the population was mired in poverty. All too often, the average individual lived in unimaginably wretched conditions. It was only in the nineteenth century, and then only in the West, that the masses started to enjoy prosperity.
Keep that in mind when you hear about living and working conditions during the nineteenth century. Because it’s true—by today’s standards, the living and working conditions of the time were often miserable. But by the standards of everything that had come before, they were not. For the men and women working those jobs, they were often a godsend.
Remember also, the population of the time was growing at a rate never before seen in human history—so fast that early economists like Malthus wrung their hands over whether such growth could be sustainable. How did the West actually sustain those growing numbers? Only through the rising productivity made possible by capitalism. Many of the workers who manned the factories would not have been able to survive at all in the era before capitalism.
Indeed, two basic facts speak more loudly than any statistical study could. First, factory owners did not have the power to force workers to labor in their factories; all they could do was offer work at a given wage to people who were free to accept the offer, or reject it and look for work elsewhere. Second, people flocked to those jobs, emigrating to the cities from America’s farms and from abroad.
How, then, did conditions for workers improve? Just as businessmen had to compete for customers, offering better products and lower prices, so they had to compete for workers, offering them better wages and better working conditions. This process of competition led businessmen to bid wages up to reflect workers’ productivity: the more productive workers became—the more skills they developed, the more efficiently they were managed, the more capital and technology they could employ—the higher their wages tended to rise.
As a result of the era’s mounting productivity, the statistics show steadily rising wages and steadily declining working hours—long before the government intervened to “protect” workers. Real wages more than tripled over the course of the nineteenth century.
In 1870, according to research from Michael Cox and Richard Alm, the average worker worked 3,069 hours a year. But as his productivity increased, by 1913 he could enjoy a much-improved standard of living working only 2,632 hours. Or consider how much easier it got to earn the money for a half-gallon of milk (56 minutes in 1900, down to 31 minutes in 1930) or 100 kilowatt hours of electricity (107 hours in 1900, but only 11 hours in 1930)
What about child labor? Didn’t nineteenth-century capitalism sentence children to hard and dangerous work? Child labor, despite what we’ve heard, was not created by capitalism. It’s a practice that stretches back to prehistory, when children would spend hours toiling in the scorching sun or freezing rain, risking disease, injury, or death, virtually as soon as they could walk.
Why were most children made to work before the twentieth century? Is it because parents were sadistic and governments cruel? Hardly. It’s because, before capitalism made us rich, children had to work if they were to survive at all. When a family lives on the equivalent of a dollar a day, there is no alternative: if you can work, you work.
What eliminates child labor is not government decree but a rising standard of living. That’s what eliminated it in the West during the nineteenth century, and that is what is eliminating it today in countries like China. As parents grow richer, one of the first things they do is use their burgeoning incomes to send their children to school.
If capitalism is what caused the West to grow rich, then it was capitalism, not government intervention, that eliminated child labor in the developed world.
This is not to deny that governments have limited or forbidden child labor by law. But child labor was going away on its own, and the laws were far from benign. By pushing children out of the newer, more visible factories where these laws were easier to enforce, hungry children were forced to seek work at smaller, older, more dangerous factories—or failing that, as economist Ludwig von Mises notes, to “infest the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers, and prostitutes.”
To be sure, life during the early days of capitalism was hard (as life had always been), but for anyone willing and able to work, life was better than it had ever been—and getting better.
The lesson for us today? Laissez-faire doesn’t impoverish us, but makes us progressively richer.
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