À atenção do Papa Bento XVI (2)

De um excelente texto de Phil Lawler, intitulado Spare us from Vatican economic analysts, que merece ser lido na íntegra, destaco as seguintes passagens (via Tom Woods):

[P]erhaps the Vatican might learn a few lessons from economic analysts. Just for instance:

• that government does not create anything, and therefore does not have funds unless it obtains those funds from ordinary people: taxpayers;
• that the world’s financial system is currently endangered because of the soaring level of government debt;
• that regulatory agencies have an abysmal record of failure in protecting the public from market fluctuations, speculative bubbles, and even outright fraud—and it is only reasonable to expect that a worldwide authority would reproduce those failures on a global scale;
• that government interventions in the markets invariably produce unintended consequences, many of them deleterious;
• that government regulation invariably furnishes opportunities for powerful corporations to manipulate the market for their own purposes, to the detriment of the general welfare.

Oh, yes, and most important of all:

• When an obscure Vatican agency [Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace] issues a statement that contains 50% solid Catholic social teaching, and 50% flaky leftist theory, the world’s media will ignore the distinctively Catholic content—what the Church should say, what the world should learn—and concentrate exclusively on the leftist theory. So for the great mass of ordinary readers, who will never read the full document, but only scan the headlines, the important message will be lost. What will register, instead, is that the Vatican has not learned its lessons about economic affairs and political realities.

À atenção do Papa Bento XVI

A propósito desta notícia, recomenda-se que Sua Santidade promova, com carácter de urgência, a leitura serena e atenta por parte dos seus conselheiros económicos de "The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (Studies in Ethics and Economics)", por Thomas Woods Jr.

É que o problema não é haver regulação e banco central a menos. É exactamente o contrário, como o mesmo Thomas Woods aqui explica, de forma sintética. O que segue é um excerto desse seu último texto (meus realces):

«(...) In the United States we have 115 agencies that regulate the financial sector, and the Securities and Exchange Commission never had a bigger budget or staff than under George W. Bush. There has been a threefold (inflation-adjusted) increase in funding for financial regulation since 1980. For reasons I’ve explained in my 2011 book Rollback, the repeal in 1999 of one provision of Glass-Steagall had zero to do with the financial crisis. Europe has never operated under Glass-Steagall-style restrictions and is none the worse for it. There is no repealed regulation that would have prevented the crisis consuming the world right now.

The banking industry is by far the least laissez-faire sector of the U.S. economy; it is a cartel arrangement overseen by the Federal Reserve and shot through with monopoly privilege, bailout protection, and moral hazard.

O globalismo económico defendido pelo Vaticano

a avaliar por esta notícia, é extremamente perigoso. Uma eventual existência de um Governo Mundial e, por conseguinte, de um único Banco Central, seria receita certa para o totalitarismo à escala planetária.

A ser verdade o que a Reuters divulga, penso que o Vaticano devia começar rapidamente a familiarizar-se com a Escola Austríaca.

Vaticano: contra o Keynesianismo, pró-Austríacos

Via o imprescindível Lew Rockwell, fiquei a saber que o responsável pelas finanças do Vaticano, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, está muito preocupado com a consequência das políticas keynesianas seguidas de um e outro lado do Atlântico. Tedeschi, responsável pelo Instituto das Obras Religiosas, chama a atenção para a  "nacionalização" da dívida privada nos EUA e a "privatização" da dívida pública na União Europeia. Em qualquer dos casos: «They destroy savings, which is an essential resource to create the base for bank credit; they promote speculation on real estate and securities, create illusory artificial values rather than scaling them down; they push consumption to more risky debt; they alter the market with artificial values and thus lead to belief that the very markets do not know how to correct themselves». Tedeschi, pedagogicamente, chega a aconselhar a leitura do livro - no que o autor deste blogue vivamente o acompanha -, lançado em 2009, e cuja capa replico na imagem à direita, "Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments keep creating Inflation, Bubbles and Busts," pelo economista e filósofo americano Hunter Lewis, para desfeitear o argumentário keynesiano propiciador de cada vez maior intervenção do Estado na Economia e, por essa via, na vida dos cidadãos, sem qualquer benefício tangível. Bem pelo contrário.