One of Pope's Top Advisers Makes a Direct Attack on Free Markets and Libertarianism

The Next Pope? Meet Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga 

Do we need to be concerned about which direction the Church is headed toward?

From The Economic Policy Journal  "Taking direct aim at libertarian policies promoted by many American conservatives, the Honduran cardinal who is one of Pope Francis’ top advisers said Tuesday (June 3) that today’s free market system is “a new idol” that is increasing inequality and excluding the poor.
“This economy kills,” said Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, quoting Francis frequently in a speech delivered at a conference on Catholicism and libertarianism held a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol....

For the record, there are many ways a person can become wealthy, some do so by producing goods and services the public desires, others are simply cronies that avoid free markets and get government to grant them crony market-hampering privileges. It is this latter form of wealth gain that must be objected to, and not gains by honest businessmen who provide products that people desire.
Maradiaga and the Pope don't seem to understand this distinction.

It should also be noted that inflation (which Argentina has certainly had its share of) causes distortions which benefit the rich at the expense of most everyone else. Even Keynes understood this. In The Economic Consequences of Peace, Keynes wrote with great astuteness: "By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat..."

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