I work at a Jesuit institution. The Jesuits I’ve met have been, for the most part, awesome people. But, for whatever reasons, Jesuits tend to study Marxian pseudo-economics when they go through graduate school, rather than real economics. So, it’s not surprising that  Pope Francis’s recent diatribe about markets has all the flaws you readers have no doubt already noted and discussed. (E.g., failing to distinguish cronyist rent-seeking from real capitalism, or treating highly regulated markets as if they were free markets, or ignoring problems of government failure.)

But I will use this to issue a teaser for a forthcoming book. Consider, Holy Father, the following question:

Imagine that we wave a magic wand. The magic wand makes everyone as morally perfect and virtuous as Jesus, but does not make them any smarter, longer lived, healthier, or stronger. Would the resulting people be socialist or capitalist (or something else)?

My answer, as I will defend in my forthcoming book Why Not Capitalism?, is that they would be anarcho-capitalists. If people were fully just and fully moral, they might have communes here or there, but their governing political philosophy would be anarchist bleeding heart libertarianism. (In contrast, the dominant political philosophies out there, such as Rawls’s, aren’t really in my view theories of justice, but theories of the best responses to human depravity.)