Even free market purists don’t think the invisible hand is the only one we can extend to the poorest among us.

Towards the end of last year, Pope Leo XIV released his first Apostolic Exhortation, titled Dilexi Te (Latin for “I have loved you”). Many of the major themes of this exhortation closely carried over from the themes developed by Francis in his papacy.

Included in this is a specific ethical focus on economic actions and economic systems. The exhortation spans nearly 20,000 words, covers significant ground, and maintains a central focus on God’s love for the poor. The pope argues that the dignity of the poor is central both in scripture and in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

I agree with much of what Leo has to say throughout the exhortation, so I will focus most of my comments on the area where I would differ most sharply from him — on the economic system.

Paragraph 92 in particular addresses economic policy. Leo says:

We must continue, then, to denounce the “dictatorship of an economy that kills,” and to recognize that “while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is being born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow, and the extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.

When reading this, I felt mostly surprised by the characterization of our current situation. A significant chunk of this involves a quote from Pope Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium, wherein he claims inequality has bred ideologies that defend absolute autonomy of the marketplace against state regulation.

The difficulty I find here is that, insofar as these ideologies have been bred (which I’m unsure of), they appear not to have been very successful. Regulation and regulatory agencies continue to outpace market freedom in the West. While measuring this isn’t easy, we have some indications. The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Report shows the current economic freedom score of the US is 8.1 out of 10. This is the fifth-lowest score since The Fraser Institute started keeping annual data in 2000.



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