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Vatican goes astray

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Vatican goes astray

By Boston Herald Editorial Staff

A Vatican agency is reviving an old call for an international body to oversee the world’s economy, and it’s a simply dreadful idea.

Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, presented a council report this past week with the comment, “The time has come to conceive of institutions with universal competence now that vital goods shared by the entire human family are at stake, goods which the individual states cannot promote and protect by themselves.”

And the report said the economy needs a “people-centered” ethics.

The document is by no means the anti-capitalist diatribe sometimes produced by people in religious life. It shows a good understanding of the causes of current economic difficulties.

Yet what experience would lead anybody to think an international economic supervisor could help? What would be the model? The United Nations? It can be useful for limited problems, but its agencies have been vulnerable to hijacking by interested, ill-motivated parties — witness the Israel-obsessed U.N. Human Rights Council.

How about the International Monetary Fund? The Pontifical Council admits it has been a disappointment. Something like the European Central Bank? It has not helped Europe much.

And what is “people-centered”? Some issues have no easy solution. Is a 10-year-old girl better off working in a South Asia carpet factory or in what may be her only alternative, a brothel? Rent control is sold as a help for people, yet it always proves the wisdom of an assessment by Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck: Often controls are “the most effective technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.”

Better than a supervisor is a system that encourages countries to learn from each other’s mistakes.

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