I sat down in front of a microphone and an open Skype line recently to engage in a wide ranging discussion with one of the most interesting thinkers in America today, Father Robert Sirico, founder of the Acton Institute. The interview has been divided into two parts. You can read the first part of our chat here.
The take-off point was a remarkable new collection of short documentary films called PovertyCure. To listen to the whole thing click here. Some highlights of the hour-long interview have been transcribed below for your convenience and edited for clarity:
Jerry: “Charity can be selfish, can’t it?”
Fr. Sirico: “Yeah, it can be very self-indulgent.”
Jerry: “Let’s say ‘philanthropy’. I mean, genuine charity is a Christian virtue, but the philanthropy industry can be selfishly structured and selfishly supported.”
Fr. Sirico: “Well, what we look at in PovertyCure in one of the episodes is all of the different elements (especially in international grants and aid) — the NGOs that are involved in the process; we even look at the celebrities and how this comes up every few years where people are saying, “Help us, let’s do this food for Africa,” or the U.N.’s effort to tax all the nations 1% of their GDP, the Millennium Goals project. All of these different things that come up every few years that are part of this whole poverty industry, and how dangerous that is because it distorts all of the incentives and removes the centerpiece of the ladder for the poor to actually climb up out of poverty, because it removes the profit incentive for people to come and invest and train people in a workforce that’s ultimately productive.”
Jerry: “There’s a quote also in that section of PovertyCure, from Sir Bob Geldof: “We need to do something, even if it doesn’t work or help.””
Fr. Sirico: “And then do it over and over again.”
Jerry: “Isn’t that selfishness? ‘I’m trading dollars for smugness.’ If it’s genuinely charity, if it’s genuinely turning out towards someone, and if it’s genuine altruism, then you would look at the effects. Otherwise it’s just incurvatus in se. It’s just another way of building myself up, buying my charity points.”
Fr. Sirico: “And you see this in the Gospel, don’t you? With the Pharisee who gives a tenth of his belongings and does it for everyone to see, and the poor little woman is so embarrassed with the little bit that she can give, and yet she gives everything.”
Jerry: “Yes, and also the Pharisee who makes a gift to the Temple but neglects people in close proximity like his father and his mother. If you buy status with charitable dollars, that is an arms-length market transaction. It’s not actual charity.”
Fr. Sirico: “Exactly right. I think it diminishes us, because part of the brilliance of real, authentic, virtuous charity is that you’re engaged with people. You’re not just kind of coming down and dropping something on them and leaving. You’re involved with their lives and it’s reciprocal; you receive something spiritual for the encounter that you have in helping somebody in need.”
Jerry: “What would you say to somebody who is right now getting hammered by the philanthropy industry? Maybe in the past they haven’t been cautious, just, “Yes, I’m going to give to the thing with the hungriest-looking child on the TV screen or the one that jerks my heart strings the most.” What would you say to someone about how they negotiate the philanthropy industry when they’re making their decisions?”
Fr. Sirico: “There are all these wonderful online sites now [like] Guidestar, which tells you what percentage of the amount of money is used for fundraising and various things, and how much money really gets to the poor. That’s one of the things that you can use. I think word-of-mouth is good. And I think if you’re just looking for something to do at Christmas—because a lot of people do that; always at Thanksgiving and Christmas people show up at soup kitchens wanting to work. “Where are you the rest of the year when we need you,” is the kind of response of people who are actually in this kind of care. I think the thing to do is call a local pastor and say, “Is there somebody in your congregation who you know [and] who needs some help?” Because that pastor is going to know. [I] just had it today in my own parish: There’s a woman who needs some help, her car is breaking down, she’s going through a divorce, and providentially enough somebody came to the church and said, “Here’s some money for this, and here’s some money for a poor parishioner.” And so we just gave it to her. But we know her, we know the kids, we know the family, and we don’t encourage any kind of abuse. I tend not to give to people who just come up to you or come up to the door or just stop you on the street, because very often that’s not good charity. What you want to do is get involved with somebody, even if you just take them out to lunch. I’ve had that happen… In Chicago, I met a guy and I just took him to a place to sit down. It took me 45 minutes and I got to know this guy and his son. These were legitimate people just having a hard time. People do. Not everybody wants to exploit you but you’ve got to do your due diligence as well.”
Jerry: “We as a family try to never give except relationally. If there’s no relationship, then it seems to be an inferior form or in some cases maybe even a negative value creation form of charity.”
Fr. Sirico: “Yeah. In some cases I have done that, and I figure, “Well, I’ll waste a little bit of money maybe.” But certainly as a general policy I’d rather invest my time in a person and get to know them, even if it’s just a little bit.”
Jerry: “Now, it’s not all going to be personal relationship charity for most people. There is that sort of thing – taking someone to lunch, giving to an individual person – but there are also institutions. So what guidelines can you give us? I understand that you’re mentioning that there are charity navigators of how much is wasted. But there are also sort of general philosophical principles. For instance, you have a lot of microfinance people on PovertyCure, as opposed to simple transfer payments. Is that a principle?”
Fr. Sirico: “Right, yeah. Because then you’re teaching them enterprise or they’re teaching themselves enterprise, and they have to pay the money back with interest. And usually what holds those groups together is the fact that they’re in local communities and that they are known in their communities, because the next person up for the loan is your neighbor, and they want to make sure that you pay that loan back so that they don’t get excluded from the possible loan. The other thing I tend to look for is the percentage of money that the charity gets from government, because the higher the percentage of money they get from government, the more bureaucratic they become. And by that I mean that some of them – when they get 60; 70; 80; 90% of their money from the government so that they’re just coming to you for the clean-up operation, they are already thinking in sync with what the bureaucracy has produced and identified as the needs of people, rather than that kind of on-the-ground personal encounter. So it’s true: We have to give institutionally because the division of labor works in charity as well as it does in the market, but I think when the government is so heavily involved, you know that the market of charity (if I may use that phrase) has been distorted.”
Jerry: “Yes, interesting point. I suppose also, I’ll tend to look at public pronouncements from the people involved with the charity. That if there’s a lot of rhetoric, politicization, ideological hostility to markets, then I think that will reflect itself in the philosophy. Again, just kind of swinging back to one of my favorites, HOPE International/microfinance: Peter Greer is a guy who goes out there and says, “Markets are a liberating force in peoples’ lives,” and there are other Christian international aid agencies where the public pronouncements tend to be guilt manipulation and class warfare. So I sort of gravitate away from those…”
Fr. Sirico: “We had one come to our church. Can I name it?”
Jerry: “Yeah, sure!”
Fr. Sirico: “It’s called Bread for the World. And they came with a whole operation, came to a parish I was in years ago and they wanted our parish council to endorse this. They had a beautiful film with food being passed over steamed tables to their gnarled hands of the poor… I listened to the whole presentation – Bread for the World – and I said, “How much food do you produce?” They said, “No, no, we don’t produce food.” I said, “How much food do you give away?” “We don’t give away food.” “How much do you sell?” “We don’t sell.” I said, “What is it exactly you do?””
Jerry: “They advocate.”
Fr. Sirico: “They advocate. What they were doing was coming in, and they would give us sermon notes and draft letters that we can have our groups send to congressmen as they monitor the legislation that deals with hunger and all of this kind of stuff. So it’s basically a lobbying effort in favor of farm bills and different things like that. I said, “I’d much rather go and serve the poor in the local food kitchen than be involved in your political agenda.”
Jerry: “I’ve noticed that about the same group as well; they’ve been to our parish as well. And there’s a pretty heavy dose of guilt manipulation because you’re productive. It’s like, “Well, you’re lucky enough.” There is a blessing of God involved but America also has institutions which are conducive to wealth-creation, and maybe we ought to talk about that a little bit as well.”
Fr. Sirico: “It’s the presumption that your income is directly related to the poverty of others, and so you’re not actually producing this; you’ve somehow exploited people in order to get it. I think we have a responsibility to live moral lives and lives where we put limits on ourselves, because more than what we consume, but on the other hand, the guilt manipulation I find distasteful and inaccurate. And the same groups that are begging for money from people at this time of the year, in April or May or June are opposing things that can enhance business and make business more profitable. They’re hostile to markets at one point in the year, and then they come to the market at another point in the year and ask for money.”
Jerry: “Interesting. And there’s some really good material in PovertyCure about ‘trade, not aid’. The idea that, particularly in Africa but also in South America, these farmers are efficient [and] they want to sell to the American market, but there are tariff barriers that stop them from selling to the American market. Then, in addition, we give them foreign aid which they have to use to buy subsidized developed-world food, so they’re kept forever in poverty. They can’t have a successful agricultural sector even, though these places in the world have been successful in agriculture for thousands of years — before we showed up with our tariffs and our food-dumping.”
Fr. Sirico: “You know, if I had one wish that could make the poor wealthier, one stroke of the pen, it would be to abolish tariffs and trade barriers and all of the other ways in which markets are manipulated and globalization is hindered. It would feel to the poor like trillions of dollars were infused into their economy, without any kind of aid actually going. Trade is where people are both benefitted by it, and I think that would be a great thing.”
Jerry: “Yes, and it would not have the humiliation of aid involved. And as you point out, there are the virtue-instilling effects of work. There’s a really moving story in PovertyCure about a woman with a basket manufacturing company in Rwanda who hired Hutus and Tutsis together, and she found that just them working together – she said, “We’re not going to talk about anything… You’ve got a sad story; I’ve got a sad story; we’re not going to talk about anybody’s sad stories, we’re just going to make baskets.” And they just got used to being each other’s company. Work can help produce peace between warring peoples because it’s a common goal that you work towards. There’s, you know, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” Well, entrepreneurs then are sons of God in many cases, because they can instill peace between people of different races or different religions or different backgrounds.”
Fr. Sirico: “You know, the personal contact is so important and it’s not just important poetically (it’s nice to describe the personal contact), but it’s important practically. I think when you have these people working together and knowing each other’s families it builds a sense of community. A great example of that is if you’re ever trying to blend into traffic – I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this – and you’re moving your car over and people keep going by you and they won’t let you in, either you turn or you have the person in your passenger seat turn and look at the face of the driver, and just smile and move your hand… Inevitably they will let you move in. As long as you’re an abstraction to me, I don’t have to let you in [the lane] and I won’t establish eye contact with you. I think it was Bastiat who once said something to the effect that “when goods cross borders, armies tend not to.” I think a similar thing like that might happen in a community.
Jerry: “Yes, I agree. I’m just thinking after the Civil War and the liberation of the slaves in the South, there was a widespread American belief that African-Americans would not be able to integrate into society. There was a movement – ‘[Back-to-Africa] because we can’t get along’—and I think one of the things they didn’t count on was that you had this huge spurt in economic growth in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s; especially industrialization in the north. And were things perfect? No, they weren’t perfect, but I think that commerce helped America transcend that problem. In times of economic stagnation in America and in the world, racial tensions seem to come up in volume because that blending process [and] that reconciliation process is not going on as much.”
Fr. Sirico: “That is so true. I just want to make sure that all those reading or listening to us understand that I’m not making the case that the market by itself is the be-all and end-all of human life. I think that there are some things that can’t be bought or sold or acquired on a market [but] that human beings nevertheless need; love is the great example of that. But if we just discard the market, [or] if we just pretend that we don’t need it, then we’re basically severing a very vital part of what makes a society function. It’s not the whole thing, but it’s something vital.”
Jerry: “Yes, and I would add that part 5 of PovertyCure is largely about the idea that faith and these institutions of love and civil society and things like family – what some people call ‘mediating institutions’ — seem to be a necessary precursor to a properly functioning market. Not only is the market not everything, but it doesn’t seem to be able to function without something underneath and around it.”
Fr. Sirico: “That’s exactly right, because it comes out of a culture.”
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Mr. Bowyer is the author of "The Free Market Capitalists Survival Guide," published by HarperCollins, and a Forbes contributor.
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