So I often have said that capitalism is not only the least worst system for organizing a society's economic affairs, it'd be the best system for organizing all of the society's affairs if our wants actually matched our needs. I think that difference between what we want and what we need is this thing we might call virtue. And that daylight might be part of what explains much of what we might even see wrong from the left from the right. It doesn't matter.
With capitalism is not a source of virtue. Virtue is a precondition for capitalism to work. And I think that that's a conversation that we don't have often enough. I say this is someone who's an unapologetic proponent of free market capitalism as our mechanism for organizing our society's economic affairs. But to recognize that there's more to our life well lived as individuals and as a society that then goes beyond just the economics of how we live.
And I'm looking forward to a sprawling conversation today. We've already begun it, but we decided to just turn on the camera and get it on air with my guest in the podcast today, Father Robert Serrico. I hope I'm saying your name correctly. You are. I'm not so sensitive. Yeah. Well, that's good. Neither am I. It takes two of us to empathize on that. But welcome to the podcast today. Thank you for coming down from Michigan. Thank you. I'm grateful for you being here.
I thought it would be helpful. I'm enjoying and looking forward to reading your book, The Economics of the Parables. Just looking at the back cover already, I can see that this is going to be something that I'm going to have some fun with while traveling on a plane on the campaign trail. Good stories. It looks like it, but I thought I would get, give you a chance to share a bit of your background before we get into I think a discussion from China to virtue here at home.
Sure. Well, it's a long story and I've got a whole autobiography I'm working on, but I was raised in a working class Italian home, no expectation of college at all. It's the first one in my family to go to college. The 60s came, I was growing up in the 50s, the 60s came and I got caught up with a lot of the movements of the 60s. And that took me to my mid 20s when I asked deeper questions. I mean, you alluded to something that I think is very important.
Economic truth is true, but it's not the whole truth. There's something more important. Part of the story. It's very important part of the story. If we neglect that part of the story, then we have good sentiments. We're so heavenly minded, we're no earthly good as the preacher once said. But when I confronted the reality of economics, it drew me back oddly enough to my faith that I had abandoned by that point. And that then led to my going to university and discerning my vocation as a priest.
And then when I got into seminary finding that a lot of the left wing causes that I was involved with in California at that time, I had moved to the left coast. That it's seeped into the seminaries, the form in the 80s, the form of liberation theology, the attempt to baptize Karl Marx. Well, I knew better than that, but I needed to ground myself philosophically and theologically, which is what I did in seminary.
And then eventually founded the Act and Institute, which tries to help religious leaders of all denominations, all traditions, think about the moral potential of a market economy. If we say we love the poor, we have to do something more than just love them. We have to know how not only to make food, but produce food, it gets into the whole economic question. Yeah, you bring a different dimension to this that's probably outside of the partisan axis, right?
It's not a left or right wing perspective. No, there is this discussion and it's an interesting, I would go so far as to call it a fissure on the right about whether or not we should embrace capitalism as our chosen north star for how we organize our societies affairs.
I alluded to where I land, I'll tell you more about that, but I'm interested in your perspective on this fissure between the new right, which sort of says that no, we need to restore what we would call, something we would call, I guess, a moral form of capitalism
to say that there are certain things that businesses or capitalist actors ought to take into account as their non-economic ends when their capacity is capitalist versus those who would say that no, in the system of capitalism, your job is to make products and services for profit, carry that out. What's your perspective on that increasing debate? Well, somebody who wants to say that the market of the mature mind is its ability to make distinctions. And it is true. We need a free economy.
I prefer the word free economy because it encompasses so much more than just capitalism, which is a Marxist phrase in the first place. capitalism only deals with capital, it only deals with the material. The people working in your business are more than material. You know, this is part of the problem with the pandemic. We just viewed people as patients as not as human beings, so we treated them that way.
Right, right. Interesting. And so I think that I try not to use the word capitalism on the right. There is this confusion. Here's the word came from Marx basically. It's a white union. Which capitalism? Yes, right. Right. No, it did. And we use it as though it were a full comprehensive description of a philosophy of life. And it's not. It's only a concentration on economics, which is useful by definition, it's utilitarian. But there's something more to human life than the physical.
There's something more. There's something transcendent. Of course. Virtue, you can't put under a microscope. But the ability, love, beauty, you know, these are not material things. Right. Something that speak to the spirit, the transcendence of the human person. On the right, I think that these people who are observing now are tempted by the same temptations that the left is.
And they're assuing markets and they're assuing free trade now in the name of morality, failing to understand that the market fails on a moral level when we don't place it in a moral context that the market isn't designed to give us the total meaning of human life. And it's disappointing to see a lot of my friends. Yeah. A previous friends may be now just abandoning free markets and speaking about a form of totalitarianism or at least authoritarianism in the name of virtue.
I don't think you can make people good by forcing them virtue is something you respond to volitionally. Right. Oh, I love that. So I think you and I are deeply on the same page here. I think a lot of it. Yeah. From what I've seen of you, which is why I wanted to have a conversation with you. Yeah. And I haven't really, I don't think I've had a conversation yet where we've broken into this terrain in so many words. So this is important and this is fun for me.
On one hand, I think you do have let's outline what those folks on the right now and some on the left as well are responding to, which is a sort of capital C capitalism, which is to say that that is a total form of organizing a society's affairs and rejecting the fetishization of materialism as the ultimate end all and be all. I reject that too. There's US, there's more to truth than economic truth.
Then I think the reaction and I think the different folks in the left by putting a little stakeholder in front of the word stakeholder capitalism or ESG or whatever say that, no, no, we have to take into account certain other social or moral objectives that we need to commingle with the distribution of capital and the flow of capital in an economy to achieve those goals through capital itself.
And I think that makes a certain moral mistake, a moral error, a philosophical error of mixing the kinds of things that ought not be mixed because they're concepts of the wrong kind to be commingled. But then many on the right are saying the same things. But it's not different social values instead of climate change and racial justice. It's something else, right?
A different distribution of what it means to live a dignified life as Americans, vis-a-vis other trading partners in the world that we need to modify capitalism to achieve a different set of goals. And in my views, both of those are from the failure to recognize. They kind of make the same mistake as the very thing they're criticizing by fetishizing green piece of paper.
When in fact, green piece of paper should just be green piece of paper, not more or not less, or looking to coercion to solve the problems. Well, that's the real problem, yeah. You know, and my point is that if you really want to, you know, it's not making the distinction between authority and power. This comes from Robert Nezbo to his sociologist.
He said both power and authority are forms of constraint, but one is an interior form of constraint where you don't do something you want to do, not because somebody's telling you that you have to do this, but because you've bought into some value that says, okay, I'm going to go to the wedding on Saturday morning of my sister-in-law, even though I rather be golfing. You conform your behavior, you restrict your behavior. The other form of constraint is authority, which is outside.
You must do this. Well, if you're a religious person and you're interested in virtue, if you're just a moral person you want, people to be moral, you can conform their behavior, but what you want is the conversion of a heart. It's much more radical. Now, of course, what someone on that side would say, I'm with you on this, but what some of that side would say is fake it till you make it a little bit. You build the muscle memory that teaches the heart. This is true. This is called habituation.
We acquire habits of virtue. St. Thomas says that. Right. There's some truth to that measure, but the notion of achieving it by force rather than ball and theory habituation. There has to be some seed, some attraction to the virtue that causes you to constrain your behavior, and then you restrain it over a period of time and it becomes a life. Right. I think that the point I'm interested in your reaction to is this idea of cabining capitalism.
To say that if the green piece of paper or just green pieces of paper, there are still other spheres of our lives that matter and that partly by saying that we ought to adjudicate other social norms through the flow of capital, we actually recreate the very error we were trying to avoid by deciding that he who has the most green piece of paper also gets to decide implicitly who governs or what policies do or don't make a difference.
That in some ways was the critique of the pro-deification of money view, right, which is to say no, no, no, no. Well, we need to take into account these other social values rather than worshipping the market by then saying that then you have market actors who ultimately decide what social more is to advance. That sort of, in my view, worsens the problem as opposed to saying that, you know, money buys you a yacht or a car that's nicer than the next guys. So be it.
That's just stuff who cares if we're all truly co-equal citizens in a civic body. We're truly still respecting one another as co-equal human beings in the eyes of God and in the eyes of each other. And it feels to me like that's part of what we've lost in part because we are viewing everything through the prism of a unidimensional hierarchy defined on the axis of money. And just for your reaction to that, that's a really important part of my work.
Well, you know, it's not just the yachts that the money buys, it's also the politicians. Today it is. Yeah. So what we have now is chronic capitalism. Yep. I think on the part of the, I'll call them the theocrats or the intergalists. Yeah, I think they want to really dis-thing together.
They don't have enough confidence in their own moral vision that says that people, when they're confronted with the truth of things, not not everyone, but you can build a culture, we built a culture based on this, this idea that people will acquiesce to the truth of things, not because they coerced, but because they're convinced about it.
And this is the problem we're facing today that now you have both sides of the political spectrum battling over power, battling over the government to achieve their particular ends. You know, Lord Acton once said power tends to corrupt and absolute power. Yep. Absolutely. And by the way, that was directed, not at monarchs, but at the pope. Oh, really?
It was a warning that you could have so much religion, you know, a kind of state religion that it corrupts even great people within the church itself. That's interesting. I didn't realize that was directed. That was the context. Yeah. Which pope? That would have been Pionono at the time. Okay. Pope Pius the Knight. Huh. Interesting. I learned something there. So what's your perspective on habituation?
Let's talk about it because that is the case that you'd hear from the what you call the theocrats or the integralist. I think that, you know, and to sort of define what that means, those would be those on the right, maybe who say that we need to use capital or those who wield capital need to wield it in ways that create these moral norms. That's what we mean by referring to that. Just what you said that people who create money should be bound by moral norms.
It's the same more about what you were doing on that. Yeah. Well, it's when you involve politics in the game when you know politics. Yeah. You you kind of amalgamate church and state once again with all the best intentions in the world. But this, you know, in the places where this has been experimented with, I'm thinking of Europe, we have stirred church state relationships. The church has been weakened. Germany is a classic example of this thing.
The German church, now I'm talking primarily about the Catholic church because I know best, but I think the what's called the evangelical Lutherans there as well. This would apply. They have gone woke in their theology, but they still receive heavy subsidies from the government, but the numbers of people going to the churches are diminishing. And they get this money and now they say everybody can come to communion except those who won't pay the church tax.
So you can't come to communion if you take yourself off of the subsidy role. That is you're giving money to the government to give to the church. This weakens the church. My argument about this isn't that it weakens society, though I think it does, but it weakens the church because the church loses its vision, its mission. So let's sort of go through your principle objection is the use of capitalist overreach to influence our politics. We share that in common.
What's your perspective on capitalist restraint to sort of say that, you know, I could make an extra dollar by emitting, you know, the classic example that's used in extra unit of carbon into the atmosphere, but that it's part of my job voluntarily to choose not to, even if the law doesn't constrain me. Well, I think, you know, I think it does involve both moral restraint and incentives. And if you have enough people competing for the good, you're going to have an incentive to do the good.
So some people just conform themselves in in Catholic theology. We say that there is a way in which you can be moral simply by being afraid of the penalties of sin, hell, in the act of contrition. We say, I repent of my sin because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but then we go on to say, but most of all, because they offend me, my God, that's the ideal.
But if you can't get to that point yet, just out of love of God, you avoid sin, well, then let there be some penalties in place. I'm not saying that we don't have law, I think contract, contracts, tutor people on kind of civil ethics, civil virtue, if you will. But I think there are more sublime, more sublime understanding of virtue than just the civil dimension of it. Say more.
So in civics, I might not be required to give my life, but the more sublime virtue, I might have to surrender my life or my money or my time. I mean, it happens on a whole gradation of examples. But you have in history men and women who have surrendered their comfort, their safety, their health in order to build institutions that support vulnerable life.
I mean, the whole hospital came out of the churches, love of the poor, where people would actually go into infected villages and minister to people as they were dying. And some of them caught the contagion themselves. What can inspire a person to do that? It has to be more than just you. You have to go do this or you will be in jail. So speaking of, speaking of jail, that might be a good transition to a topic that you've recently been involved in a documentary on.
And so talking about Jimmy Lai and what happened in Hong Kong, this is, you know, we're talking about the proto-authorianism that we might worry about here at home. Let's talk about what the real thing looks like. Tell us a little bit about his story and what we should learn from him. This incredible story and we did a documentary which is available to everyone to see. I think it's already hit more than, it's been out a month now, more than three million views at freejimmylai.com.
I met Jimmy more than 25 years ago in Hong Kong. By that time, he was already beginning the media empire. But the man is a serial entrepreneur, you really like him. He began with, came to Hong Kong on a junk. It is a teenager with no money. From where? From Shanghai? From Shanghai. Yeah. And in those days when you hit Hong Kong, you were free. Yeah. And he just learned the textile trade and eventually, he tells the story. It's in the documentary. He tells the story of reading Friedrich Hayek.
And he weeps as he talks that this was a whole revelation to him about how one can be involved in a market for a moral end. He eventually will have to relinquish his textile. He had kind of a beneton type clothing set of stores in China. But when Chen Eman's Square came, the protests, he protested and the Chinese told him, you're closing down in China. You sell it or we'll take it. And so he did.
And that's when he put his energy into the media empire, Apple Daily, which was the largest circulation daily in Hong Kong. And he kept up the pro-freedom, pro-democracy and then the protests and was involved in the demonstrations, the big demonstrations that took place a few years ago in Hong Kong where a third of the island came out to protest the clamp down, the totalitarian clamp down in Hong Kong. They arrested him on a series of minor things. Now he is in jail still.
What did they arrest him on? Well initially it was some zoning stuff. But now he's arrested on the national security law and he's going to be tried on treason because he and by the way, there are several others with him who are being tried. They could extradite him to the mainland. His child's coming up in October. And so I said, this is a friend of mine. What can I do?
And so we drew our resources together and produced this film, which is a very moving film, a very professionally done film, to call for his freedom. And what is, I mean, what is the US doing about this right now? Because this is a total violation of the agreement relating to the autonomy of Hong Kong, is it not? Yes, well, I mean the Hong Kong, they just say, well, that's just paper.
That's just, you know, they're not going to, we're not going to, the interesting thing about Jimmy is that one of the reasons the Chinese got really ticked off with him is he came here and met a lot of different people from all sides of the political spectrum. He met Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats and then the Republicans and went back and that's when they began to really clamp down. I think the best thing we can do is protest. Yeah. It is name it, you know, use the social media.
That's why we, we've produced this movie, freejimmylie.com and then ask people to protest it when we put up clips from the movie on TikTok, TikTok took it down, took the whole thing down, unbelievable. And then, so what was, and it was TikTok, but not the other platforms. No, the other platforms, so what do you think as with Chinese ownership of TikTok? I can't imagine. I mean, it's just, it's got to be.
And the interesting thing was the Wall Street Journal immediately wrote an editorial on it and then a number of people like Congress, know they've been very good. Well, Jimmy lies Godfather is Bill McGurne who is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. I mean, the man knows the family very well. So they put up, they said, oh, it's an algorithm mistake.
And they put up, I think, three, or maybe, maybe they left two off and they were the two, they said, they thought it was violence because we were showing the protests. They thought it was violence that we put them back up, but the two they kept off for another day were the two discussions of China's totalitarianism, completely just talking heads, talking about the lack of freedom in China. They finally put those back up and their office called and apologized.
And well, I'm still waiting to hear from their higher ups to see what they're going to do about this. What are they going to do about it? Well, we've put everything up and kept putting it up. Now, as I say, we have over three million views on all the different platforms. What do you think is going to happen to them? You know, his son testified in Congress recently and said, I just hope that I can see my father again. He can't live in Hong Kong now. He has to live outside of Hong Kong.
Where is he? He, his residence. No, no, no, his residence in Taiwan. So he's close by. So he's still sees his mom when she goes over there. But I don't think it looks good. I mean, they won't allow his, he's also a British citizen. Jimmy Lai is a British has a British passport. And they won't let a British barrister represent him in court. So he has to have the Chinese lawyer. And so he's probably going to be sentenced. I mean, it doesn't seem like he's going to get a fair trial.
You know, the thing about him. He's going to get a fair trial. Who gets a fair trial? China. But the thing about him is he knew this. When we, we did a documentary, an earlier documenting on entrepreneurship in which we interviewed him for that. And he said at that time, now this must be 15 or 20 years ago that he expected that he be arrested someday. And then as it came to this when he was arrested, he could have left it anytime. He has houses all over the world. He has two or three residences.
But he said, I can't stir up a mess and then leave it to others. I have to explain. And I just spoke with someone who visits him in prison a few months ago. And he said, Jimmy is reading the summa theological by St. Thomas Aquinas. This is a heavy theological tone. And this is what the communist are afraid of. Not just a Catholic like Jimmy is a Catholic convert. I didn't know that. I didn't know that.
But also what's going on with the Muslims, the Wigars, but also in other regions where they're now protests just today in the news. They're protests with Muslims in other areas of China. You know, it's interesting. You were saying earlier, it kind of brings the conversation full circle. There are certain realms in the civic where you're going to make certain sacrifices of a civil ethics. You could sort of think about it. But in the realm of the sublime, you may be sacrificing your life.
And I think that this is maybe the border between the civic and the sublime actually. This is the fear of totalitarians of any stripe. This is the fear of the Russians, the communist Russia. This is the fear what's going on in Venezuela, what's going on right now in Nicaragua against the church. And this is what's going on in China.
When you and it really goes back, I mean, again, my references are Christian because it's what I know best, but it goes back to put a pinch of incense on the coal to the gods because we can't have any authority over the state and what the Chinese are afraid of with religion is precisely that people have a value that is higher than the state. I like that words. Put incense on the coal.
Yes. They were just they were just asked people to come up before a statue of Caesar or the gods and just put some incense on to show your allegiance to the gods. And Christians said, we can't do that. That's idolatry. But just in martyr is a very good example of it from the third century. And that's where Marx was against the family too, actually. Oh, and probably this whole family property faith, these things present threats to the state.
Yes, because they're their sources of authority going back to our earlier discussion, sources of authority in society that transcend the state. Yep. I like that. And the ultimate version of the totalitarian is to reject those sources of authority. Yeah. And they destroy their own societies in the process of it. When freedom societies that are not free are stupid societies, they don't allow the transfer of information. They don't allow. By definition, they are.
By definition, they don't allow competition, which is a form of cooperation. Many things of competition is something negative, but it's just another form of competition. Oh, I know something better than you. I think I can do this better than you. And then the competitor learns from that. And this is why freedom is innate. It's part of human nature. We yearn to be free. What do you think is the lesson for us here out of the Jimmy Lai?
You took the trouble and the effort of producing this documentary. Sure. And about exposing his story. And there's a certain element of that. But what do you hope people here take away from it as a matter of self reflection? I said in the documentary, freedom, all these different freedoms, the freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of enterprise, freedom is all of one piece. Freedom is essential to human nature because we have reason.
And we can't use our reason if we're not free to act. The lesson for people who live in relatively free societies is we could lose it here too. We've almost lost it during the pandemic. Yep. That's a very frightening thought that they allowed tattoo polish to stay open while they close churches. There's something very wrong with that picture. It's interesting. And the point that you just made, which rings through there is the freedom is a precondition for the use of reason itself. Right.
And so that may be what they fear over there. Oh, I think that's exactly what they do. But it's exactly what happened even over here. Yes. Well, once you lose your freedom, then you start actually, you stop your ability to even reason a big part of what we saw during the pandemic as well. Yes. Yeah. Your wise man, father, I, in a short time have already learned much from you. I look forward to watching that documentary. I, I heard about it.
But you know, he, listening to you, the journey that brought you to make it, I think that's something that I'll be watching. I would, I would hopefully people across this country do not just because it's a story about Jimmy, but it's a story about all of us. And about what can happen if we don't safeguard against the human story. That's right. That's right. And it's, it's a very old, it's not a story that's limited today. No. It's a story that rings through across human history as well.
Exactly. Well, I, I don't know if I'll ever have a chance to meet him. I hope. I hope you will. I hope you will. I hope one day we do. You like to eat? I do like to eat. He likes to eat. Yeah, we'll make it a big appetites, but, but I hope that day comes. But if not, I'll look forward to getting to know him through the documentary that you made. Well, treat about it. Freegmeli.com. Absolutely. This is what we can do now. Yeah. You can count on it.
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