I have not yet had the chance to read Pope Benedict’s latest message, but Charles Burris has read it, and here’s his interesting summary:

“Fighting Poverty To Build Peace.” The Pope Benedict XVI message for World Day of Peace 2009. The Holy Father challenges many key assumptions of the modern welfare-warfare state, focusing upon the important aspects of wealth-creation and enterprise in civil society in combatting poverty as opposed to statist redistribution of wealth. He concentrates upon those systemic aspects of political economy which demean and degrades “the transcendent dignity of the human person” and the Culture of Life. As if taking a page from that nearly forgotten critic of the militarization of civil society, the economist Seymour Melman, the Pope points out that “immense military expenditure, involving material and human resources and arms, is in fact diverted from development projects for peoples, especially the poorest who are most in need of aid.” Disarmament and development go hand in hand. This is a restating of Frederic Bastiat’s classic “Broken Window” fallacy concerning “that which is seen and not seen.” Robbing Peter and Paul to pay Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, KBR, General Electric, or Northrop Grumman, while Paulette and Pillar remain impoverished by the parasitic redistributionist actions of the State apparatus and its military Keynesianism.