Free Enterprise is Human Nature and Divinely Inspired
I’ve lost track of how many people have told me over the years that free enterprise is morally wrong.
I’m sure you’ve heard the same naysayers. Capitalism creates inequality. It encourages greed and putting profits over people. My personal favorite: Jesus himself was a socialist, so shouldn’t we be socialists, too?
I mean this literally: Hell no! Because it’s a lie from the pit of hell that free enterprise is somehow immoral.
In fact, the opposite is true: Free enterprise is divinely inspired by God Himself, and it’s a central part of human nature. We shouldn’t reject free enterprise. We should embrace it in a way that no society has ever done—not even the freest country on earth, America. It’s essential to helping everyone answer God’s call in their life.
When God made humanity, He charged us with a mission that the Bible makes clear: to be fruitful and multiply. That doesn’t just mean we should have big, beautiful, busy families—though it does mean that. It also means that we should go into the world and improve it, too. How? Through our sweat and hard work. Through our creativity and innovation. Through our inherent restlessness with the status quo and our relentless desire to leave our children and grandchildren with a better life.
In a word, we should “co-create.” And who are we co-creating with? The Creator Himself—God the Father, who made us in His image. God was the original entrepreneur—and he created us to be entrepreneurs, too!
Free enterprise is the system that allows us to co-create. It gives us the space and opportunity to discover, develop, and apply our gifts for the benefit of others. It gives us the signal of profit when our entrepreneurship improves others’ lives. By the same token, it gives us the signal of loss when we aren’t doing enough for the sake of others. When we co-create to the best of our ability, we empower our family, friends, communities, and countries to grow happier, healthier, and wealthier. That’s what God wants—for us all to flourish.
Does this mean that we have the green light to be greedy? That we have the right to put profits ahead of people? Hardly.
Rightly understood, free enterprise balances resources and distributes them in ways that uphold human dignity. Anyone who puts profit over people is actually rejecting free enterprise. Ditto anyone who greedily pursues his own good at the expense of others. That’s not free enterprise at all. It’s the kind of destruction that defines the devil—not the co-creation that springs from God.
I’m a Catholic, so I’m fortunate to have a Church that has unpacked this theological truth over the centuries. The seminal text on the Christian faith and economics is Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum. It’s focused on the “rights and duties of capital and labor,” and the central point is that when we avail ourselves of our economic rights, we have a duty to lift up those around us.
Pope John Paul II put a finer point on this defense of free enterprise a century later, in the 1991 encyclical Centessimus annus. He said that the collectivist regimes of the 20th Century—the communists and the socialists—had proven Rerum novarum right, that people would suffer under their denial of human nature. Then Pope John Paul II—who we now revere as a Saint—explicitly commended “an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, [and] private property.” In other words, free enterprise.
And to be clear, this vision of free enterprise is fully aligned with what the Catholic Church calls the “preferential option for the poor.” The Church makes clear that we have a duty to lift up the poor and vulnerable. But that doesn’t mean simply giving money to the government or relying on top-down, one-size-fits-all welfare programs. That’s a rejection of what the Church calls “subsidiarity”—the idea that people closest to problems should take the lead in solving them.
Free enterprise is the only system that accords with Christian teaching. It creates the jobs and wealth that lift up struggling communities. And it generates the profits that can be put to use in charities and non-profits. That’s the best way to serve the poor—not by farming the work out to distant bureaucrats, but by serving them ourselves through entrepreneurship and action.
For the sake of human flourishing and dignity, America today needs more free enterprise, not less. We need to get government out of the way of would-be entrepreneurs, innovators, and workers. We need to get rid of the corruption and corporate welfare that have turned countless businesses away from improving lives. We need to get socialism and collectivism out of our education system, so that kids aren’t taught to hate success and never strive for themselves. We need to do everything in our power to empower everyone around us—so that they can co-create, as God intended.
The sooner we do that, the better our own lives and our society will be. Ignore the naysayers: Free enterprise is the most moral economic system humanity has encountered. But that’s what you’d expect from something that’s divinely inspired.
Tim Busch is the founder of the Busch Firm, Pacific Hospitality Group, and the Napa Institute.
