George Will is properly unimpressed by Pope Francis. Here’s Will’s conclusion:
Francis’s fact-free flamboyance reduces him to a shepherd whose selectively reverent flock, genuflecting only at green altars, is tiny relative to the publicity it receives from media otherwise disdainful of his church. Secular people with anti-Catholic agendas drain his prestige, a dwindling asset, into promotion of policies inimical to the most vulnerable people and unrelated to what once was the papacy’s very different salvific mission.
He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.
Steve Horwitz offers a Hayekian theory of parental rights.
At EconLog, Scott Sumner rightly praises the Swiss.
Bob Murphy asks a sensible question:
When even good news—in the form of a lowered estimate on the likely range of human influence on the climate—is construed as cause for worry, don’t people start to get suspicious that this isn’t really a neutral scientific debate?
