Pope Leo, Condemning Free Markets, Declares Food a ‘Basic Human Right’

Food, according to Pope Leo XIV, is a “basic human right,” and “it is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs.” Rather than call on the faithful to help others in obedience to God, he’s echoing Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that only ever leads to hunger and want.“Food, water, and health care,” Pope Leo wrote Monday on X, “cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person.”The remark is striking for its lack of a theological component. “The poor,” Jesus says in Matthew 26:11, “you will always have with you.” It’s a call to help those in need, often misinterpreted as an expression of apathy and justification for governments to legislate morality.Throughout history, various ideologues have believed they could perfect the imperfect nature of mankind. “From each according to his ability,” as the founder of communism, Karl Marx, put it in 1875, “to each according to his needs.”It sounds good on paper, but people don’t live on the printed page. Soil is tilled and crops harvested by human hands. Making individual needs a claim on the labor of others — say, farmers, doctors, or those who dig wells — compels production, which always results in failure.“He who does not work,” the USSR’s founder, Vladimir Lenin declared, “neither shall he eat.” Only those who served the state were entitled to full bellies. The result was decades of misery and suffering that led to collapse.The Mayflower Pilgrims tried to govern themselves in line with Pope Leo’s vision. Their first compact put all the Plymouth Colony’s harvests into a common store, with each resident drawing an equal share. Homes and farms were communal property, too. Nobody owned anything.The governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, journaled about the failure wrought by these policies. The Pilgrims believed that “taking away property and bringing community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing — as if they were wiser than God” about how people are built.What we’d now call collectivism was found to “breed discontent and retard much employment,” Bradford wrote. Those with the greatest abilities, “young men that were most able and fit for labor,” objected “that they should work for” the needs of “other men’s wives and children without any recompense.”Bradford’s solution was “to give land to those who can truly produce it … to maximize productivity.” This “had very good success, for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” The surplus was traded with the natives — America’s first farmers markets.Cuba’s communist state is now facing the same reality as Plymouth. The island’s “young, skilled workforce,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel said last week, needs “incentives” to rejuvenate the country’s moribund economy. He now plans to “give land to those who can truly produce it,” just like Bradford.As in the USSR, Communist China’s famines killed millions by turning production into an obligation to the state rather than a tool to pursue self-interest. Venezuela’s collectivists caused mass starvation in what had been South America’s wealthiest nation, one perched on 17 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.Forty years ago, capitalism was blamed for Ethiopia’s famine, and Americans responded with altruism like the “We Are the World” fundraiser. Little noticed was that the country’s Marxist junta, the Der, exacerbated a drought by seizing farms and denying aid to citizens that opposed communism.Pope Leo urged nations to work harder at “combating hunger and its root causes” and “to remove the obstacles that prevent aid from reaching those in need.” To succeed, those efforts will have to lean into human nature, not repeat the doomed failure of trying to rewrite it.Rights, the Declaration of Independence recognizes, come from God, and governments cannot declare new ones for certain commodities. The solution to fulfilling needs is to unleash market forces to produce abundance — a truth that has become self-evident to devout Pilgrims and atheistic communists alike.

Pope Leo, Condemning Free Markets, Declares Food a ‘Basic Human Right’

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