I haven’t ventured over into the Breitbart Memorial Museum for Fuckwittery in a long time, because a) why and b) no, but last week Pope Frank decided to point out that hoarding money isn’t cool, and that any system that doesn’t serve the needs of everybody needs to be amscrayed, just as his Employer once commanded.

Not a radical statement, unless you’re following on the heels of Pope Prada of the Hitler Youth during a time of epic income inequality reinforced by every major mainstream media outlet in the entire world. So most people were quite pleased to hear a sermon that involved people’s economic well-being instead of their sex organs.

But oh, holy father, the crazy that is ensuing in the monkey houses of the right:

Instead of using the Pope as a weapon against economic liberty, let’s talk about all the money that could be used to help the poor, but which is wasted on lavish perks for government officials, fraud-riddled programs, and giveaways to political contributors. Let’s talk about welfare programs such as ObamaCare that spread dependency on government giveaways into the formerly independent middle class, bleeding away even more resources that could be used for the benefit of the truly needy. That accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars out of our three-and-a-half trillion dollar mega-government. Clean all that garbage up from the poisonous Great Society machine you’ve created, liberals – get the welfare state running as efficiently as something like Catholic Charities – and let’s see how much we can do for those who have been “excluded” from general prosperity. That means you’ll have to give up the glittering palaces you’ve built in Washington D.C., which is now among the richest cities in America. You’ll have to give up all your lovely vote-buying cash, luxury perks of office, politically directed crony-socialist programs, and all the other implements of power.

So liberals should love the poor by abandoning Washington and running the government from … Calcutta? Which would free up resources to feed the needy in Washington, which is too rich as it is. And trying to give people health care is actually hurting them — you should let them deal with Catholic Charities, which is doing such a bang-up job insuring people these days that everyone’s already covered.

(And last I checked Obama didn’t build the White House, unless the “glittering palaces” are figurative; when was the last major government building constructed anyway? It’s Washington’s goddamn monument. If this asshole doesn’t like it he’s free to not visit.)

But of course, none of them are willing to take that deal. They want to give crackpot sermons about Christ the Tax Collector while venerating the State as the true and just repository of all money and ambition. And they certainly don’t want to talk about how the abuse of government power is what causes the unemployment Pope Francis mourns, not the lawful ambitions of hard-working, risk-taking free people. With all due respect to the Holy Father, in a Constitutional capitalist system, nobody in the private sector has the power to “exclude” anyone. That’s what thegovernmentdoes.

No one in the private sector can exclude anyone, which is why we never needed to pass laws saying you couldn’t fire someone for having a vagina or different skin color or worshipping a different God, that you had to at least pretend to give a shit about wheelchair ramps and close-captioning stuff. The private sector would TOTALLY have done all that anyway, Obama! There is no abuse of any kind in the wondrous free market, which rewards all “risk-taking free people” equally. No business ever fails except by the fault of the person running it, and that person is never you anyway, so it’s all fine.

Government steps in in cases of exclusion precisely because it’s the only system we have that is obligated to include everyone, by virtue of everyone at least in some way paying into it. Theoretically, and theologically, Christianity has the same obligation, and Frank’s doing his best to get us all to think that way again, at least on some topics. And pointing out that that is at least marginally admirable is apparently tantamount to raising a statue of Stalin in the US Senate.

A.