Morality and markets

Robert Sirico is a symphony in black: raincoat, briefcase, jacket, clergy shirt, slacks, socks, shoes. Even his black hair is lightened with only sprinkles of white at the temples. But in his memory are other colors. "It was the era of patchouli oil-do you remember?" he says. "Tie-dyed skirts. Idealism."

Back in the early '70s, this Roman Catholic priest and conservative economist was at the barricades, toting protest signs on behalf of many causes. "One of the tricks was to write our cause on one side of the cardboard, and when we got to the next event flip it over and write the new cause on the other side. So you must always look at both sides of picketers' signs, to see if they're professionals," he jokes.

In Hollywood, Mr. Sirico hung out with the professionals, including Jane Fonda; he worked on the campaign to elect Jane's husband Tom Hayden to the U.S. Senate. "I didn't know Jane and Tom well," he says. "We had dinner several times, I had their home phone number and so forth, but we weren't what you'd call close friends. I was with Jane the night Saigon fell, however."

Eventually, a worldview structured around socialism fell, and Mr. Sirico rediscovered the faith of his childhood. Still seeking ways to put his idealism into action, he took what some might consider an unlikely course: He helped found an organization to promote "limited government and a free-market economy."

The Acton Institute, which Mr. Sirico helped found in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1990, exists to link a libertarian free-market economic approach with the virtues necessary to make such freedom work. Lord Acton, for whom the Institute is named, was a 19th-century historian who believed that "liberty could not long exist without virtue, and that without liberty, no society could be virtuous."

In this work, Mr. Sirico finds himself on a two-way street. Divinity and theology students, already geared to preach virtue, are invited to seminars that expose them to the importance of liberty and the free market. Business leaders, a.k.a. greedy capitalists, attend seminars that affirm their vocation while calling them to implement their faith in the marketplace. The Acton Institute, with a million-dollar budget, fields a growing array of publications, lectures, events, and awards. Mr. Sirico himself is published widely, including a regular column in Forbes magazine. WORLD asked Mr. Sirico how this ideological journey began.

Sirico: There's a lot of this stuff that is painful to remember and embarrassing-the different sit-ins and so forth. I've had a real conversion and I have confessed it, and so I'd like it to be dumped into the sea of God's forgetfulness.

But one thing I do remember: After a day of picketing we were sitting around someone's house in Hollywood, and we were talking about the kind of world we wanted to construct. I said something like, "When the revolution comes, we'll all be able to shop at Gucci's." Conversation came to a stop. Even the smoke stood still in the room-and I'm not saying what kind of smoke it was.

I turned to a friend and said, "I have the feeling I said something wrong." She said, "Robert, that's a very bourgeois comment." I said, "But the society we're working to bring about is one where quality goods and services are available to everyone"-using Gucci, not as an example of status, but of quality. She said, "I don't really think you're a socialist."

WORLD: You can't be a socialist in Guccis.

Sirico: I was using it as an example of the kind of place people would like to go shop, but can't. So that was my fundamental misunderstanding of what socialism was.

This was early '70s; my conversion took place in 1976. Now, looking behind the picket signs, there were a lot of sad people. I don't remember many balanced, authentically happy people.

WORLD: Yet it was supposedly a time of idealism.

Sirico: A very tragic, misdirected idealism, a testimony to what happens when passion and sentiment are not guided by truth. It says a lot about the advocacy for liberty. It's not enough to advocate freedom; freedom is necessary, but not sufficient. We have to love something even more than our freedom.

Liberty is to be used for something, and I think this is one of the great confusions of the idealism of the '70s and even some of the advocates of liberty today. Liberty must be bordered by something-by the truth.

WORLD: Is there any way to communicate with those who are not serious about objective truth? How do you build bridges with those who agree with you in the libertarian cause, but don't know the truth?

Sirico: One of the things we need to do, and I say this as a believer, is that we need to be non-defensive in sharing the Gospel.

I think that we must be ruthless with ideas and gentle with people. To the woman who has had an abortion, we must act as Jesus did toward the woman caught in adultery. Protect and love her, remind others of her dignity, but never minimize the horrendous act of taking a human life. Jesus's whole focus in that account was in protecting her from those who would judge her. Only at the end does he say, "Go and sin no more." What we often want to do is start with, "Go and sin no more," and then think we can build a relationship of trust and love.

WORLD: It was idealism that pushed you into your left-wing activities, and idealism that pulled you out.

Sirico: I grew up in a very diverse neighborhood, and there was a Jewish lady who lived across the street, who invited me over to get some cookies one day. As she placed the cookies into the napkin, I saw a series of blue tattoo marks up her arm. I was very young; I didn't know about the Holocaust. Later I asked my mother and she told me.

When I think about what started me on this path, I think that has to be one of the seeds, that I was horrified by totalitarianism-that there were people who could treat others as animals and literally brand them. I carry with me something I found in an old Army-Navy store in Prague. It was with a bunch of World War II paraphernalia for sale, medals and so forth.

Mr. Sirico reaches into his briefcase and pulls out his breviary, a small black book with a zippered cover containing the daily offices and readings used by Catholic priests. From the inside pocket of the book he pulls out a square of yellow cloth, on which is stamped a six-pointed star. In the center is written the word "Jude." He touches it with awe.

Sirico: Isn't that something? It inspired me to prayer when I saw it, and I said, I want to keep that with me.

WORLD: So part of what motivates you is awareness of pain, the suffering in the world.

Sirico: Attraction to socialism can be based on a variety of reasons. For many it's not idealism, but a sheer quest for power. In pop psychology it's all the rage now to talk about control issues. Maybe that's writ large; maybe-to use all the pop lingo-it's a societal dysfunction that creates a codependency on people who are addicted to government handouts. We don't dare wean them from this and allow them to become independent and productive, because we'd lose our raison d'etre.

WORLD: The part that seems ironic is that, with your passion for justice and truth and righting wrongs still intact, you'd find yourself in the field of economics.

Sirico: If you buy into the socialist

Keynesian paradigm, that's so, it's abstract and deals with aggregates. But if you take a free market view of this, you're talking, in von Mises's words, about human interaction, a series of human encounters. This humanizes and personalizes it. It doesn't sanctify it; there's a lot of human interaction that's evil and immoral, ill-guided and ill-gotten. But you can see how it's not merely a dry abstraction, but involves human beings.

WORLD: Although you favor the free market, you don't hold it up as the ultimate good.

Sirico: No, in some cases it's not a good at all. You could do a whole analysis on market efficiency with legalized prostitution, and even if you proved that women would be less abused and so forth, it would still be evil. It doesn't change the nature of the act. The market can tell us a lot of things, but it doesn't deal with the deepest human needs, which have to do with spirituality, love, things not predicated on utilitarian concerns.

WORLD: Cultural decay is what many conservatives are concerned about. Do we need the force of legislation in some cases, to control what the market can't? For example, to control pornography on the Internet?

Sirico: I'm very nervous on all of that. We can set up a mechanism that, while X group is in power, they'll control the levers and produce the virtues. These may very well be virtues that I agree with. But once you set in stone these institutions, who's to say that in the next generation they'll share your virtues? Will the new virtue, for example, be safe sex, pushing condoms on kids to teach them responsibility?

WORLD: I suppose even libertarians would agree that there are things we cannot tolerate, and the narrowest circle of what we cannot tolerate is violence. I suppose abortion would fall under that.

Sirico: Absolutely. The most strict libertarian application of the principle of non-initiation of coercion applies first and foremost to abortion. Because the unborn is undeniable, scientifically, biologically human life. And everybody knows that, it's being acknowledged more and more.

WORLD: What about the libertarian position on drugs? Are you arguing in favor of repeal of drug laws?

Sirico: Yes, I think so. I think the argument has come to that now. With the caveat that, if that's going to happen, it must happen concomitantly with enabling civic society to respond by not tolerating drug abuse. Empowering neighborhoods, homeowners, and businesses to exclude people who use drugs from their associations, communities, rental apartments, employment places. People should be able to form associations where they have choices as to with whom they will associate or not associate. A person may be legally free to engage in smoking marijuana, but I should be legally free, if he works for me, to demand a drug test and to exclude him from employment.

I say this reluctantly, because I don't want people to misunderstand. I think drug abuse is evil. But I've never seen a person who was helped by being arrested. The most effective programs are non-coercive: Teen Challenge, Alcoholics Anonymous.

WORLD: It's striking that you confine yourself to the dry realm of economics, when you have so much passion about people, lives, and virtue. Many people look at this field from the outside and think, "Numbers, numbers, numbers."

Sirico: Well, you'll never see any numbers in anything I write. Economics started with moral theology, in 16th-century Spain. I'm trying to bring it back to a language of faith.