I have seen a video recently, and I'm sure you've heard people get upset that wealthy
people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk have all this money and they don't do things like solve
world hunger.
And the video made a claim that instead of being upset at people like that, you should
really be upset at the Vatican because supposedly they have enough wealth to solve world hunger
twice over, so you should be upset at them.
So I just wanted to hear what Jimmy's take on that was.
Well, there would be different ways of approaching it.
One way of approaching it would simply be to share the facts with them.
Another way would be to turn the question around and put them on the defensive.
You could say: okay, you're making these claims; what's your basis?
How much money would it take to solve world hunger?
Because it's not just buying food for everybody.
I mean, that's a lot, but if you're talking about actually solving world hunger, that
doesn't mean giving everyone in the world a hamburger on a given day.
It means having permanent food supply being delivered to people on a permanent basis.
And the problem is actually not that we don't have enough food.
We got plenty of food for everybody on earth.
The problem is we have pockets on earth that are economically and politically underdeveloped
that prevent the adequate distribution of food in those areas.
That's the real reason for hunger: it's corruption and lack of economic development in impoverished
areas.
If everybody in the world adopted economic and political systems like in the developed
world, and if those were consistently applied throughout given nations, there would be no
hunger.
But let's suppose that you're talking to this person, and you're wanting to get them to
explain their case, you could say: So how much money would it cost to actually feed
world hunger?
And how do you know that?
I mean, show me the math.
Also, how much money does the Catholic Church have?
Because the Catholic Church has a divine mission from Jesus.
It's not gonna disband.
So the Catholic Church has a certain amount of resources that it needs to fulfill its
divine mission.
How much money does the Catholic Church have above that amount, and how do you know?
Have you been doing the auditing?
Once again, show me the math.
If you can't show me the math, either about world hunger or about how much excess resources
the Catholic Church has, you're just talking without knowledge.
You're just making claims that you have no rational basis for.
Maybe you heard it from somebody, maybe it's a claim that tickled your fancy and so you
decided to run with it; but you don't actually have any evidence for it if you haven't done
the math.
So that's one way of approaching it.
Another is to simply point out: actually, no, the Catholic Church does not have the
money to solve world hunger.
The Catholic Church, in fact, runs pretty close to the bone in many years—recently,
especially, the Vatican has actually run at a deficit.
And it is doing things to help support world hunger and medical charities and educational
charities and all kinds of different charities around the world, but actually the Vatican
itself tends to run at a deficit, or at least it frequently has in recent years.
What it does have is some fancy churches that have been built over the centuries.
Could those be sold off?
Well, hypothetically, but they were based on donations, and if donors give you money
for a purpose, like "I wanna build a church that will be beautiful and glorify God," you
can't misappropriate the funds and divert them to something else, like saying "Oh, well,
you know, the donors wanted us to build a big cathedral that would glorify God, but
now that we've received the donors' money, we're going to sell it off and spend it on
something else."
That's called misappropriation of funds.
So the practical reality is that world hunger, to the extent it's there—and fortunately
it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be—is a problem of lack of economic development
and political corruption.
And by the way, Jeff Bezos and other people like that have a way more positive profit
position than the Catholic Church does.