Pope Francis believes that markets are evil and create widespread abject poverty. President Barack Obama believes that government action to correct income inequality is the key to improving living standards for the American middle class.

Are they right?

Some, particularly American Catholics, are trying to sugarcoat Francis’ blistering condemnation of market economies in his recent apostolic exhortation. This is not taking the pope seriously. I’ve not read such animated anti-capitalist scorn since being force-fed Herbert Marcuse in college.

What is most striking about Francis’ screed is its obliviousness. His exhortation is rooted in a deep and central concern for the poor. Yet, there is better news about the plight of the poor today than at any point in human history.

According to The Economist, the number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty, defined as less than $1.25 a day, has been cut almost in half in just the last two decades. Nearly a billion of the world’s poorest people have had their living standards materially improved.

Is that because Third World governments suddenly became more effective and efficient providers of goods and services? Is it because those governments became more aggressive at redistributing wealth? Is it because governments in developed countries became more generous in providing foreign aid?

Of course not. It is because of the spread of the market economies and global trade that Francis condemns.

In China alone, nearly 700 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. There can be no serious argument that this isn’t almost exclusively the result of market liberalization and trade.

And what happened to income inequality as China was lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty? It went up, not down.

In his speech on income inequality, Obama trotted out a favorite hobbyhorse of the left: Since 1979, median household income has risen slightly while that of the affluent has soared.

In the first place, family demographics have changed considerably since 1979. Today, families are smaller and far more likely to be headed by a single female or a low-skilled immigrant. That changes where the median falls.

Moreover, these income statistics don’t fully capture changes in living standards. Although smaller, the average family today lives in a much bigger house than its 1979 counterpart. It has more cars, televisions and appliances. Its stuff does considerably more stuff.

The average family of 1979 would marvel at the standard of living of the average family today. The members of today’s family carry computers in their pockets. The family members of 1979 didn’t even have one in their home.

But here’s the major point: American governments of today are bigger and more redistributionist than those of 1979.

Total government spending -- federal, state and local -- absorbs a larger percentage of GDP today than it did in 1979. A larger percentage of that spending goes to transfer payments to individuals.

Public education is the principal way the United States tries to make real its promise of equal opportunity. Education spending is up compared with 1979, as is educational attainment. More students of more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds pursue postsecondary education or training.

It is true that income-tax rates on the affluent have declined since 1979. But so have those for the middle class. And, today, the rich pay a higher share of taxes than they did in 1979.

This is not to say that there aren’t reasons to worry about the American middle class. The two major traditional bridges to the middle class for those without college degrees, manufacturing and construction, have been eroded -- manufacturing by dramatic productivity improvements; construction by immigrant labor.

But rising income inequality didn’t cause middle-class stagnation. And since it coincided with a bigger, more redistributionist government, there’s no reason to believe it will be corrected by more of the same.

A more just social order won’t be built on economic superstitions.

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