R&L: You have described How Now Shall We Live? as “the most significant book” of your career. Why do you feel this way, and what prompted you to write it?
R&L: You have written that “the confession, ‘Caesar is not God,’ sticks in the craw of every authoritarian regime and draws an angry and bloody response.” What is it about this confession that stands Christianity athwart totalitarianism?
R&L: Much of your work at Harambee involves training young people from your Pasadena neighborhood to design Internet Web pages. How did you become involved in this work, and why? Carrasco: I came to Harambee in 1990 because I was seeking to live out Matthew 25, the parable of the sheep and the goats. All my life that vision of how Christ wants us to treat others had gripped my heart.
R&L: Early in life, you considered entering the ministry but decided to enter the financial world instead. How did you integrate your inclination toward religious service with your eventual business career?
R&L: It has been said, borrowing Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, that an economist is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Assuming I place a high value on the environment, and knowing you are an economist about to talk about environmental issues, do I have reason to be ill at ease?
R&L: In the first sentence of your book, The Mystery of Capital, you write, “The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph is its hour of crisis.” The great triumph, of course, is capitalism’s victory over communism. What is the great crisis? De Soto: Everyone had high expectations at the fall of the Berlin Wall, when we thought that the “end of history” was in sight because market economies would allow all to flourish, but now there is a general feeling of discontent.
R&L: Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, noted that, “The individual today is often suffocated between the two poles represented by the state and the market.” You have noted that the way out of this modern dilemma is the strengthening of culture. Could you elaborate?