Economist Jeffrey Sachs directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He’s also led the way in the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals–a high-sounding program to end poverty that depends largely on redistributing wealth from the West to the Rest with an obligatory but ineffectual nod toward the need for governmental reform and economic development in impoverished countries handicapped by corrupt leadership, progress-stifling political structures, and social mores that undermine personal incentive and the building of wealth.

Sachs has also taken it upon himself, along with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, to advise Pope Francis on climate change and all other things environmental–a strange relationship granted the two advisors’ commitment to the misanthropic notions of overpopulation, government-run family planning programs, and easy and “free” abortion, in contrast with Catholicism’s traditional social teaching upholding human dignity and opposing abortion.

Now Sachs, writing in the Leftist Catholic magazine America, has called on Pope Francis, when he speaks at U.N. headquarters in New York in September, to tongue-lash the United States for its commitment to God-given rights.

And Cornwall Alliance Adjunct Scholar Dr. Steven Hayward, writing in the PowerLine Blog, has taken Sachs to the intellectual woodshed, demonstrating Sachs’s utter ignorance of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence’s affirmation that all men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“You can tell from Sachs’s wording that he thinks the American Founding is defective, or worse. This fundamental mangling of the principles and philosophy of the American Founding gets worse,” Hayward writes. He goes on to show that Sachs thoroughly misunderstands Aristotle, to whom he appeals, as well as America’s Founders, whose thinking he generally holds in contempt, and wants the Pope to do likewise.

Read Hayward’s piece. It’s an education in fundamental political philosophy, and a thoroughly deserved thrashing for Sachs.