Courtesy of la nouvelle théologie truly fascinating article by Jeffrey Tucker on Catholics and economics. It suffers a bit from over-reach in the title "Why Catholics Don't Understand Economics" which has allowed critics to misread it.
A better way to make Tucker's point would be to say something, a significant amount of Catholic thinking on economics has been and continues to tend to be embarrassing nonsense here is a theory as to why that may be. I don't know whether I agree or disagree yet, but Tucker has made an interesting contribution here.
And it is an argument worth having because I think Tucker is quite correct to say that Catholics very often misunderstand economics. It's not universal; there are Catholic economists who are both good Catholics and good economists but much Catholic thinking on economics is just embarrassing.
NB: Having a degree in economics, even several, or, for that matter, teaching economics at a university does not seem to be any barrier to spouting all sorts of nonsense.
This is an interesting article, but I don't think he offers much in the way of an solution. He cites the Jewish proscriptions about charging for non-scarce goods, but we also have that in the Catholic tradition. You can't charge for Sacraments, e.g., marriage. You can charge for the use of the Church, the organist, the sextant who has to open the Church, but not for the Sacrament itself. And we know from history how the Church got into serious trouble with the buying and selling of indulgences.
ReplyDeleteJesus did deal with both realms--scarce and non-scarce goods. Jesus said "ask and you shall receive," "give us this day our daily bread" (as someone said not "enough bread to last a year" but "daily" bread), and I do believe in the miracle of the loaves and fishes because I have experienced that in my own life. Maybe Jesus point was to get people to not worry so much about the scarce goods and concentrate more on the non-scarce goods which will last longer, like eternity?