No. Did St. Joseph have tools? Were any of them made of expensive iron or cheaper copper? If either, he sure didn’t mine and smelt them himself. He traded his knowledge and skilled labor for something he valued more in each instance. Did Jesus never get paid for making a table or a chair? Of course he got paid, and he traded the money for flour, wine, cloth and everything else people needed at the time.And I’m completely right in saying this.
They are exactly the same thing, the difference only being that in trade a medium is used. But, as with the spear heads and the bow wood and the whiskey, sometimes the commodity itself is the medium.But again you are conflating barter and trade
Your talking, again, about labour, barter, wages, currency and trade.No. Did St. Joseph have tools?
Centesimus Annus (“The Hundredth Year,” Donders translation) , Pope John Paul II, 1991 #42.After the failure of communism, should capitalism be the goal for Eastern Europe and the Third World? The answer is complex. If capitalism means a “market” or “free” economy that recognizes the role of business, the market, and private property, as well as free human creativity, then the answer is “yes.” If it means a system in
which economic, religious, and ethical freedom are denied, then the answer is “no.” Marxism failed, but marginalization and exploitation remain, especially in the Third World, just as alienation does in the more advanced countries.
The Common Good and the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching , Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, 1996 #76.The Catholic doctrine of the common good is incompatible with unlimited free-market, or laissez-faire, capitalism, which insists that the distribution of wealth must occur entirely according to the dictates of market forces. This theory presupposes that the common good will take care of itself…This does sometimes happen; but to say that it invariably must happen, as if by a God-given natural law, is a view which can amount to idolatry or a form of economic superstition.
The Common Good and the Catholic Church’s Social Teaching , Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, 1996 #78.The Church recognises that market forces, when properly regulated in the name of the common good, can be an efficient mechanism for matching resources to needs in a developed society. No other system has so far shown itself superior in encouraging wealth creation and hence in advancing the prosperity of the community, and enabling poverty and hardship to be more generously relieved…In a market economy the existence of a wide variety of consumer choice means that individual decisions can be made according to individual wants and needs, thus respecting certain aspects of human freedom and following the principle of subsidiarity.
Again you are conflating currency, labour, wages, barter and trade which have existed in almost every premodern society; with capitalism, which is a specific economic and social system that emerged from the breakup of medieval feudalism in the 15th and 16th centuries and then with the spread of industrialization.For that matter, has nobody ever found coins from ancient Rome or Carthage?
I doubt there’s one American out of a quarter million who really believes in laissez-faire capitalism.The Catholic doctrine of the common good is incompatible with unlimited free-market, or laissez-faire, capitalism, which insists that the distribution of wealth must occur entirely according to the dictates of market forces
That’s called bartering and trading. Not capitalist economics.I truly don’t buy this. Has the Encyclopedia never heard of Medieval fairs,
No, ancient Roman economics were based around a system of patronage and clientelism.But capitalism was ancient even when Rome was founded.
But here is a more detailed quote explaining what he meant when he was refering to capitalism:In the above encyclical, Pope St. John Paul II states unequivocally and incontrovertibly that “capitalism” is a reversal of the divine order laid down by God in the Book of Genesis and he moreover reiterates, and this ABSOLUTELY crucial, that “ precisely this reversal of order should rightly be called “capitalism” ”.
Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”) , Pope John Paul II, 1981 #30.Man is treated as an instrument of production, whereas he–alone, independent of the work he does–ought to be treated as the effective subject of work and its true maker and creator. Precisely this reversal of order, whatever the program or name under which it occurs, should rightly be called “capitalism”…Everybody knows > that capitalism has a definite historical meaning as a system, an economic and social system, opposed to “socialism” or “communism.” But in light of the analysis of the fundamental reality of the whole economic process–first and foremost of the production structure that work is–it should be recognized that the error of > early capitalism can be repeated wherever people are treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of their work.