Evils of Communism

[Abu]

Free enterprise only developed through the monks of the ninth century and onwards with the Catholic Late Scholastics.

 

[magnet]

Free enterprise only developed through the monks of the ninth century and onwards with the Catholic Late Scholastics.

I think you are saying that the monasteries, some being large institutions, began to develop sophisticated enterprise efforts. Some of them had whole crews who specialized in producing goods that could be sold in the marketplace. This was a way for the monasteries to raise extra cash in addition to being supported by noblemen.

 

[Abu]

The first examples of free enterprise appeared in the great Catholic monasteries, about the ninth century. (John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages, St Martin’s Press1969, I; The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark, Random House, 2005, p 58).

The fact is that Catholic philosophy and theology, based on reason and faith, enabled the birth of free enterprise. From the great monastic estates in the ninth century, immense increases in agricultural productivity grew from “such significant innovations as the switch to horses, the heavy moldboard plow, and the three-field system” away from subsistence agriculture to specialised crops and products, sold at a profit to initiate a cash economy. “As their incomes continued to mount, this led many monasteries to become banks, lending to the nobility.”[cf. op. cit (Stark) p xii, 55-58].

Randall Collins has noted that innovation and specialization in the monastic estates was “a version of the developed characteristics of capitalism itself… the dynamism of the medieval economy was primarily that of the Church.” [Randall Collins, The *Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, 1998, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p 47]

 

[magnet]

The first examples of free enterprise appeared in the great Catholic monasteries, about the ninth century. (John Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages, St Martin’s Press1969, I; The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark, Random House, 2005, p 58).

This is misleading because it implies that free enterprise did not exist prior to the ninth century. In reality, free enterprise was alive and well in Mecca during the sixth century. In fact it was so successful that the Prophet Mohammad lamented that urban life was being dominated by thoughts of getting rich by tycoons at the expense of the average person.