In error.
“The Late Scholastics derived their ethical approach from the Thomist concept of the interrelatedness of natural law, ethics and economics.” (Christians For Freedom, Dr Alejandro Chafuen, Ignatius, 1986, p 36-37).
Free enterprise economic development started in the great Catholic monastic estates of the ninth century, and a solid basis of economic Catholic thought developed from the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century the Late Scholastics who were Thomists (followers of St Thomas) “writing and teaching at the University of Salamanca in Spain, sought to explain the full range of human action and social; organization.” They “observed the existence of economic law, inexorable forces of cause and effect that operate very much as other natural laws. Over the course of several generations, they discovered and explained the laws of supply and demand, the cause of inflation, the operation of foreign exchange rates, and the subjective nature of economic value…” For these reasons Joseph Schumpeter applauded them as the first real economists. (Thomas E Woods Jr, The Church And The Market, Lexington Books, 2005, p 8).
As repeatedly shown St John Paul II emphatically affirms free enterprise and rejects the mistaken term “capitalism”, teaching that as “an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector… the answer is certainly in the affirmative…” Centesimus Annus #42, 1991].
Since the effects of Original Sin taint every individual, it is only the virtuous who can apply virtuously any human endeavour even when based on natural laws as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has emphasised in Caritas et Veritate, 2009, #36:
“Society does not have to protect itself from the market, as if the development of the latter were ipso facto to entail the death of authentically human relations. Admittedly, the market can be a negative force, not because it is so by nature, but because a certain ideology can make it so. It must be remembered that the market does not exist in the pure state. It is shaped by the cultural configurations which define it and give it direction. Economy and finance, as instruments, can be used badly when those at the helm are motivated by purely selfish ends. Instruments that are good in themselves can thereby be transformed into harmful ones. But it is man’s darkened reason that produces these consequences, not the instrument per se. Therefore it is not the instrument that must be called to account, but individuals, their moral conscience and their personal and social responsibility.”
It is ludicrous how often papal insights and reality are brushed aside for personal prejudices.
