Review: Catholic Economics, Part I | National Catholic Reporter

Review: Catholic Economics, Part I | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: While Adam Smith's observations were the start of modern economics, they were not its end. Welfare economics owes much of its content to Pareto and Keynes, who can hardly be called libertarians in the Austrian School of Hayek and von Mises. While much of economics assumes a libertarian/individualist way of life is all that there is, there are others who are either egalitarian (like Marx) or even hierarchical, like the Distributists who believe both that small is beautiful and that the Church will take over civil authority after an inevitable environmental or resource collapse. I look forward to tomorrow's post to see if the Distributists are mentioned.



Of course, in cooperative economics we do get limits on consumption - with most cooperative members consuming mostly what they cooperative produces or trades for (although they may have a cash card to facilitate that trading). While the free market is the most efficient allocation mechanism to make sure supply and demand are roughly approximate, it can be simulated with a well managed egalitarian system - which can have both external and internal price cues - using standard labor hours both internally and externally. Such a currency is possible if the basic wage is standardized - with such items as education and longevity compensated by making the education free and by compensating longevity with stock accumulation - with dividends either reinvested, spent or some combination of the two. Finally for now, it goes without saying that if you internalize stock accumulation and home mortgages to the cooperative, there will be no markets for either mortgage backed securities or shares of stock and therefore no financial economics outside the cooperative. You can find more about this in my online book, Musings from the Christian Left (a non-doctrinal Catholic economics), which is available on blogspot, Facebook and oocities.