Defining a Good: The Intersection of St. Thomas Aquinas and Carl Menger
While the average person thinks economics begins with Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations, readers of the Mises Wire know that the story goes back much further than that. Members of the Austrian school commonly describe their earliest intellectual predecessors, the late Scholastics, as “proto-Austrians.” In Jesús Huerta de Soto’s chapter on Juan de Mariana in 15 Great Austrian Economists, Huerta de Soto writes of ten major contributions to what would go on to be important Austrian school concepts:
- The subjective theory of value
- The proper relationship between prices and costs
- The dynamic nature of the market and the impossibility of the model of equilibrium
- The dynamic concept of competition understood as a process of rivalry among sellers
- The rediscovery of the time-preference principle
- The distorting influence of the inflationary growth of money on prices
- The negative economic effects of fractional reserve banking
- That bank deposits form part of the monetary supply
- The impossibility of organizing society by coercive commands
- The tradition that any unjustified intervention on the market by the state violates natural law
In fact, Huerta de Soto goes on to further say that
the greatest merit of Carl Menger was to rediscover and take up this continental Catholic tradition of Spanish scholastic thought that was almost forgotten and cut short as a consequence of the black legend against Spain and the negative influence on the history of economic thought of Adam Smith and his followers of the British Classical School.
However, these contributions were not the only discoveries that Menger’s founding of the Austr
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