The Free Market and Catholic Social Teaching
The death of Pope Francis highlights a concern of many Catholics, including myself. Can we believe in the free market consistently with our faith? If we accept the Peronist views of the late pontiff, we obviously cannot do so. But fortunately, there is a better option available to us.
Clearly, God wants us to have peace and prosperity, to live in a “free and prosperous commonwealth,” as Ludwig von Mises put it. But the science of praxeology teaches us, by irrefutable logic, that only the free market enables us to avoid economic chaos. It therefore follows that the free market is ordained by God. This line of reasoning is more than theoretical. The great nineteenth-century free market economist Frédéric Bastiat, who was a Catholic, argued in just this way. As Claudio Resani notes: “’[L]iberty…is an act of faith in God and in His works.’ This is how Frédéric Bastiat thought concludes The Law, his most famous work. Reading his various writings and pamphlets, we can very often notice a recurring mention of God, or at least of a Creator, and of the morality that today we call ‘Judeo-Christian’ As already introduced, The Law is a very important work by Bastiat, and here we find the profound definition of freedom mentioned above but, we also find other statements with a religious background. Turning to the collectivist theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciples, horrified, Bastiat comments with a touch of irony: ‘But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves!’ Bastiat was a natural law scholar. For him, every individual is endowed by his Creator with rights and faculties that no one can justly take away from him. This is the same case with another famous statement he wrote in The Law: ‘Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life;…’ This is what is expressed in The Law by Bastiat as far as philosophy is concerned. It is a philosophical thought enlightened by a deep Christian faith that sees each individual as the image and likeness of the Lord. As far as economic thought is concerned, Bastiat expresses substantially the same natural law, to explain it we use his own words taken from Economic Harmonies and from the first edition of Economic Sophisms: ‘…the thought that put harmony into the movement of the heavenly bodies was also able to insert it into the internal mechanisms of society….freedom and public interest can be reconciled with justice and peace; that all these great principles follow infinite parallel paths without conflicting with each other for all eternity;… [This] we know of the goodness and wisdom of God as shown in the sublime harmony of physical creation…’ He is convinced that the harmony that exists in the natural sciences is also present in society and in interpersonal relationships, as a
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
