Reviews for The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy

The average rating for The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-08-18 00:00:00 Brooke James Distributists who attack Tom as a "dissenter" or a "liberal heretic" either have not read this book, or do not wish to give his case a fair trial. Not only does Tom display an incredible amount of economic knowledge that far surpasses his critics, but he is also able to defend his position on philosophical, moral, and theological grounds. I don't agree with everything he has written here, but nearly so. There are certainly short-run circumstances that allow for the exploitation that is warned about in the social encyclicals, and I would have liked Tom to acknowledge those cases. His treatment on usury was a little weak as well in that he spent most of his time parrying alternative views on usury instead of proposing his own interpretation of it; his very short treatment of Vix Pervenit was a bit disappointing in this regard. My main criticism is that he relies too much on mutual consent as a sufficient condition for a just contract, instead of taking into consideration duress, fraud, and other factors that significantly reduce the voluntariness of an agreement. On the whole Tom shows that the critics of the free market do not properly understand the logic of the market that cannot be superseded by fiat, but must be taken into account when formulating policy.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-02 00:00:00 Keith Love Really good overall from what I remember, but in the years since I read this I have come to the conclusion that Woods is in error when he holds that it isn't a binding teaching that the just wage can in principle deviate from the voluntarily-agreed-upon wage. (This book is mainly about economics rather than philosophy on a deeper level, but I would recommend reading some of Edward Feser's articles and blog posts on the incompatibility of libertarian self-ownership with Catholic social teaching and the Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law tradition, collected here: )