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Pillar

Business & Economics

The fifth pillar, business and economics, is built upon concern for the common good and the ways in which the economic order contributes to—or detracts from—human flourishing. Public Discourse examines the ways in which the market is shaped by—and gives shape to—our understanding of the human person, the role of the family, the rule of law, and education and culture.

On Medical Killing and “Capitalism”

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Bretton Woods and Our Current Economic Distemper

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If we want to revive the era of postwar prosperity, we should revive its monetary system.

Montesquieu and the Monetary System

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We take our monetary system for granted, complacently trusting that the experts are doing their jobs well. Yet our current system strays very far from what the public would actually prefer.
socialism, capitalism, Tocqueviille

How Tocqueville Identified Socialism’s Folly and Capitalism’s Challenge

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Alexis de Tocqueville showed that socialism’s errors go far beyond bad economics. But his criticisms should remind today’s advocates of markets that they must promote stronger normative cases for capitalism.

Whither Humane Economics? In Defense of Wonder and Admiration in Natural Science

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What is needed for a humane economics is not theological economics, but a rediscovery of the call to understand the world through an economic science replete with wonder and admiration—something missing in contemporary economics as much as in the drab theology of many ethicists. Properly delineated, this is not a rejection of ethics in economics, but a recovery of the normative dimension of reality.

The Economics and Ethics of “Just Wages”

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As with the concept of the just price, the idea of the just wage combines the subjectivity of the diverse needs and preferences of individuals with the objective demands of justice. The teaching of the Catholic Church on the just wage avoids both the Scylla of economism and the Charybdis of moralism.

Thomas Aquinas on the Just Price

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St. Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the question of the just price is often misunderstood by both Catholic integralists and classical liberals. These misunderstandings deprive us of lessons that could otherwise help us combine the goods of freedom and virtue as individuals and in society.
Adam Smith, portrait, economist

Putting Adam Smith Back Together

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The choices underlying marketplace transactions are more complicated and less narrowly self-regarding than we often suppose. By returning to the full corpus of Adam Smith’s writings, we can escape economistic conceptions of human beings and enhance our understanding of how market economies actually work.

Community-Based Businesses Help Tame Market Economy Excesses

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Capitalism is an amoral economic system. An amoral economic system or “the free market” cannot guide human beings and their behavior. On the contrary, the market must actively be guided and tamed in order to ensure that it benefits communities. Supporting community-based and community-oriented businesses is one important way to achieve this end.
money, debt, dollar bill

What America’s Public Debt Crisis Says about Us and What We Can Do about It

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Our personal habits and our political culture are not unconnected. When personal debt is at an all-time high, it seems unreasonable to expect that thrift would somehow become a public virtue. If we do not act responsibly with the budgets of our own families, it seems unrealistic to expect fiscal responsibility from those who are entrusted with spending other people’s money.

Thomas More on the Virtues and Vices of Property

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Thomas More’s Utopia suggests that a defense of property emphasizing material productivity, though valid, is inadequate. By probing classical reasons for and against private property, More goes deeper, addressing the objective needs of the human soul.

Rewilding Civil Society

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In conservation biology, a complex ecosystem whose health was slowly compromised over time can be revivified through a cascade of positive changes set in motion by reintroducing one of that system’s previous components. That’s exactly what today’s civil society needs, and conservative policymakers can help. We mustn’t shy away from using policy to achieve important ends—not just freedom, but the lessons, beliefs, and norms that make a free society succeed.

If the Dalai Lama Ran General Mills

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Business leaders are turning to the modern mindfulness movement to make their employees happier and more productive. But what is mindfulness? And do its practices really work if they are motivated by the desire for profit?

Private Equity: How it Serves the Common Good

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To serve the common good, private equity managers need the virtues of humility and magnanimity. If they exhibit these virtues, their companies will grow, increasing human capital and wealth.

Man Does Not Live By Economic Growth Alone

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“Economic piety” has led to an overemphasis on consumption, writes Oren Cass in The Once and Future Worker. If we value family and community life, we need a labor policy that is explicitly intended to sustain them.

Just Tariff Theory

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The notion that tariffs are bad has been supported by world-renowned economists for centuries. Yet we are currently in the midst of a trade war. Maybe what we need is a Just Tariff Theory: a system to weigh the economic harms of tariffs against the political benefits they may have.

How the Dust Bowl Undermined the Libertarian Ideology of Plains Farmers

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Eighty-five years ago, staunchly self-reliant American farmers encountered a crisis-the Dust Bowl-they simply could not overcome on their own. The story of the Dust Bowl is a story about American grit and perseverance, but also about the limits of libertarianism.

Integrating Catholic Social Teaching With Economics and Natural Science

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Thoughtful Catholics should integrate the discoveries and insights of economics and science with the principles of Catholic social teaching, and ultimately, with the natural moral law and revealed theology.

Happy Deficit Day!

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Reasonable people can claim that the government of the richest country in human history should provide certain things to its poorer citizens. But reasonable people cannot claim those things come without a price.

From the Great Recession to the Great Divide: Business and Economics in the Last Decade

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Americans today are anxious—not just financially, but socially. We despair even though we are materially better off than at any other time in human history. What happened? How did we get here?

Social Ecology and the Market Economy: Revisiting the Threefold Foundations of a Flourishing Society

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A full vision of the social structures of human flourishing must include three elements: the economic, political, and moral-cultural.

Love, Economics, and Cheap Sex

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According to sociologist Mark Regnerus, the birth control pill and the rise of internet porn decreased the cost of sexual access so substantially as to affect a fundamental shift from a world in which sex served higher goods to a world in which sex is the higher good.

An Exchange on Happiness, Freedom, and Spiritual Formation

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How should we understand hierarchies, markets, freedom, happiness, anthropology, and spiritual formation? Three Christian thinkers respond to each other.

Happiness, Freedom, and Spiritual Formation: A Response to Reichert and Maier

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Market economies are not inherently hostile to Christian spiritual formation. And expanding the scope of Church authority into the temporal realm is no substitute for traditional spiritual practices such as prayer and fasting.

Trump’s Tariffs and Why America Needs a Patriotic Case for Free Trade

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While the economic arguments for free trade remain compelling, the political rationale requires a long-overdue overhaul.

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