Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Are there economic laws?
Are there economic laws?
Apr 3, 2025 3:40 AM

In the latest edition of an otherwise scholarly theological journal, a writer, who only ever writes about one subject, attacked the free market as usual. He wrote: “Neither can economics be satisfied with leaving human beings to the mercy of markets with their supposed ‘laws.’. . .” While there is certainly no space to take on his whole article, this part might just be the most serious error in it.

This particular writer, and those trained in his school, which he denies is the German Historical School, but it is, operate from a nominalistic approach. Nominalism, a school of thought begun in the Middle Ages by the Franciscan, William of Ockham, denies that there is any human nature. Therefore, human beings have no necessary consistency in them. In ethics, each person makes up his own code, and the codes can be very much at odds. To a nominalist, everything is will alone, not reason. This is why the writer in question asserts that people are at the “mercy of markets.” To those who think like this, everything is power. Even in moral theology, the reason one obeys the Ten Commandments is that it’s God’s will only, and there is no connection with mandments and the nature of things. God could manded ten other things we were to avoid, and we would be required to obey them, because they are His will, even if they were the opposite of those actually listed. (I am sure many people would not have any trouble with mandments were that the case) Thus, to those who think in this manner, markets are power, and that’s why there are no laws of economics. That’s why corporations are evil; because money gives them power, which they use to take advantage of others.

The truth of it is that human beings do participate in mon nature, created by God, and mon nature leads people to think and act alike generally speaking. The laws of e from this consistency of human nature. Markets do have laws because people make free choices as to what is best for them. The market exists for the sake of the consumer, which includes everybody. If I go to the store and want to buy bananas, and the bananas are rotten, why should I buy them; to support the farmer or the store? If we all did that, people would be encouraged to make junk and I would be encouraged to continue to buy it even if it did not fulfill my needs. Why would I do that?

Let’s take the example to a higher level. I know that there is a demand for office space in my city, so I want to build a tall office building. The office building has to be tall because land in a city is very scarce and therefore very expensive, so I have to build “up.” To do so I need strong steel. pany X has crummy steel, it will not hold up and the building e crashing down at the first sign of stress. So I must go pany Y that sells steel that will be appropriate to the height of my proposed building. Should I buy pany X steel because I feel sorry for the workers who will not get my business? You tell me; rather you go tell that to the families of the victims of my collapsed building.

Will the steel pany X be cheaper? Perhaps. If I buy it and the es tumbling down, am I evil? Well, we cannot judge the soul of another, nor can we read his mind. One thing we do know is that this builder did ignore the laws of economics (and probably those of engineering as well).

Think about the decisions in your life, and see if there are no laws governing your decisions. If gasoline is $.10 per gallon cheaper in the next town, which is 45 minutes away, would you think it is worth it to drive there to get that particular gas, given not only the price but the time involved, and whether it is raining or snowing, and other things that you have to do? Well, you just did a cost-benefit analysis, which every sane human being does in their head many times a day whether they realize it or not. How can anyone say that there are no laws of economics.

Read more from Dr. Luckey at “Catholic Truths on Economics.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
‘The Monuments Men:’ Art Matters
Robert M. Edsel’s The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History is a terrific book regarding a part of World War II history that few are aware of. One of Hitler’s goals was to amass great art for his personal collection, and to build a museum and a cathedral in Linz, Austria. What Edsel calls a “backwater of factories and smoke” would e, in Hitler’s vision, a cultural center to rival anything Europe had...
Actually, We Won the War on Poverty
“Why, if we have made such great strides reducing poverty,” asks Scott Winship, “is there such widespread belief that, to quote Ronald Reagan, ‘We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won’?” We won the War on Poverty in the sense that the prevalence of material hardship has declined. According to Meyer and Sullivan, just 8 percent of Americans live at the low standard of living endured by a third of Americans in 1963. But it was a limited and...
Why is the State of the Union Always ‘Strong’?
I have a can’t miss prediction: tonight, when President Obama gives his sixth State of the Union address, he will describe the state of the union as “strong.” Admittedly, predicting that the state of our union will be described as “strong” is about as safe a bet as you can make when es to politics. Over the last hundred years presidents have described the State of the Union (SOTU) in various ways — Good (Truman), Sound (Carter), Not Good (Ford)....
Economic Facts: More Gut-Wrenching Than ‘Fun’
gives us a list of “fun” facts about the economy. Of course, “fun” is used in an ironic way, which e clear when you look at just how dreary these facts are: $1.8 Trillion: Cost Of ObamaCare’s Coverage Provisions From 2014 To 2023 (CBO, 7/30/13)$1 Trillion: The Total Student Debt Held By Americans. (Josh Mitchell, “Student-Loan Debt Slows Recovery,” The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics, 12/30/13) $174 Billion:Federal Budget Deficit For The First Three Months Of FY2014. (U.S. Treasury...
Pete Seeger, 1919-2014
Pete Seeger performing the Woodie Guthrie song “This Land is Your Land” at President Obama’s “We Are One” Inaugural Concert, January 19, 2009. Environmentalist, agent provocateur, leftist activist, recovering Communist and ardent redistributionist – all apply to the folksinger who died Monday in New York at the age of 94. Pete Seeger, for better or worse, answered to all of the above adjectives but it’s his legacy as a songwriter and performer for which this writer prefers to remember him....
A Challenge to ‘Work-Life Balance’
Upon the recent birth of our third child, I took a brief “vacation” from “work” (quotes intended). The time spent with family was special, joyous, and fulfilling, yet given the extreme lack of sleep, the sudden rush of behavioral backlash from Toddler Siblings 1 and 2, and a host of new scarcities and constraints, it was also a whole heap of work. Needless to say, when I arrived back at the office just a week later, I felt like I...
Poverty, Development, and the Idealist
In the latest EconTalk podcast, Nina Munk, journalist and author of The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, talks about how she spent six years following Jeffrey Sachs and the evolution of the Millennium Villages Project — an attempt to jumpstart a set of African villages in hopes of discovering a new template for development. Munk details the great optimism at the beginning of the project and the discouraging results after six years of high levels of...
Acton University 2014 Speaker Spotlight: Ross Douthat
The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not e inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation —weak mobility from the bottom of the e ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class. These challenges are bound up in a growing social crisis— a retreat from marriage, a weakening of religious munal ties, a decline in workforce participation— that cannot be solved in Washington D.C. But economic and social policy can make a difference nonetheless, making family life...
Presuming the Best
Kierkegaard once wrote, “The majority of men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, terribly objective sometimes–but the real task is in fact to be objective toward one’s self and subjective toward all others.” In this week’s Acton Commentary, “Discounting the Unseen,” I explore our responsibility to presume the best of others, particularly with regards to what remains unknown or assumed about them. This is a significant task given our natural propensity to excuse ourselves and to condemn...
Evaluating Net Neutrality via Walter Eucken
On January 14, as Brad Chacos so perfectly put it for PC World, “a Washington appeals court ruled that the FCC’s net neutrality rules are invalid in an 81-page document that included talk about cat videos on YouTube.” Reactions have been varied. Joe Carter recently surveyed various arguments in his latest explainer. For my part, I mend the German, ordoliberal economist Walter Eucken as a guide for evaluating net neutrality, which as Joe Carter put it, “[a]t its simplest …...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved