Catholics once came to the rescue

To market, to market, to save us all:

* WSJ today, p-1, has “Price cuts spur home sales.”  Biggest monthly gain in almost seven years. What? Market correcting itself? It does that? Not for those whose mantra is market-bad-government-good. Holy Mother the State we believe in, not in any stinkin’ market!!!!

* Cardinal Cajetan, Dominican, 1468-1534, upheld the market as arbiter of justice in pricing and even endorsed upward mobility as individual goal. Saw money as a commodity, and so favored foreign exchange — francs for dollars, etc. — and lending at interest: usury, they called it in those days, regardless of rate.

There were statists among them, one of them fellow Dominican DeSoto, as in Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, 1995.

* As for statism and its presumed role in bringing us together in a spirit of community, fellow 16th- (& 17th-) century commentator, Sir Thomas Smith chimed in (from England) on the role of self-interest in running things, within a property-rights framework:

It’s “a natural fact of human life to be channelled by constructive policy rather than thwarted by repressive legislation.” It’s better that people be “provoked with lucre [money]” than have governments “take this reward from them.”

Better too that entrepreneurs with their virtues and faults and their track record be the engine of change we can believe in than politicians with theirs.

* Also in the 16th, the papal bull “Cum Onus” condemning “usury” — lending at interest whatever the rate — issued in 1569 by Pius Fifth, came too late in the debate to quell lending at interest. Too many theologians (philosophers) had OK’d it.

In fact, four years later the Jesuits, forget their special vow to obey the pope, OK’d the mutually redeemable census contract — selling of annuities, whereby a price is put on delaying of money-use — in a general congregation and eight years after that, in 1581, all census contracting.

Some German Jesuits complained about such liberalism, and Jesuit Genl Claude Aquaviva told them to suck it up. “So much for the Pope’s census prohibition,” commented Rothbard, about whom one may look here.