Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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53 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Catholics for Freedom, March 12, 2005
Professor Thomas Woods is an interesting author: a traditionalist Catholic who is also a supporter of the free market economy. In this book, he presents a Catholic case for the free enterprise system, employing the economics of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard (neither of whom was religious, much less Catholic.)
It's well known that the Roman Catholic Church has never been a particularly strong supporter of capitalism. Many popes have stressed the benefits of private property and opposed extreme versions of socialism, but have not realized the positive benefits of Capitalism. In the past, teachers in the Catholic Church haven't understood the functioning of economic laws. The always-paradoxical John Paul II, while having a better understanding of the markets processes, supports large-scale government intervention in the economy. In addition, many Catholics believe that the church's advocacy of the mixed economy is dogma, thus putting Catholic supporters of free enterprise on the same level as those who advocate women priests and the like.
Prof. Woods thus has a lot of work to do. He first shows the autonomous nature of economic reasoning. Churchmen are entitled to instruct the faithful on their duties to their fellow man, but lay Catholics are free to make an independent appraisal of the effectiveness of any given plan. For example, if a churchman tells his flock to help the needy, that's all well and good; if he tells them that the only way to improve the lot of the poor is through minimum wage laws, labor unions, foreign aid and the like, he is making a judgment about how economic laws work. Woods argues that, from the Catholic perspective, there is no reason to believe that the pope is infallible in his economic prescriptions. Prof. Woods discusses a large number of subjects, including usury, wages, prices, banking and foreign aid.
My one concern is whether all of Catholic economic teaching fits neatly into Prof. Woods' approach. Many popes taught in a rather dogmatic way about the need for various interventions in the economy. One example is the support for laws mandating the closing of stores on Sunday (as well as giving workers the day off). If popes who advocated these things had been Misesian praxeologists, I doubt they would have come to different conclusions.
The book ends with a strong critique of distributism, which seeks a larger distribution of private property in the hands of workers. Chesteron and Belloc, among others, advocated distributism. Many traditionally minded Catholics see distributism as a "third way" between capitalism and socialism. But as Prof. Woods points out, the only institution which has the power to redistribute property on a massive scale is the state.
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56 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Long overdue, February 26, 2005
I have been waiting for this book for many years. As an economist and an orthodox Catholic, I have been concerned at how many of my fellow Catholics, with little if any background in economics, have dismissed the free-market while advancing policies that can only lead to economic ruin. This is a travesty, I've always thought. In philosophy, in medical ethics, and in many other disciplines Catholics have been some of the best thinkers; in economics, on the other hand, the situation is too embarrassing to behold.
What Dr. Woods has done here is to show that so many of the Catholic arguments against the free market are rather like many of the Protestant arguments against Catholicism: they're often based on ignorance and misunderstandings. He then proceeds to lay out one of the strongest and most overwhelming cases for the free market I have ever read - and I have read a lot of them.
I just finished Woods's book an hour ago and signed on to write my review. I was sorry to see the review below (which has since been placed above this one, apparently). At no time does Woods's book contend that economic efficiency is the supreme value; in (as I recall) chapter one Woods expressly dismisses that idea, and in fact criticizes the Chicago School of economics for at times holding that very position.
The Church and the Market often deals with issues that by and large have not been taken up by the popes at all. Thus the chapter on money and banking discusses the gold standard, the moral dimension of fiat currency, the moral implications of fractional-reserve banking, the moral aspects of inflation, etc. Here Woods shows Catholics that a good grasp of economics can help them render better moral judgments. He also corrects the errors of Fr. Coughlin, who is still admired by some people but whose grasp of monetary economics was disastrously poor.
I wonder if the critic above read the whole book, since it explicitly answers the very clichés that are sprinkled throughout that review. This is disappointing; I hoped Woods's book, so carefully and persuasively argued, would force opponents of Austrian economics to stop and think. Instead, at least in this one case, it has succeeded only in making them repeat the same ill-informed charges they did before he wrote his book. That is the kind of ignorance against which this important -- and beautifully written -- book is directed.
Your work is not wasted, Dr. Woods, believe me. Many of us have been waiting for this book for a long time. Pay no attention to those who call you disobedient (or whatever it is they'll call you). You have done the Church an important service, as did the scholastics who showed that the best of secular thought could be reconciled with the teaching of the Church.
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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very effective, January 29, 2006
Let me note from the outset that I've gotten to know Professor Woods by means of emails we've exchanged after I've read some of his articles; I have reviewed a couple of his other books for Amazon as well.
I read The Church and the Market late last year and loved it. Woods has a gift for explaining complicated things in ways that can easily be understood. Woods anticipates more arguments against the free market than I could have come up with in 20 years and demolishes them all, without invective or a sneer.
This is an extremely learned book, and written in clear and engaging prose. Woods takes a consistently pro-freedom position in his discussion of wages, antitrust, the welfare state, banking, foreign aid, etc.
At the same time, he addresses some of the Catholic hostility to the market, and poses some interesting questions. His argument goes something like this: certain papal statements call for a "living wage" (for example) because they believe such recommendations will make workers better off. But what if such a policy (whether enforced by law or by ecclesiastical urging is irrelevant) will make workers worse off? (Woods gives many reasons that this would be the case, including the fact that fewer workers would be employed.)
Leave aside your objection that Woods' economic analysis is wrong, and that, say, a $50 minimum wage would actually be a great thing. The question is this. Let's say Woods is right, which is certainly possible. Let's say this approach would indeed make workers worse off. Is a Catholic free to say so? If not, why not?
Note that Woods isn't saying the Church is not allowed to speak on economic matters. He is saying that some of the economic assumptions behind the bishops' statements on the economy are faulty, and that the resulting moral analysis is necessarily faulty as well.
It would be something else if Church leaders were to admit that the policies they recommend would surely make people worse off, but that justice requires that they be instituted anyway. That would be one thing. But these policies are being recommended on the express assumption that they will help people. But what if they won't? What then?
That is an interesting and good question, though many Catholics are embarrassing themselves by claiming Woods has no right to ask it. Playing right into the Protestant caricature of Catholicism, they insist that free discussion on such matters is not allowed (a fact that would have been very interesting to medieval scholars, who wrote about and debated just about every philosophical and theological issue you can name). They acknowledge none of the careful distinctions Woods makes, and some of the dafter ones go so far as to say he's dissenting from official teaching simply in pointing out reality. What a nightmare.
As for N. Ravitch, below, he's Professor Norman Ravitch, who 1) hates the Catholic Church (do a Google search on him) and 2) makes a habit of reviewing books he hasn't read. (Check out his review of George Weigel's book God's Choice, for example.) The point of Woods's book is to ADDRESS anti-market statements by Church figures; Ravitch, apparently going only on the brief description above, assumes Woods' book just ignores them. No one who even owned a copy, much less actually read it, could have mischaracterized it so completely.
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