Return to Order: Where We've Been, How We Got There, and Where We Need to Go: From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society

Description

I disagree with the author's opinion: "Three Reasons Why Bitcoin Is Not Money", although the word "decentralized" (which is the most important feature of blockchain-based currencies, and is essentially the same as the Catholic "principle of subsidiarity") is mentioned 6 times in Return to Order; cf. "Crypto-Currency Meltdown Is a Lesson on the Nature of Money and Wealth" by John Horvat II.

Coins the term "frenetic intemperance," the classic example of which is "Black Friday" shopaholic stampeders.

ref:83.1:

The Fear of God and Just Price

We find a concern for the second tribunal reflected in the following conversation between Saint John Bosco and a simple blacksmith who supported the saint’s works.

“Do you know what my biggest worry is?”

“Surely it must be to live and die in the grace of God.”

“No, I’m not worried about death. I take care, though, to be prepared for it when it comes. My biggest worry is this: I am a blacksmith, and I am very much troubled when after finishing a job I have to decide on the price I must charge. As I enter the charge in my book I ask myself: Will the good Lord write down the same amount? If I charge more, won’t that be a charge against me? To play it safe, I always charge 20% less than the ordinary rate” (Giovanni Battista Lemoyne, The Biographical Memoirs of St. John Bosco, ed. Diego Borgatello [New Rochelle, N.Y.: Salesiana Publishers, Inc., 1965], 1:230).

Obviously not all tradesmen can or should take such a position. However, the fact that this simple and successful blacksmith and many others like him showed such a great concern for justice can only have created an atmosphere favoring commerce in general.

Horvat, Return to Order ch. 32 "An Organic Economic Order: A Passion for Justice", § "Just Price and Markets" (ref:78.10) cites Langholm, Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought, 85 (PDF p. 96):

The modern mechanistic conception of the market as a suprapersonal force setting the terms to which an individual exchanger must submit was foreign to the medieval masters. Their frame of reference was a moral universe that obliged any buyer or seller to act for the common good and agree to terms of exchange accordingly, regardless of the advantage granted him by the forces of the market.

see: "Who first argued that market forces determine just pricing?"