The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy

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"Chapter Six: Answering the Distributist Critique" (ref:15.1-303) is a criticism of distributism and, indirectly, Catholic Land Movement– seu neo–Luddite tendancies. I'm not entirely convinced.

02/28/266 Answering the Distributist Critique : 286

economies of scale

03/01/266 Answering the Distributist Critique : 298

for most of the twentieth century the price of sugar to Americans was 500 percent higher than the world price, thanks to government price supports.

03/01/266 Answering the Distributist Critique : 308

embedded within St. Thomas’ discussion of the limits to property is the much broader question of the status of the right to property itself: is it a natural or divinely bestowed right, or a mere fixture of human positive law? St. Thomas opted for the latter position,

so he’d agree IP not is a part of natural law?

03/01/266 Answering the Distributist Critique : 324

Melinda Gates’s chances of dying during childbirth are about one-sixtieth what they would have been in 1700

ref:15.22 on importance of efficiency:

Partisans of the market are often portrayed [by distributists? as if distributists are anti-market‽] as morally stunted for their emphasis on economic efficiency, an emphasis that supposedly fails to reckon with other values whose importance is said to be greater than that of mere efficiency. But the point is, the more efficient we are in producing the goods we need, the more leisure we can enjoy to pursue the very “higher things” that economists allegedly leave out of account.

mentions Fr. Fahey (Money Manipulation and the Social Order), but Woods seems to be setting up strawmen to refute Fahey; e.g., Fahey doesn't think the gold standard involves partial gold backing, despite his using England as an example of a (deformed/imperfect) gold standard (cf. Fahey's fuller treatment of quantitative vs. qualitative theory of money in Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society).

The Church and the Market is a vigorous and lively defense of the market economy and a withering attack on all forms of state intervention. It covers labor unions, monopoly, money and banking, business cycles, interest, usury, and much more. Although it makes a particular point of noting the moral arguments of the market economy and that Catholics are of course perfectly at liberty to support it, its audience is much broader than Catholics alone. Readers of all religious traditions and none at all have praised The Church and the Market, first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards, as one of the most compelling and persuasive defenses of capitalism against its critics ever written.