Being Good Bankers
Consider that a majority of Jesus’ parables discuss money, wealth, or commerce. Our relationship to our finances obviously matter a great deal for our spiritual life.
Catholic Investor Advises Graduates on the Meaning of Wealth
As a private equity manager and venture capitalist, Frank Hanna knows about how to succeed at business and how to create wealth. But his new book, A Graduate’s Guide to Life is no Art of the Deal-style book about how to get ahead and beat the competition. In fact, almost the opposite: “Competition is not … Read more
Trump the Rotarian and Why Elites Hate Him and You, Too
Publishing scion Al Regnery told a story last night about how the hoi polloi out on the campaign hustings appreciated the fact that Donald Trump always dressed to the nines. Always perfectly turned out, business suit, dress shirt, shined shoes, perfectly knotted four-in-hand tie, the working man appreciated Trump’s authenticity. One man said, “This is … Read more
Faith and the Employer
The diocese of Lansing, where I currently attend mass, is a pretty good one, as such things go in the contemporary United States. Our parish has a very good priest and I’m confident we won’t soon be joining in on the practice I’ve seen in the archdiocese of Detroit of worshiping in the round, complete … Read more
The Economy of Communion in Africa
Africa is a continent of great spiritual and cultural wealth, but also of great material poverty. The way forward for African economies is not aid and development assistance, but prudent business management that enables African workers to attain higher levels of productivity for their efforts. But what model of business management is appropriate for the … Read more
Corporate Personhood and 14th Amendment Rights
This article originally appeared on Ethika Politika One of the demands made by the Occupy Wall Street movement has been the ending of the legal fiction of personhood for business corporations. This desire on the part of the Occupy movement is healthy, but the issue is actually more complicated than might at first appear. For corporate … Read more
The Happiness of Believers
Do religious belief and practice affect the happiness of Europeans? In the first part of this two-part article, to answer our question we focused on the European Values Study. In this second part we deal with results from the European Social Survey. For an empirical analysis of the effect of religion on happiness, we use … Read more
Catholics and “Usury”: A Tragic History
This piece is paired with another view of usury from a distributist perspective, also running today. What makes “social teaching” different from the faith-and-morals magisterium of the Catholic Church? Most of the latter was settled early in Church history, with developments coming over time as subtle elaborations and careful applications of eternal truths. Social … Read more
Another Sin We Don’t Want to Hear About
This piece is paired with another view of usury from an Austrian economics perspective, also running today. The Catholic Church is always condemned for condemning sins. Since we are all sinners, sin is the last thing we want to hear about. But of course, if we don’t confess our sins and flee from our … Read more
Free Enterprise and the Church: The Morality of Business and Work
The recent note from the Vatican on financial markets, along with the outbreak of protests in many cities against what is seen as the failures of capitalism, has once more brought up the question of what it is exactly that the Catholic Church teaches about economic issues. A recent contribution to this subject came with … Read more
A Misguiding Note from the Vatican
The recent Note issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, “Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority,” has liberals jubilant and conservatives apoplectic with its call “to create some form of global monetary management” (Sec. 4). This Note is a compilation of papal Social Teaching … Read more
Profits are for People
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding “people before profits” — as if profit motivation were the source of mankind’s troubles — when it’s often the absence of profit motivation that’s the true villain. First, let’s get both the definition and magnitude of profits out of the way. Profits represent the residual claim earned by … Read more
Cooperation: A Free Market Benefits Everyone
The following will explain the most important idea in the history of social analysis. The notion (actually, it’s a description of reality that is all around us but rarely noticed) has been around for many centuries. It was first discovered by late-medieval monks working in Spain. It was given scientific precision in the classical period. … Read more
Walmart Case a Victory for Consumers
The Supreme Court handed down a big win for American consumers this week, though the case had nothing to do with consumer protection. The court’s decision involved the rules for determining what constitutes a proper class of plaintiffs, representing not just those individuals who have come forward to allege illegal behavior but others who have been … Read more
Obama and Business: Irreconcilable Differences
Last week, I noted that various forms of the word “unexpected” almost inevitably appeared in news stories about unfavorable economic developments. You can find them again in stories about Friday’s shocking news, that only 54,000 net new jobs were created in the month of May and that unemployment rose to 9.1 percent. But with news … Read more
Dependency and Votes
Those who regard government “entitlement” programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality. To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that … Read more
The Late Great American Dollar
The economic crisis that hit the developed world a few years ago was devastating. Millions lost their jobs, their homes, and their retirements. But the next catastrophe — which could be coming soon — will make the recent recession feel like a boom time. Imagine gasoline prices really skyrocketing and the cost of food and … Read more
Catholic Social Teaching and These Changing Times
Today, Gaudium et spes must be read in the light of Centesimus annus and other writings of the late-Pope John Paul II. These remain, by far, the most concrete, sophisticated, and accurate descriptions of the contemporary world. They are rooted in a thoroughly contemporary grasp of the philosophy and theology of the human person, community, … Read more
Toward a More Just Economy
I can only do justice to John Mueller’s magnum opus Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element (and it is “magnum,” with 470 dense pages and copious footnotes) by comparing it to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, and the wrongheaded but immensely influential General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by … Read more
What Is the New Statism?
After years of going nowhere, economic theory in the Catholic world just got a big upgrade from none other than the head of the Vatican’s bank. Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, a one-time private banker and professor of financial ethics at the Catholic University in Milan, has headed the Institute for Religious Works since 2009. Writing in … Read more