Divine Economy: Theology and the Market

Long complains repeatedly that Christian theology's approach to economies has relied far too much on the doctrine of creation and not enough on christological foundations. And yet this is exactly what Aquinas does--for this is the essence of the natural-law approach to ethics. In Aquinas's treatment of property, for example, the fundamental constraint on an owner's claim is the fact (perceptible to reason without the aid of revelation) that the world has been created by God with the intention of meeting people's needs. In articulating his own position on property ownership, Aquinas does not rely on Jesus' teaching about love of neighbor or other biblical warrants. His argument, consistent with that of the early church, is that because of God's intention in creation, if I have more than I need and you have less than you need, I am obliged to share my surplus with you, even if I rightfully own it. Not to do so would violate God's created order.

TO TAKE A SECOND example, consider Long's desire to recover the classic prohibition against usury--the claim that it is immoral to charge interest when lending money. In an attempt to counteract received wisdom today, Long spends considerable time on the relevant discussions by economists Dempsey, Knut Wicksell, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig von Mises.

Long objects to those who argue that Aquinas's prohibition against usury is based on a faulty conception of money as "sterile." Long defends the notion that money is sterile on the grounds that only living things can reproduce "because God endowed them in nature with the capacity for reproduction."

Aquinas himself, however, makes a single argument against usury, arising out of the Aristotelian tradition. He starts with a distinction between two kinds of goods and the different moral requirements we face when we lend goods of each kind. Some goods are used up when they are used, like the bottle of wine we lend to a neighbor. When the neighbor brings the bottle back (or brings an equivalent bottle back if the first one was drunk), we put the bottle back in our stock. Because from our perspective the wine was not used (after all, we now have it, just as we would if there had been no loan), we deserve to receive the bottle but no additional payment because of the loan.

The second kind of good is one that is not used up when it is used, like a house. The house can be used temporarily by another person and then returned to us, but we have, in fact, lost something in the meantime: the use of the house. For this reason God's natural law allows us to capture an additional payment (which we call rent) for our loss. In modern terminology, the wine is a consumption good, whereas the house is a capital good, producing a flow of services, or in Aquinas's terminology, producing "usufruct." (Long completely overlooks Aquinas's conviction that goods like the house are not sterile. This alone disproves Long's claim that, in this tradition, only living things can avoid sterility.)