Chapter 8 on economics needs to be completely revised

books:

	• How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization Thomas E. Woods Jr Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 92 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

What did the Roman (Catholics's) ever do for us?

You can't read this book without thinking of the famous Monty Python scene from Monty Python's Life Of Brian - The Immaculate Edition where the People's front of Judea inadvertently lists every improvement that the Roman have ever brought to their land. This would be a great modern description of the politically correct view of the history which would like to forget all of the contributions of the church in everything from Science to Law to ethics, education and even the preservation and copying of books via the monks.

These facts are stubborn things and Mr. Woods wastes no time diving in showing over and over again how things that we take for granted have their base in Catholic belief and practice and the actions of faithful Catholics in particular and the church in general. The list is very long and the presentation is a celebration of the Civilization that these faithful catholics helped build and the results that all of us enjoy today without a thought.

The best way to understand where you are is to understand where you have been. This book does that job very well.

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Chapter 8 on economics needs to be completely revised

Woods has written a book which is generally excellent.He demonstrates that the Catholic Church has been at the center of positive developments in the sciences,arts,architecture,education,law,and ethics over the centuries.One minor complaint is Woods' decision not to explicitly connect Galileo(discussed on pp.69-74) and Kepler(discussed on pp.110-113).Woods gaves the impression that each worked in isolation from the other. In fact ,both Kepler and Galileo closely followed the work of the other.There was a good deal of correspondence between the two.Galileo's mistake,then,is to have not taken Kepler's work more seriously than he did,especially since Kepler's work was directly based on the generally accepted observations made by Kepler's instructor,Tycho Brahe (not Tyco,p.268).
The major problem in the book appears in chapter 8.First, Murray Rothbard is not a great Twentieth Century economist.Murray Rothbard is a great Twentieth Century Libertarian-Austrian economist.Second,the 16th and 17th Century Spanish "Late" Scholastic philosophers cited repeatedly by Woods throughout chapter 8 are not in the same class as the 13th century great Scholastics of the School of Paris(1200-1350 AD).NONE of the ECONOMIC discussions of St.Albert the Great,St.Thomas Aquinas,and Duns Scotus are referred to anywhere in chapter 8.This creates a severe problem for the potential reader who will not realize that the question Woods is dealing with had already been analyzed in detail by the Great 13th Century Scholastics. Albert the Great,Thomas Aquinas,and Scotus had all agreed that the fair and just price was the price determined in the market place at the particular time that the transaction between the buyer and the seller was proposed .However,there were 3 very important qualifications that the latter, minor,Spanish Scholastics failed miseribly to comprehend.The market price is NOT a fair and just price if there is any compulsion,coercion,or uncertainty existing at the time the transaction took place.The standard " Lemon Problem " discussion of asymmetric information ,taught in all basic microeconomiic courses, impacts falls directly into the uncertainty(partial uncertainty)category.The negotiated or agreed upon price of a good carried out under conditions of asymmetric information is NOT a just and fair exchange.

Only John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith,both of whom are considered the greatest two economists of all time,except by Libertarians, understood the nature of the original arguments put forth by the School of Paris Scholastics .Keynes makes it quite clear on pp.351-352 of his General Theory (1936)that the 13th Century Scholastics had a very good intuitive understanding of the differences between making decisions under risk versus making decisions under uncertainty and/or ignorance.Smith's position [See Wealth of Nations,pp.290-340,Modern Library(Cannan)edition] is practically the same as the positions on the rate of interest,usury laws,and speculation held by the 13th century Scholastics ,but rejected by the 16th and 17th century Spanish Scholastics.Woods needs to totally rewrite this chapter(chapter 8) of his book.It is an intellectual mess that detracts from the rest of the book.

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Underpinning Western Civilization

A great and badly needed volume. Beautiful cover artwork.
I wish I could donate scores of this book to our high schools and colleges in the U.S. where the decidedly skewed Protestant and Atheist version of history is being taught. Basically little or nothing good existed before the frenzied cries of Sola Scriptura! in the 16th century using the Bible - a document assembled by the Catholic Church as the center piece of this new man made tradition.
One wonders how an institution so evil and corrupt could last almost 2000 years and be the largest and universally (catholic) dispersed Christian group on the planet? Luther, Calvin and company's spiritual children have been around for 500 years and look at how many denominations have formed from that mindset and those splits and yet more splits
Catholicism and it's echoes surround us every day in our legal system, architecture, agriculture, art, literature etc.
Somehow Mendel (the father of genetics) was left out of this volume but another great companion piece to this book is "Catholic Churchmen and Science" by James J. Walsh.
Thank you for the research and enlightenment.
We as Christians and a Church have typically taken the stance that we are called to be Christlike and transform the World with no publicity sought or given for most of what we do. The unfortunate reality is that we live in a World which deals out a great deal of "noise" and erroneous facts, so intelligent rebuttals like this are needed to educate those willing to seek out the fullness of Truth.

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From modern economics to Western art and m usic, the Catholic Church has contributed more to the development of Western civilization than any other institution--but rarely gets credit for it.

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