The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (Studies in Ethics and Economics)

"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."--Amazon.com Filling a lapse in the debate on the role of religious thought in economic theory, The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, informed by the history of Catholic economic thought, shows that the long-seen contradiction between Catholic faith and support for the market economy does not exist.