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The Return of the Just Price
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
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A great deal has been heard of late of the problem of reconciling one aim of economic policy, that of stability, or full employment as it is usually expressed nowadays, with another aim, that of economic efficiency. But stability and efficiency do not exhaust the list of the rightful aims of economic policy. There is a third, since the economic system should be not only efficient and reasonably stable but should also be just. This third element, justice, has received relatively little attention in modern economic analysis, but this is in direct contrast with the discussions of economic matters found in the scholastic philosophers. In their treatises, the one thing about price which they emphasise is that it must be a just price. They devoted little space to any direct consideration of those aspects of human economic activities which bear upon the stability or efficiency of the system, but a great deal to those aspects which treat of justice as between man and man. Does this mean that the medieval writers were very poor economists? They have indeed been treated as such in the textbooks on the development of economic thought. But recent developments of economics are giving cause for some reassessment, here as elsewhere.
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- Copyright © 1953 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Macmillan, 1936), Ch. 23, pp. 351–2
2 Quoted by Fr Bernard Dempsey, 8.J. Interest and Usury (Dobson. 1948). VIII. p. 149.
3 Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Pelican, 1942), I, p. 43. See also O'Brien, An Essay in Medical Economic Teaching (Longmans Green, 1920), III, p. 109–110.
4 O'Brien, op. cit., I. p. 42
5 Tawney, op. cit., I. p. 42
6 Biel, quoted by O'Brien, op. cit., III. p. 107
7 Ibid., p. 111–5
8 Kaulla. The Theory of the Just Price (Allen and Unwin. 1940). I. p. 54.
9 Stamp, Christianity and Economics. (Macmillan, 1939). IV. pp. 58–9. See also O'Brien, op. cit. pp. 111–2.
10 Op. cit., p. 44
11 Langenstein. quoted by O'Brien, op. cit., p. 107.
12 Ibid., pp. 116–7
13 Ibid., pp. 106–7
14 The, whole analylical structure on which this conclusion retsted may be found, with varying degrees of internal consistency, in any elementary text‐book on the subject.
15 See especially Henderson, ‘Prices and profits in state enterprise’. Review of Economic Studies. XVI (1). 1948–9. pp. 13–24; Ruggles, ‘The welfare basis of the marginal cast pricing principle’, ibid. XVII (1). 1949–50, pp. 29–46. and ‘Recent developments in the theory of marginal cost pricing’, ibid. XVII (2). 1949–50, pp. 107–126.
16 No prediction is offered on the question of whether efficiency would be raised or lowered.
17 Op. cit., pp. 40, 71
18 St Thomas Aquinas (Hodder and Stoughton. 1943), p. 144
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