Redeeming Economics (13) Two Problems

The book Redeeming Economics by John D Mueller has a couple of serious weaknesses. First, he advocates natural law. Natural laws are those that can be derived by human reason, rather than by revelation. The problem with natural law is that almost anything can be derived by human reason, depending on the starting assumptions. If the natural law theologian begins with Christian assumptions, they do not want to far from the truth. When secular assumptions are applied, natural law can go anywhere.

The other problem with the book is that Mueller adopts Aristotle’s theory of distributive justice. Aristotle was an advocate of political power, so he believed that every government must have a principle for distributing goods among its citizens.

The scholastic “economists” favored both voluntary and socially organized redistribution of wealth to favor the less fortunate. But they also recognized that the capacity for such giving is always limited by the fact of scarcity. Absolute equality of wealth or income is neither practically possible nor useful to society, since it would require abolishing private property with its triple advantages of productivity, order and social peace. Policymakers’ direct control does not extend beyond what the government can tax, subsidize or regulate.

This approach to distributive justice has been used to support the redistributionist policies of modern governments. This is a dangerous trend, because compulsory redistribution by taxation is not supported by the scriptures.