Matt Miller, a reader of this blog, has just alerted me to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Faithful Citizenship page. There we are introduced to things like The Candy Game, a “social justice” and “fairness” learning game. We read items like:
Social Justice. Changing unjust rules, such as lowering how much the prizes cost or redistributing the candy allotment so that those with the fewest have more.
Justice is helping to change the laws in some way to make all more equal.
This definition of justice is a bit removed from the classical suum cuique tribuere, to render to each his due.
It was with moral confusion (to put it exceedingly kindly) like this as my target that I wrote The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. It’s actually more than serviceable as an introduction to Austrian economics as well: it covers praxeology, prices, wages, monopoly, antitrust, foreign aid, distributism, income redistribution, money, banking, business cycles, interest, and quite a bit more. Here’s a little bit about it.