Just Price - Later Reinterpretations of The Doctrine

Later Reinterpretations of The Doctrine

In Aquinas' time, most products were sold by the immediate producers (i.e. farmers and craftspeople), and wage-labor and banking were still in their infancy. The role of merchants and money-lenders was limited. The later School of Salamanca argued that the just price is determined by common estimation which can be identical with the market price -depending on various circumstances such as relative bargaining power of sellers and buyers- or can be set by public authorities. With the rise of Capitalism, the use of just price theory faded. In modern economics, interest is seen as payment for a valuable service, which is the use of the money, though most banking systems still forbid excessive interest rates.

Likewise, during the rapid expansion of capitalism over the past several centuries the theory of the just price was used to justify popular action against merchants who raised their prices in years of dearth. The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson emphasized the continuing force of this tradition in his pioneering article on the "Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Other historians and sociologists have uncovered the same phenomenon in variety of other situations including peasants riots in continental Europe during the nineteenth century and in many developing countries in the twentieth. The political scientist James C. Scott, for example, showed how this ideology could be used as a method of resisting authority in "The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia" (1976).

Brazilian journalist and philosopher Olavo de Carvalho joined the just price of St. Thomas Aquinas with the economic theories of Böhm-Bawerk. Explaining that the medieval usurer differed to modern capitalist by the fact that in medieval society wealth was fixed (land), while in industrial society the function of money had changed completely: “At the new framework, none could accumulate money under the bed for stroke him between dawn swoon of fetishistic perversion?????, but I had to bet it quickly on overall growth of the economy before inflation turned it into dust. If he committed the blunder of investing it in the impoverishment of anyone else, would be investing in his own bankruptcy.”