Well-developed and plausible theories of economics were visible in the deliberations of Medieval Schoolmen five centuries before Smith. Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and other scholars of the high Middle Ages inquired intensely as to how moral and just prices might be computed. They arrived at complicated answers to this question: a just price is derived through competition in the economic whole; it is proper insofar as it is arrived at voluntarily by both parties to a transaction, but only when neither is disadvantaged by an asymmetry of need; it fairly represents the cost of producing a commodity; it is what the seller would be willing to pay if he were the buyer; etc.

Churchmen continued their studies of competition and markets well into the Renaissance. Their efforts culminated at Salamanca in what we now call the Just Price Theory; but this considerable intellectual achievement has since become rather sterile. Centuries of applied Scholasticism have given us exquisitely refined criteria for the just price; but these criteria remain several, unrelated, and even mutually contradictory in their verbal state. They have not been shown to coalesce into the sort of synthesis required for expression of singular notions such as ‘justice’ or the unique price a commodity might have at a given place and time.

While economics’ ideas about its primal notion of price remain unresolved we must expect that economic science will remain unfocused, and that contradictory implications will be drawn from the same data. Murray Rothbard described the Spanish Jesuits of Salamanca as his proto-Austrians. R.H. Tawney discovered the labor theory of value in the Dominican Aquinas, and famously nominated Karl Marx as last of the Schoolmen. SFEcon offers that prices were simply not determinant creatures in the period between Honorius and Calvin.

Most modern business practices, together with their related interest-bearing financial instruments, were fully developed in the extensive commercial civilizations of antiquity. As this world began giving way to barbarian invaders, extended investments became rare because they were difficult to recoup. Commerce became local, and earlier business practices — including those involving interest payments — gradually became ineffective and were forgotten.

Our young Church convened its First Lateran Council in late antiquity (325-381). Among the official Church doctrines propounded there we find a formal prohibition of interest payments in all forms. Licit transactions were now confirmed as the local spot transactions that prevailed in the ruined polity that had been the Roman Empire. It was literally a mortal heresy to profit in any visible way from the commitment of funds over time.

There being scant monetary profits to maximize during the Medieval period, no economic optimum could be cognized. Permissible economic states were therefore delimited by gang warfare rather than by free and orderly markets. Hence the unique set of prices through which technologies produce maximal benefit remained undiscovered.

The Council of Trent (1545-63) affirmed all the Church’s prior teaching on usury along with its many other irritants to the Protestant movement. The Protestants, upon freeing themselves to interpret scripture by their own lights in their own geographic regions, proceeded to exploit the possibilities of capitalism in vast mercantile and industrial empires based on maximal returns to investment.

Prices adjudicated in these expanded markets not only guided commerce to produce generally elevated material circumstances, they also unified the aforesaid Medieval criteria for what makes a price moral and just. While not admitting to any errors in its teaching, the Holy See quietly justified the taking of interest under Pius VIII in 1830.

While preoccupied in textural analyses, economics incessantly disputes the authority of its texts — producing commentaries upon commentaries upon commentaries, with the only possible objective being to create something that becomes canonical and thereby generative of even more comment. One might think economic science would at this point be desirous of nothing more than final release from the infinite regress of argumentation.

Where other sciences have broken out of their adolescent Scholasticism of mere verbal dispute, they have done so by establishing the primacy of objective demonstrata. If the facts of economic life are denominated in quanta of economic goods, then it would seem that economic science should require demonstrably objective accounts of how physical assets come to be distributed among the physical processes of transformation over time. Credible accounts should, we might suppose, demonstrate the necessity of money and prices to a theory’s operation. If discourse failing those tests were removed consideration, economics would achieve what might be welcome relief from its current loquacity.