Over at America, Meghan Clark has an excellent response to Stacie Beck’s quite abysmal article “Just Economics”, which was also featured in America.  Clark shows just how divorced this worldview is from Catholic thought, in addition to highlighting the faulty economics that Beck employs.  The heart of the conflict centers around whether people have dignity as children of God and are thus entitled to basic necessities that are minimal prerequisites to human flourishing or whether the free market should determine who has access to these basic needs.  Clark states:

What the goals of social justice do assume is that a society built upon justice can protect the dignity and encourage the participation of all its members. To evaluate the justice and morality of economic structures, we must ask what does it do to people? And how do people participate in it? In a similar vein, Pope John Paul II reiterated numerous times that markets are a means, not an end. If the modern market economy, as it exists, cannot be structured to create a social order in which this is realized—then it is the modern market economy which must be restructured, not children’s catechism books.

It’s not impossible to argue that economic growth and the benefits of the market have sometimes been overlooked or underappreciated in Catholic Social Teaching. However, Beck’s piece cannot be reconciled with the core principles of Catholic Social Teaching and is based on a fundamentally flawed view of economics, and Meghan Clark does an excellent job highlighting its considerable shortcomings.  I highly recommend reading her full critique.