Money Manipulation and Social Order

The following quotation is taken from Chapter II of Money Manipulation and Social Order.  The book, written by Fr Denis Fahey C.S.S.p. was first printed in 1944. The title of Chapter II is Political, Economic And Financial Principles Of St. Thomas Aquinas. For a fuller treatment of the principles of St. Thomas Aquinas concerning money, the reader is recommended to read The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society, Chapter II.

“Those who are skilled in the manipulation of money must be servants of the State, not the dictators of governmental policy; they must aim at aiding and strengthening family-life, not at disrupting it for the sake of the figures in their ledgers. It is completely against order if the production and the distribution of the goods needed by families to the exigencies of money-making instead of the other way round. If, by a perversion of the right order, money or exchange-medium becomes the master, production and distribution will decay, the potentialities of the State’s resources will not be realized, and family-life will suffer.

If the manipulators of money get control of the Government of the State, then the Government will not be able to compel the bankers and the money-changers  to practise the virtue of social justice, namely, that justice which has for object the Common Good, and the welfare of the whole nation will suffer grievously. Usury and alteration of the price-level will then be permitted to go unchecked, and the real Sovereignty in the State will inevitably pass into the hands  of the manipulators of money. The next stage will be a move to bring national Sovereignty under the domination of some international organisation subject to finance. That will make permanent and world-wide the present-day anti- Christian and anti-natural perversions of order involved in the subordination of human persons to the production of material goods and in the subordination of the production and distribution of material goods to finance.

For St. Thomas, it is the duty of the State to see that money or exchange-medium is a stable measure of value.”