A tradição católica (2): Martin de Azpilcueta Navarrus (1493-1586)

Depois de ter referenciado o Bispo Nicholas Oresme (em 1377) passamos aos escolásticos ibéricos (retirado de Economic Thought before Adam Smith, Murray N Rothbard), e com uma referência a Portugal.

"Renowned for his saintly life and vast learning, the gaunt, hook-nosed Dominican Azpi1cueta was regarded as the most eminent canon lawyer of his day. After teaching canon law in Cahors and Toulouse in France, Azpilcueta returned to take up a chair at Salamanca, where his overflowing lectures featured a new method of teaching civil law by combin- ing it with canon law. In 1538, Azpilcueta was sent by Emperor Charles V to be rector of the new University of Coimbra, in western Portugal. There he developed the principles of international law originally set forth by his mas- ter, Vitoria. Azpilcueta spent his last years in Rome, a trusted adviser to three popes, dying at the advanced age of 93.

 Azpilcueta used his great influence to advance economic liberalism farther than it had ever gone before, among the scholastics or anywhere else. In sharp contrast to de Soto's admiration for comprehensive price control, Azpi1cueta was the first economic thinker to state clearly and boldly that government price-fixing was imprudent and unwise. When goods are abun- dant, he sensibly pointed out, there is no need for maximum price control, and when goods are scarce, controls would do the community more harm than good. But Azpilcueta's outstanding contribution to economics was his theory of money, published in his Comentario resolutoio de usuras (1556) as an appen- dix to a manual on moral theology.

The manual and the commentaries in the appendix were translated into Latin and Italian, and proved to be influential for Catholic writers for many years. Azpilcueta built on the analysis of Cardinal Cajetan to present the first clear and unambiguous presentation of the 'quantity theory of money'. Or rather, he breaks firmly with the tradition that money can in any sense be a fixed measure of value of other goods. In contrast to older emphasis on foreign exchange, or money in terms of other monies, Azpilcueta clearly identified the value of money as its purchasing power in terms of goods. Once Azpilcueta grasped these two points firmly, then the 'quantity theory' followed directly. For then, like other goods, the value of money varied inversely with its supply, or quantity available.

As Azpilcueta put it:

'all merchandise becomes dearer when it is in great demand and short supply, and that money, in so far as it may be sold, bartered, or exchanged by some other form of contract, is merchandise, and therefore also becomes dearer when it is in great demand and short supply'.

 It should be noted that this splendid and concise analysis of the determi- nants of the purchasing power of money does not make the mistake of later 'quantity theorists' in stressing the quantity or supply of money while ignor- ing the demand. On the contrary, demand and supply analysis was applied correctly to the monetary sphere.

 Thus, Azpilcueta wrote:

 ...other things being equal, in countries where there is a great scarcity of money all other saleable goods, and even the hands and labor of men, are given for less money than where it is abundant. Thus we see by experience that in France, where money is scarcer than in Spain, bread, wine, cloth and labor are worth much less. And even in Spain, in times when money was scarcer, saleable goods and labor were given for very much less than after the discovery of the Indies, which flooded the country with gold and silver. The reason for this is that money is worth more where and when it is scarce than where and when it is abundant.

 Martin de Azpilcueta, in this case influenced by his colleague de Soto, also developed the latter's
purchasing-power parity theory of exchange rates, at the same time that he worked out the 'quantity
theory', supply and demand analysis of the value of money. The two of course, go hand in hand.

 One of Azpilcueta's most important contributions was to revive the vital concept of time-preference, perhaps under the influence of the works of its discoverer, San Bernardino of Siena. Azpilcueta pointed out, more clearly than Bernardino, that a present good, such as money, will naturally be worth more on the market than future goods, that is, goods that are now claims to money in the future. 

As Azpilcueta put it:

'a claim on something is worth less than the thing itself, and ... it is plain that that which is not usable for a year is less valuable than something of the same quality which is usable at once'."

E assim podemos ver o porquê de serem apelidados de pré-austríacos.