Free Will: Capitalism versus Socialism. An Analysis from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics.

Abstract

This article examines free will as a central anthropological and moral category in the Catholic tradition—developed particularly by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, and reaffirmed by the contemporary Magisterium—and establishes a critical dialogue with the notion of freedom characteristic of the Austrian School of Economics (Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Huerta de Soto, Kirzner). The objective is to comparatively assess the congruence between free will and two ideal-typical institutional orders: market capitalism and coercive planning socialism. It is argued that, to the extent that free will requires a real sphere of choice and responsibility, institutional orders that minimise coercion and preserve personal initiative—particularly those that protect private property, contractual freedom, and the principle of subsidiarity—are more consistent with a Christian anthropology of freedom than those that systematically replace individual decision-making with central direction. Far from sacralising the market, it is argued that capitalism is only morally defensible when subordinated to the rule of law and an ethical culture; nevertheless, under anthropological and moral criteria, it offers more favourable conditions for the ordinary exercise of free will than socialism in its forms of coercive planning.