The attempt to comprehensively regulate and legislate human commerce has been with us ever since Adam. It has always ended in signal failure. That alone should teach us something.
Medieval sumptuary laws are an example. It was widely thought that a craftsman who plied his trade, selling goods or services to support his family was engaged in a holy and righteous calling. But a merchant who bought and sold goods for a profit without adding any value to them was a greedy exploiter. Go figure. Consider R. H. Tawney's description:
". . . But the man who buys [a thing] in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God's temple." By very definition a man who "buys in order that he may sell dearer," the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity. He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, "is justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, is serves the lust of gain." [R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: An Historical Study (London: John Murray, 1923), p. 34f.]Laying aside the matter of intentions, motives, and goals in such ways of thinking, just focus on the application of such ideas.
The local craftsman makes baskets to feed his family. The medieval mindset commended such work as holy. He sells them at a profit to generate the income to feed his children. Very Christian. But a merchant who buys in one country and sells more dearly in another is (according to this style of casuistry) adding no value, and is just motivated merely by greed and filthy gain. His actions are evil. He is exploiting the person he bought from and the person he sold to.
But what happens if the virtuous local craftsman were to sell at a price higher than required to feed the children? When do his prices become so high that they have moved from necessity to "the lust of gain"? When does he become a usurious exploiter? There is no standard to tell beyond the prejudice of the local community. Avarice is defined as going beyond the local price custom. But the custom has no ethical or moral warrant in itself.
Economic life either remains restricted to a wage-and-price controlled village, or it allows economic advances beyond immediate and legitimate sumptuary needs. If the former, poverty becomes a permanent institution. Economic growth, raising the general standard of living, is severely impeded, if not prevented outright.
Medieval sumptuary laws were tossed aside, not as a result of one cause alone, but a combination of factors. For example, the churches of the Reformation remained strongly committed to late medieval sumptuary laws until they became manifestly impractical, riddled with inconsistencies, and, therefore, injustice. Like all wage and price control systems they failed in the application. Human action is so complex that casuistry becomes impossibly, ridiculously complicated.
The twentieth century saw them return with a vengeance. Communist nations practised a rigorous system of wage and price controls--with the same object in view, namely, economic justice for all. They failed terribly and comprehensively. Whilst the propaganda machine in the Soviet Union declared that bad weather caused bad wheat harvests, the regularity of bad weather stretching out over sixty years mocked the evil fools in the Kremlin.
Fabian socialism sought to achieve the same end, without bloody revolution. Redistributive taxation systems--almost universal in the West--are a further application of medieval sumptuary laws, albeit thoroughly secular. Like the medieval version, they are doomed to failure. Like medieval laws they have been inevitably inconsistent in application, impossible to administer fairly, and therefore unjust. But the closeness in ideology to medieval wage and price controls can be seen in the similar appeals employed: the rejection and hatred of the exploiter, of the filthy rich, of the avaricious, and of the greedy. Such appeals and ad hominem arguments echo the simplistic medieval mind, secularisation notwithstanding.
What then of sins like greed and avarice? Are they really evils, condemned by Scripture? Of course. But not all sins are crimes--in fact, far from it. The vast majority are not. Many sins are not to be subject to human administrations or rules or punishments. All sins of illicit motive fall into this category. A man or a woman may look with lust upon another--which is evil--but to make it a crime would be to destroy human society under the most repressive regime imaginable. Covetousness and envy provide further examples.
The Christian Church made a grave mistake with respect to sumptuary laws. Let's not repeat it. It is the fool who will not learn from the blows Providence has delivered to our backs. And let's not get sucked in by the false moralising of the secular socialists about greed, exploitation, and usury, smeared over with a patina of distorted and misappropriated Christian doctrines about care of the poor and love of one's neighbour.
Those who do not learn from history's legacy are doomed to repeat it.
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