Many business transactions and employment contracts are wrongfully exploitative despite being consensual and beneficial to both parties, compared with a nontransaction baseline. This form of exploitation can present governments with a dilemma. Legally permitting exploitation may send the message that the public condones it. In some economic conditions, coercively enforced antiexploitation law may harm the people it is intended to help. Under these conditions, a way out of the dilemma is to enact laws with provisions that lack coercive enforcement. Noncoercive law would convey the state’s condemnation of wrongful exploitation without risking the harmful effects of coercively enforced law. It would also give firms and their agents a way of explaining nonexploitative pricing decisions to investors, and it may help give precise content to the moral duty to set prices and wages fairly. Governments should thus consider noncoercive law a viable component of their responses to exploitation.

This article describes the development of the moral economy of merit among the fishermen and rural poor of Dalai Village, Magtaal soum, Mongolia. In 1971, the historian E. P. Thompson used the term “moral economy” to describe a popular consensus on what was considered right and wrong in economic behavior, arguing that its provocation motivated the eighteenth-century English poor to engage in crowd-based political action. In contemporary, post-socialist eastern Mongolia, the rural poor have constructed a pervasive local discourse on what is considered legitimate (“merit-making” or buyantai) versus what is illegitimate in economic behavior that morally-condones their illegal wildlife procurement, selling, and smuggling activities. The political contexts of these case studies are compared in order to detail a similar political-economic progression: (1) the recent market liberalization of the commons, sparking moral outrage amongst those classes newly disadvantaged through this shift to the market; and (2) the formation of an anti-profiteering moral discourse among these classes, designed to limit the ability of others to economically capitalize off of these circumstances. Comparing the case studies, the moral economy is manifested as exchange practices involving commons-marked goods that distribute their benefits among the participants, envisioned as thereby promoting group wellbeing rather than the uneven accumulation by individuals.

Since St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the first scholastics to analyze the idea of a “just price,” economists, economic historians and philosophers interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the market have focused on Aquinas’s writings. One group insists that Aquinas defined the just price as the payment needed to cover sellers’ labor and material costs. A second camp vehemently counters that Aquinas’s just price is simply the going market price. We argue that neither of these views is correct. The Thomistic just price is the price that would be agreed to by a just person as part of an exchange. This “just person price” takes into account the well-being of the individual transactors and the good of the entire community. Such a price reduces neither to the cost-covering price nor to the market exchange price. A Thomistic concept of the just person price deserves to be reconsidered, especially because a Thomistic approach offers some useful ways to deal with issues quite differently from the popular neoclassical approach directed toward arriving at a socially optimal market price.