Luther begins by chastising merchants as prone to the inevitable sin of greed, but nevertheless sees its need:
<It is not to be denied that buying and selling are necessary. They cannot be dispensed with and can be practiced in a Christian manner, especially when the articles of trade serve a necessary and honourable purpose. For in this wise even the patriarchs bought and sold cattle, wool, grain, butter, milk, and other goods. These are gifts of God, which He bestows out of the earth and distributes among men.https://www.truecovenanter.com/truelutheran/luther_trade_and_usury.phtmlThus he qualifies trade, which where it serves need and honour, is a blessing, but as he continues, it becomes unnecessary where it gives license to trade of "foreign" luxuries, in particular (which he describes as having "no useful purpose"), which transfer Germany's gold and silver out of the country; by the Frankfurt fair (e.g. an international marketplace) which Luther describes as:
<Frankfurt is the golden and silver hole through which everything that springs and grows, is minted or coined here, flows out of Germany.https://www.truecovenanter.com/truelutheran/luther_trade_and_usury.phtmlAnd so he has a preliminary concern with the wealth of his nation, in a proto-Mercantilist sense of balancing trade. He continues that if this market was ended, then the people would no longer be robbed by usury, either. However, he submits to the market, saying "we Germans must remain Germans"; which is to say, in their habits of vice; as he later writes, concerns "drinking and dancing".
The next part deals with "unrighteous prices", which as he writes, begins in the common motto: "I shall sell my wares as dear as I can." We read in Ibn Khaldun (1377) that the merchant's method is to 'buy low and sell high,' and so as a matter of common sense, this is his profit. Luther sees that merchandising is by nature sinful in its greedy formulations, and further, he writes this about it:
<On this basis trade can be nothing else than robbing and stealing other people's property.Post too long. Click here to view the full text.