There are those who claim riches are not good. Such views are unbalanced since goods in themselves are neutral and can serve man in many ways.
Saint Thomas Aquinas strikes the balance when he claims that: ‘Riches are good for as much as they serve the use of virtue; and if this measure be exceeded, so that they hinder the practice of virtue, they are no longer to be reckoned as a good but as an evil.’
Yet another moral commentator, Jean de Meun, bluntly affirms: “The soul can be just as thoroughly ruined by excessive poverty as by excessive wealth; both wound with equal severity.” (Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 51)