Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Yuval Levin on capitalism:

"The answer is that the market alone will not create them. Illiberal economic systems are indeed great barriers to decent moral living. But free markets alone are not the source of virtue. They must be accompanied by a larger culture that encourages morality and virtue to flourish. And occasionally there are ways in which totally unfettered capitalism can impair such a culture, and therefore in which capitalism should be gently fettered in the service of a higher end. Libertarians often fail to see this point because their notion of culture and community is informed by a radical individualism that has real trouble dealing with the necessarily common task of educating citizens.

The three great advocates of a free economy at the birth of the capitalist idea — Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton — did not imagine that the market would produce its own morality. On the contrary, they saw it as arising out of a certain moral view of the world (as Younkins does), and answering to the norms of a political community ruling itself through free institutions.

They were informed, above all, by an insight that seems too often lacking in contemporary libertarian circles: an overriding skepticism about the capacities of human beings to perfect themselves and their world. Capitalism as originally understood is truly the least worst form of an economy, and not the road to some utopia. It is this darker and more grave sense of the world, this fundamental conservatism, that separates the classical liberals from the keen post-modern futurists among the friends of capitalism."