Monday, July 24, 2006
Posted by:
Michael Medved
at
6:17 AM
The other day I posted a few thoughts under the heading “Little Gifts of the Free Market” that began with a ringing declaration: “If left to function naturally with a minimum of interference, the free -market system and the profit motive will insure ongoing improvements in living standards and affordability.”
Unbeknownst to me, an economist at the University of Chicago had just published an ambitious 616-page book that makes much the same point with vastly greater evidentiary backing. Deirdre N. McCloskey (there’s a fine Irish name, to be sure) argues in “THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES” (University of Chicago Press, $32.50) private property and middle-class attitudes provide consistent blessings to modern society
“Capitalism,” she writes, “has not corrupted our souls. It has improved them.”
In a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal, British banker and philosopher Matt Ridley, writes that “Ms. McCloskey is not arguing that markets are necessary, least-worst evils and that greed is good merely because it works…. Ms. McCloskey wants to make the case that the rest of the virtues-- in her accounting, hope, faith, love, justice, courage and temperance, as well as prudence – also matter, and that capitalism encourages them all. A businessman is motivated as much by emotion, sentiment and the transcendent as anybody else.”
I eagerly await the opportunity to digest this book in its entirety – feeling gratified that it seems to echo some of the arguments in a key chapter in my own most recent book, RIGHT TURNS. Among the 35 life lessons I trace in that tome is one that declares: “Business Isn’t Exploitative- It’s Heroic.” In the course of that chapter, I specifically and passionately praise…. “the Bourgeois Virtues,” which have been subjected to considerable calumny and every sort of intellectual assault, while deserving as many defenders as possible. Deirdre N. McCloskey has, apparently, made a major contribution in that effort.
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Friday, May 16 2008
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