Decentralists of the ’30s had a clear-eyed focus on the grip of the giant corporations over our political economy, whose antagonism to our sense of individual and community freedom and fair access to justice is so palpable today. There was a time in the Depression of the 1930s when conservative thought sprang from the dire [...]
Knut Hamsun The modern market economy has never lacked for its literary expositors. From the time the industrial revolution (a term coined in the 1820s in France) first gained notice as a major and permanent development, litterateurs have given it the treatment. From Balzac’s dissection of the new class system of 19th-century Paris [...]
Libertarian futurists such as Tyler Cowen and Brink Lindsey sometimes write as if the point of all our remarkable techno-progress—the victory of capitalism in the form of the creative power of “human capital”—is some combination of the emancipatory hippie spirit of the 1960s with the liberty in the service of individual productivity of Reagan’s 1980s. [...]
Most Americans today, as has been the case for the past 150 years or so, are neither economically nor politically free. They are, instead, servile, prime subjects for abuse and manipulation, because most depend on a wage or a salary. Americans have long mistrusted great power, which they regard as the enemy of freedom. They [...]
Corporate scandals over the last two decades, followed by the crash of the economy in 2008, have brought about widespread skepticism toward America’s corporate leaders. Almost daily there are calls for new legal and regulatory reforms directed at businesses, especially banks and investment firms. Some corporations have even begun to reassess their own business practices. [...]
R.R. Reno, quite an astute conservative public intellectual, claims that those with eyes to see know that the big news these days is the global victory of capitalism. I’m not following Reno in every respect here, but going with what I would say in support of his position. The good news is that productivity has [...]
Solzhenitsyn knew that the materialism that shaped the culture of both capitalist and communist societies was ultimately inhuman because of its denial of spiritual values and because it led to serious environmental degradation. Interview of Joseph Pearce by Annamarie Adkins After the fall of the Berlin Wall, some people predicted that global affairs had reached [...]
‘Mob’ is an interesting word because of its dual meaning. It means not only ‘organized crime’, that is, a small group of men working corporately and criminally in their own self-interest, but it also means a large group of rancorous, disgruntled people rioting for special interests they share in common. This irony is particularly interesting [...]
Eric, Gannon, and Nate Schlueter have graciously asked us to present our arguments on the relationship between capitalism and Christianity. The subtitle is something to the effect of “can a good Christian” embrace “the morality of capitalism.” Whether I should or not, I will interpret this question in my own way and attempt to answer [...]
“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Mitt Romney fell on this Obama quote like an NFL lineman on an end zone fumble during the Super Bowl. And understandably so. Had Obama been channeling Isaac Newton—“If I have seen further than others it is because I am standing [...]
A number of Americans, fancying that the world is governed mainly by economic doctrines and practices, are inclined to think that an era of international good feeling lies before us. I intend to sprinkle some drops of cold water on such hasty hopes. I have no faith in the notion that an abstract “democratic capitalism” [...]