This weekend, I caught a BBC radio program on the meltdown in “The City”--London’s financial district. The program quoted many young Brit bankers who said morality was a barrier to personal success in The City. Better to have the sociopath gene if one wants to become a billionaire.
What we are hearing and seeing, in other words, is a failure of morality, not of capitalism.
J. K. Galbraith wrote that conservatives NEVER quote the statements of Adam Smith that directly deny the existence of the Free Market Fairy and the Forbes ninny is another one. He asks:
How do we get back to the old Adam Smith/Benjamin Franklin idea of free enterprise based on a moral foundation?
Can you imagine someone as sophisticated as Smith ascribing morality to capitalism?
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