THE POLITICS OF CAPITALISM

David Brooks has written another FAIL column and has deservedly gotten some well-reasoned and well-deserved criticism.  This part is profoundly ignorant:

The first citizens of this country erected institutions to protect themselves from their own shortcomings. We’re familiar with some of them: the system of checks and balances, the Senate, etc. More important, they believed, was public spiritedness — a system of habits and attitudes that would check egotism and self-indulgence.

Egotism is THE central assumption of the conservative approach both to economics and morality. The myth of the Free Market Fairy has been the pillar of conservative thinking for decades.