Whatever its flaws, capitalism is an incredible mechanism for giving people what they want. Even the more left-wing among us have to admit that when it comes to creating wealth, capitalism is hard to beat. Every TV show, car, restaurant, toothpaste, and diaper comes in countless different brands at countless different price ranges, reaching a wider market than ever before. Whatever your tastes or desires, the market has created a product to meet them. Or at least it's trying.
The problem is that people don't always want what's good for them. That's why the same mechanism that has banished hunger in most of the developed world and allowed regular people to travel from New York to California in just a few hours, has also blessed us with reality TV, twinkies, and cocaine.
And it's also why now, more than ever, virtue is required by market participants. I think that some people, heirs to the Enlightenment, believe self-interest is enough to make the economy function: people will figure out what's good and bad for them, and they'll adjust their decisions accordingly. There's no need for culture - or worse, government - to curtail or channel these desires.
But as we all know from our own attempts to kick our bad habits, and also in watching the cycles of self-destruction that people around us sometimes engage in, humans don't always learn from their mistakes, and they don't always act to their own benefit. Sometimes, it's precisely the opposite.
The bottom line is this: if capitalism is going to give us what we want, then we better want the right things. Otherwise, the economy will only be providing us with the means of our own self-destruction.
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