“gawd you’re deep. Ouvre?”
Naw. I just know a few foreign words.
“Anyway, look, capitalism is just another “ism.” “
Fair enough, as will all that follows it.
Capitalism is the economic ordering of social life that corresponds to the political ordering of Liberty. Michael Novak wrote cogently about the third leg of this tripod, a Pluralistic cultural-moral sphere. Over the years, I have come to appreciate his position, and to think of these three legs—Capitalism, Libety, Pluralism—as delimiting American exceptionalism.
I read Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead in my teens and was profoundly influenced by them. I remember feeling swelled up with the sensation of a Francisco D’Ancona or Howard Roarke, even as I joined the sexual revolution, decried my evil, racist country and bought into every communist idea the zeitgeist was pedaling. The decades, life, etc. have taught me the dual folly of my youth.
“Glad to trade ideas with you. I never read long posts — yours was an exception. Well done. The articulation of the argument about who pays for and who benefits from education was brilliant and needful.”
It’s been a pleasure dialoging with you. Thanks for the compliment.
I see myself more as Ragnar Daneskjold these days.
OK, without recanting the more mysterious view of economics that I posted, I understand that it can be useful, oh, I suppose it's necessary, to expound the concept and offer an intellectual rationale for it. But that process is a derivative of the thing itself, a snapshot, a static representation. I guess like the Bible is -- it's a static articulation of The Living Word. And as we know, subject, in its limited nature, to infinite interpretations and misunderstandings.
But the real thing is alive, has a reliable, unchanging character, but is ultimately never fully grasped rationally.