This powerful and thoroughly documented book overturns many long-held beliefs about Adam Smith. Spencer Pack demonstrates that contrary to popular myth, Adam Smith was not a dogmatic defender of laissez-faire capitalism and neither was he in favour of regressive taxation. The book stresses for the first time the many qualms and problems - indeed the profound ambiguity - which Adam Smith felt toward the capitalist system.
This study aims to demonstrate that Adam Smith was neither a dogmatic defender of laissez-faire capitalism, nor of regressive taxation. On the contrary, Smith's views could be ambigious - he advocated many activities for the capitalist state and was in favour of mildly progressive taxation.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning economics journalist explains how America’s capitalist system is broken and how it can be repaired. With a new introduction by the author Thirty years ago, “greed is good” and “maximizing shareholder value” became the new mantras woven into the fabric of our economy, politics, and business culture. Free market capitalism has lifted more than a billion people from poverty around the world. But in the United States, most of its benefits have been captured by the richest ten percent, and it has provided justification for squeezing workers, cheating customers, avoiding taxes, and leaving communities in the lurch. As a result, Americans are losing faith in the free market—and the democratic institutions that support it. In Moral Capitalism, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Steven Pearlstein chronicles our descent and challenges the theories being taught in business schools and exercised in boardrooms nationwide. Missing from our current model are vital elements recognized long ago by Adam Smith and Charles Darwin—the mutual trust and cooperation necessary for capitalism to survive and thrive. Pearlstein shows how rising inequality of incomes and opportunity have eroded that social capital, and how restoring fairness need not come at the expense of economic growth. He concludes with bold steps to create a shared prosperity and revive our faith in American capitalism. Previously published as Can American Capitalism Survive? Praise for Moral Capitalism “If anyone can save capitalism from the capitalists, it’s Steven Pearlstein. This lucid, brilliant book refuses to abandon capitalism to those who believe morality and justice irrelevant to an economic system.” —Ezra Klein, founder and editor-at-large, Vox “This book delivers a trenchant critique of the ravages of inequality and a passionate cry for greater balance. [A] powerful, idealistic book.” —The Washington Post
Western civilization fashioned a capitalism that created a worldwide economic cornucopia and higher standards of living than any other system, yet its legitimacy is often questioned by its beneficiaries. Boston University Emeritus Professor Angelo M. Codevilla, proclaims Donald Devine’s The Enduring Tension between Capitalism and the Moral Order, “the best answer to this question since Adam Smith’s. Like Smith, Devine shows the mutually sustaining nature of morality and economic freedom, and provides a much-needed clearing away of the confusion with which recent authors have befogged this essential relationship.” Devine begins with Karl Marx setting capitalism’s roots in feudalism and the implications of that traditionalist inheritance, finally transformed by Rousseau’s “Christian heresy,” which turned the vision of heavenly perfection into an impossibly perfect ideal for earthly society. To unravel this capitalist enigma, Devine identifies the roots of the confusion, critiques the rationalized responses, and identifies the remedy—the revival of an historical Lockean pluralism able to fuse a moral scaffolding sufficient to hold the walls and preserve the best of capitalist civilization.
Popular opinion would have us believe that America's free market system is driven by greed and materialism, resulting in gross inequalities of wealth, destruction of the environment, and other social ills. Even proponents of capitalism often refer to the free market as simply a 'lesser evil' whose faults are preferable to those of social democracy or communism. But what if the conventional understanding of capitalism as corrupt and unprincipled is wrong? What if the free market economy actually reinforces Christian values? In Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism, Arthur C. Brooks and Peter Wehner explore how America's system of democratic capitalism both depends upon and cultivates an intricate social web of families, churches, and communities. Far from oppressing and depriving individuals, the free market system uniquely enables Americans to exercise vocation and experience the dignity of self-sufficiency, all while contributing to the common good. The fruits of this system include the alleviation of poverty, better health, and greater access to education than at any other time in human history-but also a more significant prosperity: the flourishing of the human soul.
This book is a concise explanation of capitalism's moral and economic superiority to socialism, including America's current mixed-economy welfare state. This volume offers a focused, essentialized, and condensed argument ideal for the layman who admires capitalism but lacking a succinct, accessible explanation of its moral and economic virtues.
For the first time in history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. Capitalism prevails because it delivers prosperity and meets desires for autonomy. But it also is unstable and morally defective. Surveying the varieties and futures of capitalism, Branko Milanovic offers creative solutions to improve a system that isn’t going anywhere.
Can capitalism have moral foundations? Though this question may seem strange in today's world of vast economic disparities and widespread poverty, discussions originating with the birth of capitalism add a critical perspective to the current debate on the efficacy and morality of capitalist economies. Authors Daniel Halliday and John Thrasher use this question to introduce classical political philosophy as a framework by which to evaluate the ethics of capitalism today. They revisit and reconstruct historical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century defenses of capitalism, as written by key proponents such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. They ask what these early advocates of market order would say about contemporary economies, and argue for the importance of connecting these foundational defenses to discussions of economic systems and the roles they play in economic justice and injustice today. The textbook covers longstanding problems that are as old as the discussion of capitalism itself, such as wage inequality, global trade, and the connection between paid labor and human flourishing. It also addresses new challenges, such as climate change, the welfare state, and competitive consumption, and provides topical global case studies. Additionally, it includes study questions at the end of each chapter and an author-created companion website to help guide classroom discussion.
The world is drifting without a clear plan for its economic development. Communism is dead, but in the wake of Enron and similar scandals, many see capitalism as amoral and too easily abused. A blueprint for progress is needed and Moral Capitalism provides one. Moral Capitalism is based on principles developed by the Caux Round Table, an extraordinary international network of top business executives who believe that business can-and must-weigh both profit and principle. Caux Round Table's global chair, Stephen Young, argues that the ethical standards inherent in capitalism have been compromised by cultural values inimical to capitalism's essentially egalitarian, rational spirit, and distorted by the short-sighted dog-eat-dog doctrines of social Darwinism into what he calls brute capitalism. He demonstrates how the Caux Round Table's Seven General Principles for Business can serve as a blueprint for a new moral capitalism, and explores in detail how, if guided by these principles, capitalism is really the only system with the potential to reduce global poverty and tyranny and address the needs and aspirations of individuals, societies, and nations.
This book adds a crucial focus on morality to the growing literature on the history of capitalism by exploring social and cultural perspectives on the economic order that has dominated the modern world. Taking the study beyond narrow economic confines, it traces the entanglement between moral sentiments and capitalism, examining both moral critiques and moral justifications. Company bankruptcies, systems of taxation, wealth, and the running of stock exchanges were attacked on moral grounds, while ideas of economic justice and the humanization of capitalism loomed large over moral critiques. Many movements, from antislavery to labour campaigns, were inspired by aspirations to improve capitalism and halt the moral decay that was felt to have affected large sections of society. This book questions how moral sentiments are defined and have changed over time, and how these relate to both capitalism and anti-capitalism. Covering a range of different social movements and ethical issues, the 13 chapters present a moral history of capitalism, understood not simply as an economic system but as an order that encompasses all areas of modern life.
