Patrick Deneen offers another lifetime's worth of insight in a single post:

What is important, then, is not whether guvment is involved - it is finally to what end. And our current end is growth and expansion of the modern project of the human mastery of nature. When we debate over guvment involvement in the market, we obscure the nature of the debate - whether this is the appropriate or sole goal of a society. I would submit that it is a deeply flawed goal - sharing the view of Aristotle that a proper economy is cognizant of limits to moneymaking in the name of fundamental human goods of which prosperity is a part, but only a part.

Those goods include healthy and stable communities which are both formed by culture and in which cultures are maintained and preserved; a sound culture that inculcates central human virtues and that is ably passed on from one generation to the next; a culture that makes and keeps good families; a culture that inculcates the very virtues that will be necessary for a good, humane, and moral economy (one that avoids the abuses that we have recently seen in our financial markets); a culture that strongly emphasizes a sense of gratitude and obligation between generations; a culture that encourages stewardship, conservation and fidelity; and perhaps above all, a culture that reins in and chastens our eternal temptation toward Promethean or sinful self-aggrandizement, that teaches and enforces limits, that calls to our mind our flaws, and that does not allow us to lose sight of our fundamental condition of being dependent upon one another. A further good is our ability to act in concert with one another to achieve and maintain such a culture and polity - citizenship as shared and mutual governance, which goes far beyond our current conception of citizenship as suffrage.


Deneen also demonstrates how Americans' love-affair with untethered "Liberty!" often has unintended consequences. He then reminds us that another alternative tradition exists, manifest broadly in the West, including Aristotle and Aquinas, Burke and Chesterton, and in America, including the Antifederalists, Hawthorne and Melville, Orestes Brownson, Henry Adams, Jonathan Edwards, Santayana and Royce, the Southern Agrarians, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Wendell Berry.

Please read the whole thing here.