From Steven Malanga at the Manhattan Institute, in City Journal, their captive magazine:
What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don’t understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is “not to be disturbed in his toil,” as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures, or bail out old ones. They would find what Tocqueville described as the “fatal circle” of materialism—the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.
The article, ironically, misses what Touqueville emphasized, that the virtues that keep capitalism from destroying itself in greed, dishonesty, shabby accounting, fraud, rent-seeking, the corruption of regulators, etc. are inculcated through civic participation in voluntary organizations. These include religious organizations and private schools, but also include over 1,000,000 other nonprofits, providing almost any citizen , even one who works in a cubicle for a loan brokerage firm, with a chance to exercise talents and get active on behalf of the public good.
Malanga himself lays the blame on French artists in the 19th century, hippies in the 60s, Catholic Charities, and the liberals. But the rot is deep enough to include, certainly, the business schools and think tanks, for God's sake. Unless we hold the mirror up to nature, as Horace said, and turn it to see our own faces, these sermonettes on civic morality are vicious in themselves and examples of the very moral blindness and vanity they seek to cure. Not that I am in any position to point a finger at Malanga, or Manhattan Institute for that matter. In my days in Wealth Bondage, between morality enhancement sessions with private clients, I too wrote op eds in a City Journal we owned as way to get the word out deploring the corruption of the times. I even won a prize which I have right here in my cubicle. We are all somebody's stooge.
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