Art and Business:

And faith, I suppose.

Michael Novak died recently. He wrote on democracy, capitalism, and religion. He started out as a student of the left, worked on the George McGovern campaign. Over time he came to the opinion that "the left was wrong about virtually every big issue of our time". Authored The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. 

I take this from the March 28, 2017 issue of Forbes magazine, Fact and Comment by the Editor-In-Chief, Steve Forbes. I encourage you to read the whole piece, but here goes what I think is the essence of his thought...

Novak had no rose-colored view of the system. "I would not want it to be thought that any system is the Kingdom of God on Earth. Capitalism isn't. Democracy isn't." Despite commerce's lowly, pedestrian status, he recognized that free markets enhance humanity by encouraging, without hardly being aware of it, interacting and working with each other in ways that produced prosperity and the opportunity for the previously oppressed to, as Lincoln put it, improve their lot in life. It gave people the chance to develop their particular talents. It encouraged a creativity that would enhance the lives of everyone. It had people looking to the future rather than to just the narrow here and now. Its end products are the opposite of greed, selfishness and miserliness - misers do not found the Microsofts, WalMarts and Apples of the world. 

Our Founders, Novak perceptively noted, based the new American Republic on free-market commerce because such a system attacked a sin even more deadly than hate: envy. "Hatred...is at least visible and universally recognized as evil. Envy seldom operates under its own name; it chooses a lovelier name to hide behind, and it works like a deadly invisible gas. In previous republics, it has set class against class, sections of cities against other sections."

By contrast, in a commercial society, "when persons see that their material conditions are actually improving from year to year...they stop comparing themselves tie their neighbors."

Think about it.