In its March / April issue, The American Interest published excerpts from a John Templeton Foundation event in London that asked the question “Does the free market corrode moral character?” to some leading scholars (more on who at the bottom):

It is worth reading (unfortunately the link is behind a subscription wall) in its entirety but here are a few of my highlights:

John Gray: All humanly acceptable economic systems make use of human motives that are morally questionable.
Classical economics and the liberal theory from which it comes have always understood … economic that systems must harness the strongest human impulses, not merely the most noble ones.

Stephanie Flanders: Out of the crooked timber of humanity , as Kant put it, nothing straight can be built.

Bernard-Henri Levy (with the best quotes of course): When the anti-globalization movement claims that market capitalism brings misery, it is just false. These are provincial people, seeing the world only from the Western point of view. They do not go to the places where the market has not yet introduced its principles and its laws and see that these are the places where misery is the deepest.

Jagdish Bhagwati (in response to Flanders asking “So you reject the Marxist idea that we are what we produce or consume”: I feel completely blame-free about buying cheap goods from the poor countries; indeed, I feel virtuous about it instead.

Bernard-Henri Levy: This advice, that we accept not just the inevitability of imperfection but also its benefits, is very important. Of course Adam Smith did not make the free market into an idol; no serious theoretician of economics ever did that. The proper way to think about democracy, is that both are ideals we strive for but can never reach. It’s a continual process, without end, which means that just as it is not such a bad system, it of course cannot be completely good. From Adam Smith to David Ricardo to Benjamin Constant to Karl Mark there has always been this double bind. The system is not so bad; it enables civilization by providing a way to mediate the normal and natural brutality of competition for scarce resources. But it always seems to teeter at the edge of an abyss.

One of the key issues concerning the deep questioning of capitalism today seems to have much to do with the unrealistic utopian expectations Levy talks of. Ridding us of business cycles, achieving total equity, eradicating risk etc.; Capitalism cannot be expected to do any, never mind all of these things. The fact that the world is so economically intertwined will hopefully allow the world to get through this economic pain peacefully which (alongside a peaceful rise of China) is a great reason to celebrate the scrappy unpredictable system which to paraphrase Winston Churchill is “the worst form of economic governing except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”.
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John Gray is professor emeritus at the London School of Economics. Among his recent books are False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.
Jagdish Bhagwati, University Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a leading economist and the author of In Defense of Globalization.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, has written more than thirty books, including the New York Times bestseller American Vertigo and, most recently, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism.
Stephanie Flanders has been a writer and columnist at the Financial Times and an adviser to U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. Since 2002, she has been at the BBC, where she is now economics editor.

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