Wow! Andrew Sullivan literally echoes my point that I made a few weeks ago here:
I said:“I’m trying to help the supporters of free markets. If the foundation of their ideology is weak, we all risk sliding into an alternative social order. If you can’t demonstrate that your system of belief is superior you only have yourself to blame if the assortment of Commies will have a stronger case (and public opinion) on their side. That is a major reason I support a stronger regulatory environment – not because I’m anti-business or anti-capitalist – but because I want to protect market participants from inadequate behavior that can discredit their philosophy and expose them and eventually the public to a harmful outcome.”
And here’s what he says:
“Which is why many leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, conservatives as well as liberals, attached a safety net to such an unsafe, bewildering, constantly shifting web of human demand and supply. They did so in part for humane reasons – but also because they realized that unless capitalism red in tooth and claw were complemented by some collective cushioning, it would soon fall prey to more revolutionary movements. The safety net was created to save capitalism from itself, not to attack capitalism.”
The two concepts are usually seen in complete opposition in our political discourse. The more capitalism and wealth, the familiar argument goes, the better able we are to do without a safety net for the poor, elderly, sick and young. And that’s true so far as it goes. What it doesn’t get at is that the forces that free market capitalism unleashes are precisely the forces that undermine traditional forms of community and family that once served as a traditional safety net, free from government control. In the West, it happened slowly – with the welfare state emerging in 19th century Germany and spreading elsewhere, as individuals uprooted themselves from their home towns and forged new careers, lives and families in the big cities, with all the broken homes, deserted villages, and bewildered families they left behind. But in South Korea, the shift has been so sudden and so incomplete…
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Left with Balls 