Imbecilia

I was somewhat surprised to find this article at MarketWatch, a popular online stock market site.

Entitled “Capitalism is killing our morals, our future”, it is written by one Paul Farrell, and is essentially a paen to Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, who thinks that the thing that is killing our society is the market economy. It is an article that is positively besotted with polyunsaturated stupid, not only in what it affirmatively claims, without any scientific evidence at all, but in what it omits, which, principally, includes any reference to the great shortcomings of alternative forms of economic organization. Perhaps the most enormous howler in the article is the total failure to see how the nefarious alliances between big corporations, banks and government represent, not the epitome, but the death, of genuine free enterprise.

Farrell is a peddler of psychobabble dressed up as financial and economic analysis (check out this very pointed critique), and Sandel (a tenured Harvard professor) is an advocate of communitarianism, perpetually in search of a non-secular basis for morality which, somehow, always seems neatly to coincide with garden variety progressivism and its insistence on collective (read “statist”) control (David Gordon deals with Sandel handily, in this article).

Submitted here as further evidence that high-priced university instruction is increasingly an exercise in fraud (why isn’t Sandel, who is critical of the market economy’s tendency to put a price on everything, dispensing his wisdom, free of charge, from a bench in some public park?)