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The National Interest
The Beginning of Economic Wisdom
by Michael Novak
. . . Today's anti-capitalists are mostly not self-described communists or socialists; they declare themselves to be environmentalists, or vibrate against globalization without particular labels for themselves. The trouble with the greens is that, by the end of the summer, they turn out to be reds. Just as in the bad old days, they want the state to command private businesses. And the trouble with anti-globalizers is that those living in the most forlorn parts of the world not yet included in the global system remain today the most desperately poor, ill and likely to die young. As before, envy and the undifferentiated impulse to leveling are at work.
The deeper problem seems to be that neither democracy nor capitalism provides much in the way of pure, idealized outcomes, romance, poetry or myth. Both are systems for adults who have crossed what Joseph Conrad called "the shadow line" that separates illusion and fantasy from a sense of limits and reality. While Professor Lindblom seeks a reasonable idealism, struggling admirably to quell his own romantic tendencies, it is Professor Sowell who better exemplifies the sense of constraints that the ancients used to call phronesis ("practical wisdom" or, in some translations, "prudence").
Sowell's prudence is the habit of mind better suited to democracy and capitalism. Considerably less enamored of pretty ideals, more attentive to the multiple ways in which things can go wrong in human affairs, men and women of practical wisdom rejoice in the limited good effects that, despite everything, may actually be achieved. They count as blessings those imperfect beauties that utopians reject as flawed. What can we do when faced with such a tension except once again to recall Wallace Stevens, who observed in verse: "Our paradise is the imperfect."