There are an awful lot of good things about capitalism-private property owenership, competition leading to greater efficiency and innovations, personal inititive, the general compatability of capitalism with freedom, reward for risk-taking and insight. And, of course, there are an awful lot of terrible things about capitalism-there’s nothing about capitalism that values the environment or really any shared resources, it encourages people to exploit each other, it encourages useless and even destructive behavior if it makes money.

The perplexing thing is why no one has tried to develop a system that encourages capitalism’s virtues and discourages its flaws. I think perhaps one part of the answer is that capitalism is, sadly, first and foremost an ideology, although I’m not at all sure this is the way Adam Smith envisioned it. Then again, what passes for religion is almost never what was envisioned by the religion’s founder, so maybe it is no surprise. The problem is that to structure a system which would encourage the virtues and discourage the flaws you would need an ideology to determine which were which. As it stands now, capitalism itself is the ideology and it is loosely defined around a holy principle of the free market. This is, of course, absurd on many levels but it presists because it benefits the people at the top, the very people who would be most in a position to change the system.