I’ll go whole hog here. We need a cleaned-up capitalism, not a weary,
sighing, acceptance-of-man’s-fallen-nature capitalism.
Weary sighing acceptance? Try the eager jubilant over being given free reign to exploit man's fallen nature capitalism.
Reagan "conservatives" preached that the Reagan tax cuts and free-trade would usher in a period of investment at home, in a word, that if you just let people have more of their own money they'd know what to do with it and they would do the right thing.
They didn't.
"Conservatives" exported our jobs and invested abroad, creating middle classes in poor countries where there were none before, at the expense of the middle class at home. They drove the opening to China, enriched it and created a monster which now robs us blind and threatens world peace. The libertarians have sold China the rope the communists hope to hang us with.
If Republicans and conservatives had properly understood human nature they wouldn't have made this mistake. The doctrinaire among them showed themselves to be liberals, not conservatives, possessed of a foolish optimism based on the idea that people are basically good. They are not. People do what's best for number one, as they always have. Screw thy neighbor, and thy country if necessary. Are we not a nation of immigrants?
Only conservatism with its roots in the transcendent moral order has been able to curb this false individualism and mistaken enthusiasm. Both were routinely attacked in church in former days, but nobody seems to go there anymore, and when they do go the preacher turns out to have joined the wrong side.
The "conservative" rubes out there still believe this stupid myth of libertarianism, while the billionaire class of both parties which got rich off it only hopes they continue to do so.
They care about nothing but themselves and their right to privacy, the penumbra of our collective deviancy.
