Capitalism - defined

Well, not really. Jonah Goldberg responding to a critic of his support of capitalism:

Third, I agree that capitalism is flawed and that it doesn’t provide us with a sense of meaning. However, I don’t think that is it’s flaw. I don’t want the government to provide me with meaning. I don’t want to live in a society where politics is the chief provider of “meaning” either. Some may recall, I wrote a whole book touching on the problems with politics of “meaning.”

Fourth, I don’t believe that capitalism makes people irrelevant. Democratic free market systems respect individuals far, far, far more than systems which reject both democracy and free markets. Explicitly anti-capitalist systems treat the individual with barbaric indifference. In America, we lionize the individual. And, in our system, and those like it, the government is not openly hostile to the better and more authentic sources of meaning – faith, friends, neighborhoods, culture, civil society etc. Of course, sometimes the state oversteps its bounds, makes mistakes, gets in bed with business, whatever. But these are not the fulfillments of free market ideology. Most often they are violations of it.