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Originally Posted by armourbearer  A good read in response is an article by W S Reid, Calvin as a critic of capitalism (can't recall the journal), which helps to balance the scales somewhat. Capitalism owes more to the evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest (or in economic terms, the prosperity of the unscrupulous) than to Calvin, in my honest opinion. But I would be thinking of a specific form of economic policy which may not be what others mean by the term "capitalism." |
Rev. Winzer, I can't accept the historical accuracy of your views on capitalist and economic thought. On the contrary, since the time when Darwin's views were accepted by society at large, economic theory has moved away from free market capitalism, while the most prominent, and most remembered, 18th and early-mid 19th century economic thinkers were probably the most capitalistic in history. The theoretical (including moral) underpinnings of modern finance were quite explicitly developed and systematised by Ricardo, Say, Smith, Bastiat and the like well before Darwin. Nor, from what I have seen, do the unscrupulous tend to prosper in the long run any more than the honest, and alternate arrangements of the economy tend to weaken, not strengthen, the relationship between honest effort and reward.