THE AUTHOR CERTAINLY DOESN'T:

M. Stanton Evans once said, in defense of free markets: "It all depends on how prosperous you want to be." Prosperity, most of us would agree, is generally a good thing. The Western World has been quite good at it, although prosperity has often required that we compromise on the important things that got us prosperity in the first place. An "economy" meant in Greek and Roman terms (and Hebrew as well) the proper management of a household, which required the close cooperation of a husband and wife, and usually members of the extended family. To survive and prosper, our ancestors had to grow things, make things, and fix things. This is still the rule of an ordered economy, and we must recapture its moral center in order to work our way back from the present distress. "The economy," as we anthropomorphize it, is, of course, much more complicated than the trinity of grow, make, and fix. But just as central to a properly managed household as the trinity is work. In fact, there can be no meaningful economic activity without respect for work. From long before Xenophon's Oeconomicus the ancients revered work as man's purpose; Plato went so far as to equate justice with doing one's own work and tending to one's own business. Interpreting Plato nearly twenty-five centuries later, Irving Babbitt remarked that the only true freedom is the freedom to work. Among the Romans, Plutarch describes the elder Cato as dedicated to the work of his farm, the work of teaching his children and writing treatises on many aspects of agricultural life, the work of the law in helping neighbors, and the work of politics and war in service to the res publica; such was Cato's definition of Roman virtue. The poet Vergil used the term labor to represent the dignity of work, without which the mission of Rome would have little to offer the republic or the world.

Tweet   @brothersjudd