The-Morality-of-Capitalism-PDF

often resented by entrenched elites. As they see the world, minoritiesbecome uppity and the lower classes no longer knowtheir place. More shocking, from their perspective, is that underfree-market capitalism women assert their own worth. Status isundermined. People create relationships based on choice andconsent, rather than birth or status. 21 The conservative hatred offree-market capitalism, which was very neatly summarized andincorporated by Marx into his writings, reflects anger at suchchange and often anger at the loss of privilege. Leo Melamed (theChairman Emeritus of the CME Group [formerly the ChicagoMercantile Exchange] whose own life story of escaping fromthe Gestapo and the KGB and going on to revolutionize worldfinance is a story of courage and vision), drew on his experiencewhen he said that “in Chicago’s financial markets it is not whatyou are—your personal pedigree, your family origin, your physicalinfirmities, your gender—but your ability to determine whatthe customer wants and where the market is headed. Little elsematters.” 22 Embracing free-market capitalism means embracingthe freedom to change, to innovate, to invent. It means accommodatingchange and respecting the freedom of others to do asthey please with what is theirs. It means making place for newtechnologies, new scientific theories, new forms of art, and newidentities and new relationships. It means embracing the freedomto create wealth, which is the only means to the elimination ofpoverty. (Wealth has causes, but poverty does not; poverty iswhat results if wealth production does not take place, whereaswealth is not what results if poverty production does not takeplace.) 23 It means celebrating human liberation and realizinghuman potential.The authors whose essays are presented here come from avariety of countries and cultures and from a variety of callingsand intellectual disciplines. Each offers an appreciation of howfree-market exchanges are rooted in morality and reinforce moralbehavior. The selection includes a mix of essays, some quite short,some longer, some quite accessible, some more academic. It includestwo essays that have not previously appeared in English andwere translated from Chinese and Russian for this collection. Itincludes contributions by two Nobel Prize winners, one a novelist10