If you are at all familiar with the history of economics, you are likely aware of Adam Smith.  He is most famous for his Wealth of Nations (or An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nation), an Enlightenment era document in which he proposed the idea of an entirely open economic market, one that fosters absolute free trade and rejects any governmental intervention in the marketplace.  For Smith, the market works best when all of its participants are pursuing their self-interest for profit.  When everyone is doing so, Smith argues, the whole (society) will benefit.

     How will this happen?  It is the work of an "invisible hand," the law of exchange, driven by supply and demand, and nothing more.  Crucially, there is no moral point:  it's all about matching supply and demand.  That's all.

     Why does Smith's system find such favor in the West today?  Simply, it has produced immense prosperity in most of the nations in which it has been used.  True enough.  But only if one elevates economic prosperity as the highest value can Smith's system be called moral.  We are more than economic and material beings.  Furthermore, not everyone will prosper in the same way:  there will be haves and there will be have nots.  Monopolies will occur, industries will be destroyed, many lives shattered.

     And when this happens, the market doesn't care:  as a banker at Goldman Sachs remarked in a recent interview, such "disaster" is no more than the "shifting of capital" to a better position.  Again, there is no moral point other than the meeting of supply and demand.  It's very Darwinian:  survival of the fittest.

     So why do many of us reject Darwinism and yet embrace the laissez-faire marketplace?  Do we really want to base our economic activities on the notion of the survival of the fittest?  Do we treasure our material fullness more than the common good?

     It's exceeding difficult to be black and white in a gray world.