In a web exclusive preview to the latest issue of Renewing Minds, a new journal of Christian thought from Union University, Jordan Ballor considers the future of free enterprise:
That the United States has been blessed with great prosperity is beyond argument. Even critics of the American system of government and economy admit that the system of free enterprise has been unmatched in its ability to generate wealth. As Hunter Baker notes, this reality has occasioned a shift in the polemic against free enterprise. Pointing to John Kenneth Galbraith’s argument in The Affluent Society, which “implicitly conceded that earlier critics of the free economy had been wrong in their repeated assertions that competitive capitalism failed to yield broad benefits to the public,” Baker observes that “critics of the free market now argue more on the basis of inequality and relative deprivation instead of on the basis of absolute deprivation.”
Where the fairness of the unequal outcomes characteristic of market economies can no longer be assumed, the burden of proof shifts to those who would defend the merits of free enterprise.
