UK’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: Has Europe Lost Its Soul to the Markets?

Spot on. Sacks is speaking of Europe but he could very well be speaking of the United States.

From Chief Rabbi Sacks’ website:

The first financial instruments of modern capitalism were developed by 14th-century banks in Christian Florence, Pisa, Genoa and Venice. Max Weber traced the connections between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Michael Novak has done likewise for Catholicism. Jews, numbering one fifth of one per cent of the population of the world, have won more than 30 per cent of Nobel Prizes in economics. When I asked the developmental economist Jeffrey Sachs what drove him in his work, he replied without hesitation,tikkun olam, the Jewish imperative of “healing a fractured world”. The birth of the modern economy is inseparable from its Judeo-Christian roots.

But this is not a stable equilibrium. Capitalism is a sustained process of creative destruction. The market undermines the very values that gave rise to it in the first place. The consumer culture is profoundly antithetical to human dignity. It inflames desire, undermines happiness, weakens the capacity to defer instinctual gratification and blinds us to the vital distinction between the price of things and their value.

Instead of seeing the system as Adam Smith did, as a means of directing self-interest to the common good, it can become a means of empowering self-interest to the detriment of the common good. Instead of the market being framed by moral principles, it comes to substitute for moral principle. If you can buy it, negotiate it, earn it and afford it, then you are entitled to it — as the advertisers say — because you’re worth it. The market ceases to be merely a system and becomes an ideology in its own right.

Read and reflect on the whole thing.