Work yet to be done...............

     In short, humans were not created to be receivers only, or clients only, but also creators.  God gave them minds and imaginations, as well as courage and a zest for trial and error.  He implanted in them a desire to better their condition, for their families and for the whole of human society.  The creation of wealth is a social task and the supportive efforts of all are necessary to its accomplishment.  It is especially necessary for the poor.  Since we now know that wealth can be created in a sustained and systematic way, then - given the immense suffering of so many poor - economic development has become a moral obligation.  We are obliged to work to shape institutions and systems that permit its flourishing.  The cost, otherwise, is widespread misery, from which so much of the world today, lacking such institutions, unnecessarily suffers.
     Both the traditionalist economic vision and the Socialist economic vision have proved inadequate.  The capacity of capitalist and democratic systems to raise up hundreds of millions of the poor has been abundantly proved.  Such systems to not promise, or deliver, paradise on earth.  They are but instruments of our larger moral and cultural purposes.  But it is precisely the leaders and thinkers of the moral and cultural sectors of the free societies that have been most deficient in grasping the moral and spiritual possibilities these novel systems of political economy have opened before us.  The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment achieved an unprecedented revolution in the human ethos, whose spiritual possibilities have yet to be realized.  It is my hope that moral and cultural leaders, philosophers and poets, theologians and prelates, will awaken from their slumbers, grasp these possibilities, and fashion from them maxims of practical moral guidance, for which so many economic activists are manifestly thirsty.


Michael Novak, This Hemisphere of Liberty