In the Boston Review Before Greed Americans Didn’t Always Yearn for Riches
Not only was great wealth an aberration in Lincoln’s time, but even the idea that the accumulation of great riches was the point of a working life seemed foreign. Whereas today the most well-off frequently argue that riches are the reward of hard work, in the Civil War era, the reward was a “competency,” what the late historian Alan Dawley described as the ability to support a family and have enough in reserve to sustain it through hard times at an accustomed level of prosperity.
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The idea of having enough frequently trumped the ambition for endless accumulation.
At Mercatornet What money can’t buy
Markets are expanding into spheres of life where they do not belong and we are drifting from participation in a market economy to immersion in a market society. A market economy is a tool for organizing productive activity. But a market society is based on an ideological distortion of the law of supply and demands. He offers scores of innovative ways that investors are monetizing social life, not just material goods, in ways that seem unfair or degrading, both small and big.Posted by Jill Fallon at March 2, 2013 5:29 PM | Permalink
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And in reducing everything to cost-benefit analysis and in refusing to accept that some things have an intrinsic value, utilitarianism is one of the great enemies of a truly human society.