Turmoil in Washington Spawns Debate Over Capitalism

One of the most useful articles I have seen in a long time appeared in Sunday's Washington Post.  Using the sequestration, debt ceiling, and government-closing threats as a backdrop the author, Steven Pearlstein, suggests there may be something wrong with capitalism at its root.  The beginning of the article reads almost like a screed on the views of every important alleged capitalist thinker since Adam Smith.  The article, however, goes on to question the morality of a system which seems bent on allowing the wealthy to amass an ever greater percentage of the nation's wealth.  An important statement appears near the end of this opinion piece:

In our current debate over capitalism, too much attention is focused on whether, how or how much to redistribute the incomes that markets have produced, with too little focus on the institutional arrangements that determine how that income is divided up in the first place.

I have rarely, if ever, seen anything like this in the Post before and certainly never in The New York Times business pages.  It shows a new openness to questioning the profit system, without the attendant hysterical insistence that the only alternative to the profit system is communism or state socialism.  As I have said before, it happens to be my view that a mixed economy is what we really have in this country.  The question now before us is What kind of a mixed economy should we have?  What should be the basis of such an economy?  What, in fact, is the fairest way to apportion the benefits of  the tremendous natural resources the United States possesses?

"Is Capitalism Moral?"