Source: Law & Liberty
by Nathan Smith
“Economists have an old habit of assuming that people are strictly selfish and rational, maximizing their ‘utility.’ In theory, everyone is ‘Max U,’ as Deirdre McCloskey mockingly puts it. The assumption can be useful — people often do act selfishly, and belief in market efficiency sometimes clarifies moral choices — but it is false as a generalization. Virtue and capitalism need each other, and have long quietly collaborated to improve the human condition. That truth is kept quiet, ironically, by economists themselves. They understand capitalism better than most, and generally defend it, but Max U is a moral blind spot that causes them to underrate capitalism ethically, and teach others to do so. With friends like these, capitalism hardly needs enemies.” (10/28/25)