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5 Thoughts For Today

5. Is there anyone who actually hates trees?

4. On the other hand, whatever benefits may accord from commoditizing literally everything, the unfettered exchange of goods and services via contract is not necessarily in accord with the common good.

3. There are real cases to made on both "sides" for a robust articulation of what Professor Cole Williams calls "economic self-determination." The Right absolutizes the self, to the exclusion of the whole; the Left obliterates the self for the sake of the whole.

2. We do not have a healthy economic ecosystem, for two reasons: 1. We have believed that people are mere economic instruments; and 2. We have degraded and stifled the moral intuitions of those same people, in pursuit of merely economic and material ends. In short, we lack the virtue to create wealth in sustainable, humane, and purposeful ways.

1. The "common good" is the sum of all conditions necessary for every person to reach the end for which they have been made. A purely materialistic end, pursued via either capitalism or socialism, degrades the dignity of the human person.

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