“Economics,” as a discipline, used to be part of a larger discipline, “Political Economy,” and I think it’s lost some perspective in coming into its own. For us poets the economic question isn’t equilibrium or the efficient movement of resources, supply or demand - it isn’t even wealth or poverty - but how we can continue to be poets in the real and problematic world, and in that frame of mind, economics doesn’t stop at The Market’s edge. The way we slice up our collective wealth helps determine when we get married, whether we have children, how healthily we eat, what our cities look like, who runs our politics and - in the privacy of our own minds - how safe or desperate we feel, and whether we can look other people squarely in the eye or have to turn away when the subject of money comes up. Not to mention, it helps decide how many gifted writers we have who can devote their time to writing poetry. When I was in college, free market zealots used to slam self-described socialists or communists for being concerned only with material fairness or equality, for failing to see the importance of spiritual values like freedom and ambition. They can only have been wilfully blind. A system that leaves millions of people too poor and insecure to take part in politics, too vulnerable to speak up to their bosses, too dispirited to continue searching for work has failed, in a large way, on quite a few spiritual values. I think all of us are impoverished in the way we think about the interweaving of The Market and everything else we do. Otherwise how could the U.S. Supreme Court rule and rule again that donations to political campaigns can’t be limited because (in the most familiar paraphrase) “money equals speech,” without admitting that this overturns the whole constitutional order of equal citizenship and gives Bill Gates perhaps 5,000 times the right to speak of an average American family? To defend free speech by ensuring speech is unequal can only be the product of either Orwellian cynicism or an inability to come to grips with the role of money in our lives.

If we want to carve out the space for every American to be free, we have to give him or her the wherewithal to be financially secure, well educated, with equal access to the podium at town hall and many other things. Our political and welfare systems have tried to ensure that kind of freedom, while our market system has had more of a mixed effect. It’s made sure we’re so much wealthier than Russian serfs and Roman slaves that we have solid ground to stand on … yet so unequal to one another, in terms of power, wealth and access, that we (the great majority of us, the ones without ”real” money) feel vulnerable all the time. We live today with our feet in two worlds - one of equality, one of inequality - that we pretend are consistent with one another but are actually in perpetual tension.

I read a great book years ago, Robert Butow’s Tojo and the Coming of War, which described (in terms of Japan’s World War II prime minister as an individual and the Japanese middle class as a group) how a nation of many tendencies - artistic, warlike, isolationist, domineering, democratic and imperial - chose, during the 1920s, to set itself on a course of war and domination. Men like Tojo emphasized to their countrymen that Japan was the nation of samurai warriors and of their martial ethic, bushido, and that it was the Japanese way to invade and to conquer. Butow pointed out, however, that any nation of long history has many strands of tradition to choose from, that a Japanese leader could as easily have emphasized the country’s Shinto-influenced benevolence and tolerance, its Heian period artistry and poetry, its democratic Meiji constitution of 1890, its pre-19th century inwardness and isolation from the world. People are never bound to a single tradition, whether they’re choosing to embrace it or to rebel against it. They always make a choice - and are responsible to themselves and the world for which choice they make.

In the United States, among the many strands of our own history and culture to choose from, we have “free enterprise” on one hand and “democracy” on the other … and, because tradition has too many hands, leave-me-alone individualism (from Henry David Thoreau to the Unabomber) as a strong third. We are as familiar in our bones, in our blood, in our daydreams and in our fears with the political ideals of Thomas Jefferson as with the economic ideals of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. We know Norman Rockwell’s simple man, standing up to speak at a town meeting, as well as we know Horatio Alger. We respect the line of voters in front of a courthouse as much as the line of workers in front of a factory. But in the real world we have to choose among them, because the more we are loyal to the one, the more we are disloyal to the other. Are we first and foremost a community striving collectively for a good life, equal in our votes and in our fundamental value as human beings, or are we an assortment of individuals competing to win a race, where with victory comes money, power, influence and prestige? Should our laws and policies use the Market for the sake of democracy, or democracy for the sake of the Market?

This is an open question, and the last word I have to say on economics for poets.

One of the first books I read as an economics student in the late 1970s was Arthur Okun’s Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, and it wasn’t especially new when he wrote it, so the idea that we have to weigh the values of society against the values of the market is some of the most picked-over ground in the world of thought. I might as well (to an economist’s ear) be saying, “You know, war - hmmm - seems like a destructive thing.” But I believe the mistakes we make as a culture often turn on the subtly wrongheaded ways in which we hear our ground truths, the way we let them sound like something they don’t really mean.

“Equality” and “efficiency” - the two words economists like Okun use - are purely instrumental values. Equality serves our purposes in some ways, and efficiency in others. But in our mind’s ear (or in the blogosphere, the unofficial stenographer of our mind’s ear) we tend to think of The Big Tradeoff as between The Society and The Market. The Society favors equal votes, equal pay, a Norman Rockwell-esque great middle class; The Market insists on dangling huge rewards in front of people to drive them to emigrate, work hard into the night, develop their skills and so forth. Oh how to decide between these two great ideals! But if you think for a moment, only one of the two is really an end in itself. The Society is where we live; The Market is merely a tool for making the society better. We owe it no more allegiance than we owe the rake that’s swept up our yard or the Cuisinart that’s puréed our romesco sauce. The question before us is never The Society versus The Market, but always, how can we best use The Market to get The Society we want?

Or put the way the buyer of a new SUV might put it, thinking of all the road trips he’s wanted to take: How can I squeeze the most mileage out of this baby without running it into the ground?

We want a society that rewards people fairly. To get that out of The Market, without ruining this wonderful piece of machinery in the process, we have to make sure we let prices continue to go up and down as the needs of The Market require. We have to let engineers earn more in Cleveland; we have to let bankers profit from earthquakes; we have to let the millionaire get his millions and the redundant auto worker get his pink slip. Meanwhile, it’s enormously complicated (if you think about it) to decide what’s really a fair reward for each person’s work. Does an accountant deserve more than a soldier? Does an autoworker “earn” more than a nurse? Try juggling five, or ten, or ten thousand jobs againt one another, and we could run ourselves ragged trying to come up with a system of salaries to replace the one The Market whips off without even trying.

But there are a few generalizations we can make that will stand up to scrutiny. In general, the salaries and profits people receive correspond haphazardly to what they earn. But in general,  the really unfair rewards lie at the top and bottom of the income scale. Among the rich are quite a number who receive more than anyone could possibly earn, or who benefit from inheritance and old boy’s club connections, or who’ve simply worked out a dodge for squeezing money from the system like juice from a lemon, because all they’re really concerned with is acquiring more money. Among the poor are quite a number who’ve lost jobs or suffered other indignities that have derailed an otherwise productive life, or who suffer from mental and physical diseases for which we’d be churls to punish them for,  or who labor at useful jobs like teaching, social work or painting that they chose out of love (and so, for which the market doesn’t feel any great need to pay them).  If we took a huge sum of money away from each of the top 20 percent and gave it to each of the bottom 20 percent, we wouldn’t be any closer to matching each individual to his or her fair reward, but we’d improve the fairness in general of an enormously complex system. So - after all this talk - as a practical matter, I come within eyeshot of the end just to say what a British prime minister might have said in 1910 or an American president as late as the 1960s, that a steeply progressive income tax would be a very good thing - even a “negative income tax” that pays the poorest of the poor a living wage and then taxes back a portion of each additional dollar they earn. It would preserve the incentives of even the wealthy to earn a little more (no matter what they may say to pollsters and political conventions about going off to Colorado) and the incentives of the poor to get a job on top of their dole. It keeps The Market well-oiled and improves The Society. Who said a good idea had to be a new one?

The primary thing that stands in the way of even so hoary and mundane an idea as the progressive tax (and any number of other practical and wise public policies) is another of those subtly wrongheaded ways in which we hear our ground truths - one poisoned idea that makes us feel cheated when we pay our taxes, offended when the poor speak out and sheepish about telling the rich (even the vile of capitalism) that they’re really a bunch of thieves. It’s the idea - when the salary check comes in the mail and hangs there, squeezed between our fingers, with its very specific dollars and cents - that this is ours, that we’ve earned this, that it belongs to us and nobody, nowhere has the right to take it away. Surely there are a lot of good things that come with that feeling: a sense of safety and rights and indirectly of freedom, a sense that nobody can question us or push us around, that our hard work has at least a minimum value that nobody has a right to challenge. All good things. But it also carries with it the poisoned idea that what the market pays is what you earn, that we aren’t in it all together, that wealth isn’t the product of multitudes, that it can all be separated out right down to the penny … that one man or woman does actually deserve ten million dollars, while another should actually be humbly grateful for food stamps.

“It’s my money.” This one idea, to the degree we believe it, that we feel our reflexes respond to it, defeats us before we begin, ensures that we will always live in an economy rather than a society or else some weird human-animal hybrid of the two. If for a single moment we could see that it was all a lottery, a big contraption, a game of Monopoly, a snarl of traffic, a productive mess … if we could look at our particular check when it comes in the mail and laugh at its absurdity (”I deserve only this while Paris Hilton has millions! I deserve this much while a crippled soldier can’t afford groceries!”) … if we could reduce our attachment to it, let it fade from our consciousness like a bad habit we know isn’t healthy for us now … we would see everything as differently as a Zen master sees a landscape and God sees the universe.

A little more, a little less. We would shrug: Whatever works! Meanwhile let’s get on with the business of living.

So, what’s fair? I believe all great philsophical concepts have their toes planted firmly in mother Earth, so let’s start by talking about my mother, who for more than forty years of her life was a registered nurse - a member of an unarguably useful, middle-class profession. She worked hard and came home tired; I feel very protective of her. If she were living in New Jersey today and were average in every way, she would earn about $54,000 this year. For the sake of argument, let’s call that a fair salary for someone who works a normal 40-hour week and does no more or less than what’s necessary (which doesn’t describe my mother, but let’s say it did). If we were socialists and ideologically pure about it, everybody would be earning $54,000; we wouldn’t even think about money as a way to distinguish ourselves; if we had to be obsessed with something, we’d be obsessed with prestige or friendship or racking up followers on Twitter, but we’d no more think we ought to earn more money than our neighbor than we think today that we ought to have extra votes on election day or someone else’s seat on a lifeboat. To get back to this world, however, we aren’t indifferent to money, and that’s fortunate I suppose because the free market system would collapse if we were. There would be no way to get engineers to move to Cleveland (sorry, Cleveland). No one would burn the midnight oil. Everyone would work in convenience stores in Santa Barbara, California, or on the back side of Maui.

All of us agree, I suspect, on several reasons why different people should receive different rewards. The late-duty nurse whose alarm clock rings at 2 a.m. … The police officer whose next traffic stop might end in his own shooting … The startup entrepreneurs who binge-work to incarnate a vision … The chief executive who bears the stress of making an entire organization succeed - people like these do more, carry more, suffer more than convenience-store workers and so (we feel, or at least I do) they deserve some kind of outsize reward. I think that (with one exception) our ideas of what differences in pay are fair are all more or less of this sort, some form of paying people back for an extra effort they’ve made.  I’m willing to do that and be generous about it.  If someone works twice as many hours as my mother the New Jersey nurse, I say fine, pay them $108,000 a year … or even time-and-a-half, $135,000. If they also work twice as hard as my mother for each of those 16 hours a day, give them $270,000. If they’re in twice as dangerous or stressful an environment, kaching!, on up to $540,000. If they’ve got grad-school debt to pay off - lots and lots of grad school debt - or they’ve worked many years without any reward building up their business, let’s go all the way up to $1,080,000. I’m willing to pay an MBA-lawyer who bussed tables and took big loans to get through school, who works 80 hours a week without ever stopping for coffee and runs a corporation that makes dynamite right underneath his executive office, $1.08 million and even to thank him for what he does. But anything above and beyond that - any multi-million-dollar salary or billion dollar fortune - in terms of fairness, it’s pure theft. It’s received, sure enough, in a free-market system, but I don’t see how it can possibly be earned.

Our friends, the vile of capitalism, typically offer a vaguer, more pliable X factor to silence all arguments over their stratospheric compensation: their own unique talents, without which the creation of great wealth would have been impossible. We can’t all be Mozart, they might say. The lanky boy with the golden right arm who signs a deal with the Yankees, the musical prodigy from Liverpool who becomes a Beatle, the chief executive who just has that amazing way with people and with numbers (at least until the next market downturn) … without their certain je ne sais quoi the wealth that poured bounteously out of their teams, bands and businesses wouldn’t have existed at all. And so they deserve (the vile say) - well, gee, it’s hard to quantify, but I’d be tempted to say nearly all of the revenue their businesses produce. And why is that? Certainly great talents exist, and they are wonderful gifts to their possessors and to the world, but by and large those gifts are unearned. Mozart didn’t produce his five-year-old self, performing before the crowned heads of Europe. Twenty-year-old Albert Einstein didn’t produce the mind that could visualize riding on a beam of light. You might as well say they designed their own genes or gave birth to their own fathers. Anyone I’ve ever known with a great gift has worked in its thrall, almost as if he didn’t have a choice, to develop it. The fact that they’ve worked hard means nothing. Registered nurses earning $54,000 a year work hard, and would be happy to work harder if they could be rock stars or scientific visionaries. A gift doesn’t need money piled on top of it, either as an economic incentive or as a moral reward. It is its own reward.

Or if that doesn’t convince you, look at the darker, less often stated opposite tail of the X-factor argument. If the talented deserve extra rewards simply for giving us the fruit of their talents, then the untalented are getting way, way overpaid, aren’t they? Time to collect something back from those Down’s syndrome children, those mildly retarded, those physically handicapped - the brothers, sisters, children, parents we love who will never become either Yankee pitchers or registered nurses.  If they deserve anything at all, then it’s surely no more than half - or a quarter or an eighth - of our $54,000 base. Isn’t that right?

In Time magazine I once read a short letter from a physician who had been appalled (if I recall) by an article about families that had gone bankrupt trying to pay a loved-one’s medical bills. It stuck in my mind and encapsulated everything that distinguishes the kind of thinking we’re doing here from the kind you normally hear on business shows and in testimony before angry Congressmen. The letter read in its entirety, “We live in a society, not an economy.” In the society, where all human truths are witnessed and all human values have a place, the CEO doesn’t necessarily earn much more than the nurse, and the garbageman who works in the pre-dawn hours slinging trash we won’t touch may earn more than the bond trader. The society’s ladder of earning bears only the screwiest relationship to the economy’s ladder of payment. How can we possibly bring the one in line with the other?

Well, one way to divide up the wealth we’ve collectively created is to let the market do it for us. Not surprisingly, those who reap a huge reward from the market think this is a smashing idea and, by the way, absolutely fair (”I’ve earned every cent, and keep your tax collectors away from me!”) It’s worth hearing, though, what the people who invented the science of economics have to say about the fairness of the market’s rewards - to wit, nothing.

They brag quite easily about the market’s virtues in getting the right goods and services made. A shortage of engineers for a big project in Pittsburgh drives up their salary, and the high salary draws engineers to Pittsburgh. Big profits draw investors to Apple, where their money helps ensure that the beloved iPod will continue to improve. Prices go up and down in a thousand places in response to vagaries of demand; in the midst of this seemingly unmasterable complexity, people simply respond to the prices that affect them personally; and resources are shifted all over the map to solve the needs of production. Frighteningly efficient. Quite stunning, really. But fair? The economists shrug their shoulders. It has nothing to do with fairness. A human sloth who finds crude oil in his back yard will get the same reward as the inventor of a brilliant machine. One hard-working man will prosper, because the fickle finger of demand has strayed his way, while his equally hard-working neighbor will lose his shirt because his job has fallen out of favor. Great fortunes may stem from being close, at just the right moment, to a horrible disaster. Amadeo Giannini made his fortune lending money to San Francisco merchants: It required pluck, vision … and an earthquake and fire large enough to destroy the city. His business, now called the Bank of America, is the largest bank in the United States.

Economics (the economists say) pays all its attention to ensuring that producers respond to people’s demands. It doesn’t care what carnage is left in the producers’ own lives - in uprooting them from (say) Los Angeles and moving them to Pittsburgh, in destroying their livelihoods, in rewarding them for happenstance, in making them sudden millionaires or making them destitute. Like the talented but ruthless mercenaries who float through the background of so many action movies, like real Blackwater ops and CIA secret commandos who take pride in their tunnel vision and amorality, the Market does what’s necessary and lets God sort out what’s right.

It’s worth pausing to reflect that the whole reason we’ve saddled ourselves with such a strange, brutal system in the first place is a social reason: The market produces the goods and services “people” - meaning great masses of people - want. We’ve enslaved ourselves to free enterprise because it does something for our collective good. We could, of course, have set things up in our society any way we wanted; we could have let might decide right, as it did in the days of yore; there’s no natural reason, if we were going to depart from that, to have police enforce the right to own a million acres and not the right to eat. But “we’d” be fools to become socialists or communists or mercantilists … or live by feudalism or utopianism or the law of the jungle … because the market, more than any other system, makes “us” prosperous. My apologies to Milton Friedman and the Chicago school, but there are no “I”s in “the free market.”

So then, if the Market can’t be counted on to show us a fair way to divide up our collective wealth, how could we divide it up in a way that is fair? Well, I’m afraid we’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, by actually talking about fairness. For too long the Market has been the great black box in American life, the god you can’t question, the answer that stops all conversations, but it’s really just a thing like any other thing, a social arrangement, and it doesn’t have the power to rescue us from conversations we don’t want to have or facts we don’t want to face. Free enterprise isn’t alchemy. It doesn’t turn greed into virtue. It doesn’t turn compassion into vice. Put everything in American society through its meat grinder, and if, on the other side, you want to know what’s fair, you’re still going to have to ask yourself, “What’s fair?”

I left off last time with the thought that an economy - whether it be a South Seas colony of poets, a nerdtopia of scientists or our own United States - is a social creation. Whatever affluence any one of the people in it manages to achieve depends, not just on his own individual effort, but on what all of the people in that economy have chosen to do, and what their parents and their parents’ parents chose to do. Bill Gates’ life would have turned out quite differently in an isolated colony of poets or of Mountain Dew-swilling scientists. We can earn so much here in the United States (to mangle an aphorism) only because we stand on the shoulders of giants.  So I’ll freely admit, I owe this computer, this comfortable apartment I am writing from, the diplomas somewhere in storage and the photographs of exotic locales on my hard drive, not primarily to the sweat of my own (or even my industrious wife Neeta’s) brow, but to Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, to the Jewish and Italian immigrants who sweated through 14-hour days on the Lower East Side, to the strikers who died in the Haymarket riots, to the soldiers on the field at Antietam, to the inventors of the zipper and the transistor, to the farmers who tore down the trees and broke the sod that crossed the continent, to the engineers who made the Boeing 747, to the Ellis Island clerk who took pity on my forebears … to all the people who shaped (and misshaped) the world to allow an Irish-English kid to find his way to a job on a newspaper for $50,000 a year. I simply did the work once I got there, and perhaps gave my own small gift to shaping the world in the book that I wrote and something I may have said or done for the people that I worked with. But I certainly worked no harder or more cleverly than the neolithic hunter-gatherer who got a basket of root vegetables and skin cancer for the same effort.

This vile people of capitalism I spoke of - the men and women whose primary aim is often to line their own pockets and yet who describe themselves grandly as “creators of wealth” and “providers of jobs” - use this fact of our interdependence in a peculiar way. They use it to say that all the rest of us owe a debt to them. If it weren’t for Henry Ford (they say) … if it weren’t for John D. Rockefeller … if it weren’t for the CEO, the investment banker, the startup entrepreneur and (on generous days) the research scientist - if it weren’t for the people (they contend) who are like me - the rest of you unimaginative, wage-earning hangers-on - you, you poets - wouldn’t have anything. (Well, you’d have your poetry.) We’ve earned every penny of our voluptuous bank accounts. We’ve earned our Greenwich, Connecticut, mansions (built on land cleared by Yankee farmers), our Hilton Head cottages (built on land cleared by slaves), our offices in skyscrapers (built by Mohawk construction workers).

To which I say, fine: My hat is off to you for any good work you may have done, but economic interdependence is (kind of by definition) a two-way street. There’s nothing you’ve created, built, invented or monetized that hasn’t involved all the rest of us, too. Put Bill Gates (or Henry Ford, or Glenn Beck) on a deserted island, like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Even give him that charming volleyball, Wilson. And he will not create Microsoft, the Ford Motor Company or a media empire. He can’t do it without the programmers and the chipbuilders and the fibre-optic cable-layers … and the customers … and the jobs that give those customers enough money to afford Windows 7 … and the companies that use PCs in their factories and online stores, who make the customers want Windows 7 in the first place. On his little spit of land in the Pacific Bill Gates will live no better than the cleverest of neolithic hunter-gatherers. The wealth of nations isn’t really so easy to separate into the wealth of you and me, and the most humane of the great American entrepreneurs have realized this. Andrew Carnegie wrote that it was the responsibility and not the benevolence of the rich to invest their money in society or have all but a pittance taken away in inheritance taxes. He invested his own money in more than 2,500 public libraries around the world. Peter Cooper, the New York industrialist, wrote as early as the 1840s that ”the production of wealth is not the work of any one man, and the acquisition of great fortunes is not possible without the co-operation of multitudes of men.” So he founded the Cooper Union school, which for 150 years has provided a college education to each of its students completely free of charge.

Ayn Rand, that most pigheaded and pure of conservative writers, tried to forge a slam-dunk argument against this collectivist way of thinking in her novel Atlas Shrugged, by having not one lone castaway but all the really worthwhile people go off to a secret compound in, I believe, Colorado (which was prescient), a Utopia of Greed, where they created great wealth and scientific advancement exclusively for one another until all the lesser, dependent, wage-earning people left leaderless in places like Chicago and New York realized what they were missing and invited the great ones back. Her working title for the book was The Strike but it might as well have been The Tantrum. If the great ones want to go off to Colorado, as far as I personally am concerned, they’re free to do so. Yes, we may have to do without their gifts, but they will also have to do without ours. They can’t have New York (built by Irish cops and Jewish refugees and all the other Ellis Islanders); they can’t have Chicago (built by Pullman porters, gangsters and politicians); they can’t have New Orleans (built by pirates, pimps, creole chefs and more-than-moderate drinkers). They can’t have jazz or gospel or country music. They can’t have triple-A baseball. They can’t have the veterans of World War II. They can’t have laughter in crowded movie theaters or St. Patrick’s Day parades or the kind words that were said to me, along my way, by a thousand relatives, friends and strangers who would never receive an invitation to the Utopia of Greed. They can take Facebook, I suppose, but they can’t take the content. Oh yes, and they will have to mow their own lawns, type their own letters and bag their own groceries. As in all divorces, there would be pain and real loss if the Creators of Wealth ran off to Colorado, but there would also be a refreshing side. We could do without their chest-thumping whining and get on with our lives.

Put less snippishly, we should each of us confess, the great (as they style themselves) and the rest of us: We all benefit from the good works of others. We all carry the dead weight of others’ foolishness. No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Even if a self-important clod be washed away, our world would likely be the less. Which means only - if we’re really gracious about it - that we should be glad for one another’s gifts. And yet we each of us have to go home with a specific paycheck at the end of the day. How - in full view of our interdependence - do we carve up and divide the wealth we’ve created together?

My college used to offer a course we called “Econ for Poets”; it meant, econ for people who had no interest in econ. That’s not what I mean by it here; I have no intention of slumming. No, I want to make a few points about economics for people who have something else of value in their lives besides economics and who heave a sigh when they look at a Schedule C or a stock prospectus and say, “All well and good, but what does any of this bullshit have to do with my poetry?” They - the poets - with their third-hand laptops and jobs in convenience stores and drawers full of rejection slips, have it in themselves to be the truly great capitalists - perhaps they already are! - the captains of (a sort of) industry that John D. Rockefeller and Gordon Gekko didn’t even know how to dream of being.

I was an economics major back in college because I wanted to understand how the world worked. I came out a great admirer of the free enterprise system but in what most of my Wharton business-school friends regarded as a peculiar way. I saw it like the electrical system in the walls of my apartment. It was a thing you could use. It had no morality or commandments built into the wiring; it was completely agnostic and laissez-faire. As long as you understood the system’s few simple rules, you could plug any appliance into its sockets and run it to your heart’s content. In fact the rules of the electrical system and of the free enterprise system were just about the same: Your only obligation to either Con Edison or the Invisible Hand was to pay your bills. If you could put in just enough hours at the mini-mart to keep your desk lamp burning and your tea on the stove while you wrote “Kublai Khan,” you could be a great (if incongruously 19th-century) poet. If your thrift store could sell just enough second-hand shirts to keep up the rent on the soup kitchen, you could continue to feed the poor. Or if you could sell enough SUVs to afford a sprawling estate in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with 24-hour guards in the gatehouse, well, you could have your estate and your gatehouse. Free enterprise was exactly as it billed itself: No king or commissar or clansman could force you to do this when you wanted to do that. If you had the imagination to get the minimum necessary cash, by hook or by crook, you could live out your dream.

So what free enterprise turned out to be, in the end, was a great revealer of dreams. It pulled back the curtain on the hearts of men and women. It showed us their drives and desires; it showed what was in their souls. The poets, unleashed by free enterprise, were free to be poets; the greedy could pile up cash. You could see at a glance who was interesting, who was creative, who was tedious and who was vile.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, the vile like to tell their own version of this parable, and they have always had the money to do it. They are, it turns out, ungraciously unwilling to see themselves as vile. From Ozymandias to Saddam Hussein, they insist that their wealth (and the power that comes with it) are evidence of God’s blessing, a moral greatness, a contribution to humankind. And so, the vile of capitalism - and I’m not talking here about visionaries who, in the thrall of a great dream, have struggled to make it real (they can be ruthless people or wonderful people or both), but those others (you know who you are) who count their success in greenbacks, and think the angels crib their rankings from the Forbes 100 … the vile of capitalism have twisted the thinking of generations of otherwise good men and women who might have been poets or soup-kitchen owners or astrophysicists or explorers of the Nile and persuaded them that the free enterprise system is actually a philosophy that tells you how to behave. It’s not agnostic on questions of what’s valuable; it says that making money is valuable. It is what drives everything else; it’s what makes the rest of society possible. The people who spend their days piling up cash (rather than feeding the hungry, rather than painting the beautiful, rather than at home with their spouses and children) are the people you should admire. Paraphrasing Adam Smith (with something that he never actually said or meant), they say: Greed is good.

I say No. Greed … is greedy. Compassion is compassionate. Vision is visionary. Beauty is beautiful. No human quality is turned upside-down by the Invisible Hand of free enterprise and made into something it isn’t. Where your treasure is, as one Jesus of Nazareth put it, there your heart will be also. There is your portrait. There is who you are. Your bank balance doesn’t say anything about you, doesn’t give you worth if you don’t have worth, doesn’t give you beauty or morality - what describes you is instead the life that the bank balance manages to fund.

Ours isn’t the only way capitalism could play itself out, you know; free enterprise would work just as well without greed playing a central role. (In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith actually said, not that people should be greedy, but that if people were greedy, the Invisible Hand could nonetheless turn it into an advantage for society. If they weren’t greedy so much the better. Smith’s first great book, after all, was The Theory of Moral Sentiments.) I can picture a sort of capitalism on a South Seas island full of poets and lovers, where people have (reluctantly) worked hard enough and invented just enough to give themselves the comfort and room to write poetry and take walks together on the beach for most of the day. It is physically poorer than the countries of Western Europe and North America. It lacks Versailles and the Pyramids, the Golden Gate Bridge and F.A.O. Schwarz’s on Christmas Eve morning. But it is the bargain these people have struck with life; it reflects who they are. I can also picture a capitalism of absent-minded professors impatient with consumer goods if they stand in the way of space probes and particle accelerators; all of the living rooms are poorly furnished and stacked with 12-packs of Mountain Dew, but the technology is simply amazing.

What does the sort of capitalism we live in the United States reveal about us? This isn’t a stacked question; it’s an honest one. Does it reveal that we dream bigger dreams than the South Seas islanders? Or that we’ve traded poetry for consumer electronics? Or that we don’t know what to dream of, perhaps, or that we dream of such different things it can’t help but be a cacophony? Does it speak well of us or poorly of us? Or does it begin to teach a second lesson about capitalism, that it doesn’t - can’t - reflect any one person’s choice, but is always a social and collective choice, that (no matter how much we associate “free enterprise” and “individual freedom”) we always, inevitably, get stuck in a society we’ve all somehow chosen together, the poets and the money-grubbers, the beautiful and the vile?

I’ll confess: I was a huge fan of John Edwards. I believed he was a progressive at a time when we needed a progressive president. I thought he was substantive when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were tacking very close to generalities. I liked the Two Americas speech. I thought Edwards was sincere. I look around me now and see only the last scraps of the wreckage. The shine on my political judgment is badly dented, but I won’t run away from or mitigate or hem or haw about my error. It was huge. I was completely wrong about the man. My wife and her brothers (doctors, all of them, and naturally antagonistic to a lawyer who had made his fortune on melodramatic malpractice cases) had seen Edwards for the phony he was; I couldn’t see it at all. The country was spared despite me. Had I been able to wave a magic wand and make the man the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, the Democrats would have lost in a landslide even after George Bush had done the most a single man could be expected to do to ruin a major country. If I had been able to wave it twice and make Edwards president, well, we would have another Cheshire cat smile in the White House with no actual cat behind it, and a Ph.D. candidate in history somewhere could have won his first Pulitzer by writing The Era of Narcissist Presidents: 1992-2012.

I remember during the George Bush years thinking it was amazing that I lived in a world where people - lots of them, nearly 50 percent of the American public - looked at this mean-spirited, empty-headed responsibility evader and thought they saw a sincere man who could be trusted with the levers of power. It was like I was staring at the rainbow and realizing that half the people around me were colorblind. I couldn’t comprehend how they could help but see what was so obvious, even as the very things my fellow Bush critics and I predicted would happen did in fact happen, one after another - as the premises for the Iraq war were proven false, as victory eluded us, as hidden atrocities at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were revealed, as the economy collapsed…. Even at the end, between a quarter and a third of the public clung to its picture of George Bush the good and yes, even competent man, and I thought “What unbelievable fools!” Now that I have been an unbelievable fool myself, of course, I’m much more forgiving about what this says about a person’s character, but it leaves untouched the startling fact that millions of Americans, at least one of whom is very intelligent, can look at a political figure for months and years and see the picture his handlers wanted them to see and never even once the obvious truth.

Now my wife, Neeta, is going through her own on-again, off-again disillusionment with Barack Obama, who is a basically good, smart, talented and sincere man, but isn’t the same man she thought she saw on the campaign trail. (He is much like the man I thought I saw on the campaign trail, though. It seems that, round-robin, we all get our chance to be deluded by wishful thinking, and we all get our chance to be right.)

When I used to read philosophy, I gobbled everything I could find on the so-called Problem of Knowledge. How do we know that what we think is true of the world is actually true? How do we know it’s not all created in our heads - that if we turn our back on a dog, for instance, it doesn’t disappear? How do we know we aren’t imposing the structure of our mind (cause-and-effect, duality, temporal order) on a world that actually operates in a different way? Rene Descartes, taking the problem very seriously, went all the way back near the beginning and tried to prove that he existed by the self-evident fact that he was thinking. It’s possible to go one step farther back than Descartes, though, and admit we don’t even know that. At which point a smart philosopher will say, “It’s Miller time,” and go back into the world as if it exists until he can figure out a useful way of living in a world that doesn’t. But there’s a problem of knowledge in politics, too - one that isn’t as easy to ignore in everyday life. How do we know that, when we turn our backs, the politicians we thought were running for office are still really there?

I am a Democrat. You may be a Republican. We are both - above that, below it, before it - human beings who have at times in our lives been wise, open, generous, empathetic, patient, open-minded, co-operative, pragmatic, visionary. We held up no flags then. We had no allegiance to any party or creed. We were simply brothers and sisters; we had been born into a strange world that we knew somehow to be an enormous gift, and we were in for the ride together. And then we woke up on a busy morning, after a fight, at a moment of weakness or mental cloudiness, into our ordinary troubles and split back to our ordinary tribes and made less of life than was within our reach.

We spend most of our public life in that half-baked world. Dinner-table arguments, Sunday morning talk shows, email blasts, editorial pages and political blogs all live in that world and keep us tied down to it, stealing away time we could otherwise spend tending to the possible and deeply desired. We live in the wholly-baked world mostly in the privacy of our own minds, if even there. And the less time we spend in any place - physical or mental - the more nebulous it becomes. I have forgotten what hung on the walls of the bakery I used to go to in Africa; I’ve forgotten the real sound of my parents’ voices; I’ve forgotten, at times, what has made me happiest to be alive. For years I tried to write an essay that always went back into my drawer, dead on the page - perhaps because of the working title, “On the efficacy of prayer” - about the value a religious agnostic like myself saw in praying: because even if there was no one to hear our prayer, there was us, and in our words, on our lips, we were continually reminding ourselves of what we really believed, valued, wanted. We still might not be able to get to the promised land, but we would know what it looked like if the chance should ever come.

I’m calling this new blog Better Angels, of course, because Abraham Lincoln used the term, at the end of his First Inaugural Address in 1861, when the same people that wrote the Declaration of Independence, “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” “whosoever would be a man must be a nonconformist,” that walked across North America with Lewis & Clark just to see it, that formed communities that held all their worldly goods in common - one for all and all for one - at Brook Farm and New Lebanon and Oneida and New Harmony … that would later write “give us your poor,” “separate but equal is inherently unequal,” create the Marshall Plan, liberate the camps, build Rockefeller Center and the Golden Gate Bridge, ride in the Freedom Marches … was then in the process of murdering itself, dulling its mind to cruelty and death, making up nicknames for its fellow citizens to reveal them as enemies. Lincoln was a strange and wonderful man. He never lost sight of the larger possibilities of American life that were still well within the bounds of human nature. For this first inaugural he wrote to Massachusetts and Virginia alike, “We are not enemies, but friends. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory … will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” And then in 1865, when the millions were already dead and the hatred crusted over and habitual, he spoke to them again, saying, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us … care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” That, at the hardest time in the nation’s history, is political talk and policymaking of a very high order. 

I want to carve out room for that same kind of talk here.