Drawing The Battle Lines

Arthur Brooks in today's Pravda on the Potomac:

America faces a new culture war.

This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise -- limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.

Read the whole thing. Brooks makes some good points about the moral grounding of the free enterprise system - quoting Jefferson and Franklin (but not Adam Smith, for some reason) - that I agree ought to be spoken of more often. This is not a fight between greed and virtue, nor should it be allowed to be caricatured as one.