George Leef and Mike Munger are right (of course) that we need to make the moral case for capitalism. Yet I would argue that making such a case is insufficient to deter skepticism about America’s economic system. We also need to make the case at the level of values.

There are different ways to approach this. Cultural theory, for instance, suggests we need to show that capitalism stands as a bulwark against the different risks people see in life. Some people see risks to freedom, others to fairness, and others to community and order (my 2020 book The Socialist Temptation points out how socialists do a great job on this in marketing socialism) — my mentor Fred Smith took this approach when promoting the morality and virtues of capitalism.

Another way to approach values is to look at the foundations of moral thinking, as Jonathan Haidt did in his groundbreaking work The Righteous Mind. In this and his subsequent work, Haidt has identified correlative pairs of values that underpin our moral thinking. These values are care/harm (Does capitalism care about people? Does it stop people being harmed?), loyalty/betrayal (Does capitalism promote fraternity? Does capitalism reward disloyalty to country and community?), authority/subversion (Does capitalism recognize just authority? Does capitalism undermine just authority?), sanctity/degradation (Does capitalism give due weight to the sacred? Does it promote filth and/or pollution of any sort?), and finally fairness/cheating. A final pair may or may not have true validity – freedom/oppression.

People react differently to these values, so a left-liberal will be concerned primarily with care/harm and will accuse capitalism of not caring about the results of its market processes. A social conservative will be concerned about capitalism undermining traditional morality by providing markets for pornography, for instance.

Fairness is a special case, as progressives and conservatives regard it differently. Progressives view fairness as “equity” or equality of outcome. Conservatives regard fairness as a question of proportionality or equality of opportunity — my colleague Joshua Bandoch wrote about what this means in this context recently in the Washington Times.

We must address the challenges to capitalism for all these values. We may, perhaps, have spent too much time trying to make the case to the left and forgotten that we have to make the case to conservatives as well (I said as much in a 2019 piece for the Wall Street Journal.) Moreover, adherents to the emerging strand of thought known as national conservatism may well attach different weights to these values than traditional conservatives do. They seem, for instance, to attach particular significance to care/harm, which may be the source of much national-conservative rhetoric on “protecting” communities.

This isn’t an easy task. Many of our arguments on these values have been attenuated by changing circumstances. Others are just not well-developed. And libertarians, as Haidt observes, aren’t very concerned by many of the values, which means they have spent little to no time thinking about them.

Yet without such arguments, as Joshua Bandoch puts it, all we are doing is taking our economic logic and throwing it at people, hoping it will stick. That won’t work, especially in a world where economics has given way to identity as the primary political aligning issue.

So as well as an intellectual adventure, rebuilding the case for capitalism requires a genuine understanding of fears and concerns. Fred Smith would say, “They won’t care about you until they think you care.”