American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change. Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health-care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a “creative class” of “knowledge workers” – all are the progeny of widespread prosperity.
– Brink Lindsey, author
All of that “other stuff” that has been raised to “higher levels” by Left above that of the economic system that has made it possible. After all, you don’t see these other things in societies that are so poor that staying alive is the prime directive. Only rich societies have the “bandwidth” to allow its citizens to start complaining about “other stuff”.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
