Poetry

...The "self-reforming'" capacities of democratic capitalism are in large part due to the first word, democratic...

...But many Christians who find themselves with doubts about Novak's enthusiasm for capitalism are acting not out of a blindness to its benefits, but from a view that Christians have a particular obligation to be critical of the failures, imperfections, and injustices in "this world...

...But the equator travels on forever, never reaching south or north, magnetic poles working on the seas, black rock and tides so unfamiliar in their change we don't see...

...One could multiply these examples, but the point is clear enough: capitalism has often been saved by its democratic critics...

...Thib critical posture means that the Christian's vocation is to live in dynamic tension with whatever system or society he or she happens to participate into be, in John Paul's famous phrase, "a sign of contradiction...

...12:21 May 1993 Commomveal...

...but draws it quickly back i like a jump-start needed so the future will work...

...In the global economy which is producing substantial job shifts from high-wage to lowwage countries, energetic government will be required to ease the transitions of millions of workers and to underwrite job training...

...Present distilled to past as our headlight beams hit the sea rock, dissolve out over the black edge 9o f the sea...

...Most of the social reforms in the capitalist countries were the product of New Dealish and social democratic movements...

...Novak, as we have seen, is not trying to deify capitalism...

...If Novak wants to criticize self-righteousness and reflexive anti-Americanism on the Left, he'll get no argument from me...

...Who can say where the light stops being light, how the bulb turned off seems not to let that last light escape...

...There is another way of looking at this...

...Novak sees the hostility to capitalism among intellectuals as related to what he calls "'the aristocratic biases of modern intellectual life...

...With large cuts in the Department of Defense's research and development budgets, which had substantial spinoff benefits to the private economy, other government agencies may have to step into the research area...

...Far from being friends of aristocracy, many of the critics of pure capitalism are actually democrats who believe the market works best--and on behalf of the largest number of citizens--when it is constrained and improved by the workings of democratic government...

...As a result, he says, intellectuals "overlooked the self-reforming capacities of capitalism when the latter is embedded in powerful democratic and moral-religious traditions...

...But many of capitalism's critics, even some of the self-righteous ones, were responsible for the very process of self-correction that Novak celebrates...

...To the extent that Christianity nurtures that critical spirit and encourages impatience with injustice, it is doing just what it is supposed to do...

...This raises the broader question of how orle defines the Christian" s proper attitude toward any political or economic system...

...Those child-years before we know about time we are different--inventing only the present, and it sings...

...And I'll also grant him that the Left has been insufficiently mindful of the ways in which capitalism can encourage creativity and enterprise...

...Novak would agree with this analysis in principle, but argue that many on the Catholic Left take the "prophetic stance" in the wrong direction and are too eager to dismiss the moral and practical advantages of the market and (if they are Americans) the achievements of their country...

...That may make us less appreciative of the market system than Novak thinks we ought to be, but my suspicion is--to put it in the market's terms--that the benefits of this stance far outweigh the costs...

...Once time was simple as compass points-I saw north as the way everyone traveled to the future...

...Near a spot you brought me forty years before, we hoard words, reworking pasts to make them fit this night and who we've become, to explain, say, why you sicken at the smell of geraniums, how FI1 always hate oatmeal and being made late...

...And reinvented pasts become just as true, helping us carry what we can't shed: that my black-eyed rebellious daughter is like me: you've become your grandfather: how we learn to close around our pain like night leaves of prayer plants...

...Dixie Partridge Unnatural Laws Arriving Late with My Father, 77: the Northwest Coastline What's time but a trick...

...Now with all our storied pasts we know the future as mute, signing us into that place where time changes to a circle-sea, and trawling a little too far south we wonder who were we really, true north lost to the stone-eyed stars...

...Even on the level of economic performance, substantial government intervention has often been needed to keep the free market from running off the rails...