Families & the Economy

Perils & Opportunities

The Covid-19 crisis has taught important lessons about economics. First, a true free market is simply a specialized expression of mutual human relationships, involving the voluntary exchange of material goods and services (from the same root word as "servant"). This market economy works well only when undergirded by the virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, and basic justice. Second, the contemporary globalized economy of frenzied energy, mass production, and bigness is actually quite fragile, subject to massive disruptions with high human costs. And third, recent aggressive government controls, even bans, on human economic exchanges also bring on mass unemployment and the disappearance of a wide range of necessary goods, from...