This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on October 27, 2006, at the first annual Free Market Forum, sponsored by the College’s Center for the Study of Monetary Systems and Free Enterprise.In chapter 21 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus proposes a moral dilemma in the form of a parable: A man asks his two sons to go to work for him in his vineyard. The first son declines, but later ends up going. The second son tells his father he will go, but never does. “Who,” Jesus asks, “did the will of his father?” Although I am loath to argue that Jesus’s point in this parable was an economic one, we may nonetheless derive from it a moral lesson with which to evaluate economic systems in terms of achieving the common good.
Modern history presents us with two divergent models of economic arrangement: socialism and capitalism. One of these appears preoccupied with the common good and social betterment, the other with profits and production. But let us keep the parable in mind as we take a brief tour of economic history.
It makes a thorough argument about what I have often observed in the struggle between capitalism and socialism - that of the difference between the public perception of a philosophy and the actual consequences of the same.
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