The solution, the way to navigate the rapids downstream of where we are now, is clear, but not easy. It is to refocus on making the moral case for capitalism, on providing a positive, optimistic vision of the world that can be remade. That new world is a place where great enrichment is nurtured and expanded, and the increase in wealth, widely shared, is revivified.

We should perhaps take heart from the words of F.A. Hayek, who in 1949 was in an intellectual setting that was as bad, or even worse, than that in which we find ourselves today. He wrote, in “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” about how the failure of classical liberals to advocate for the good society had allowed socialism to gain a foothold, and then expand toward becoming dominant. Hayek put it this way, and his words are as powerful today as they were in 1949:

…we must be able to offer a new liberal programme which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia…a truly liberal radicalism…the main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals….

(via NRO)

[Socialists cannot make the economic argument, so they rely on the moral argument, such as it is. Its simplicity of “fairness” is tough to counter unless opponents gird themselves on the morality of the totalitarian approach socialist “fairness” requires. Hayek is in fact an excellent resource for that. Too bad so few conservatives have read The Road to Serfdom, or at least so few use it well in these debates. — Ed]