Wilhelm Röpke once observed, in a sentence that ought to unsettle every free market romanticist in our time, that the market economy “presupposes and requires a moral and social framework which it cannot itself create.” This line is often quoted as a caveat to free enterprise, but it is more properly read as its foundation. Markets are not self-sustaining organisms, nor do they generate the conditions that make them legitimate. They depend upon a prior architecture of norms, institutions, and habits that provide coherence and legitimacy.
In our republic, one of the most concrete expressions of that framework is homeownership.
Röpke’s defense of markets was inseparable from his insistence on the diffusion of property. He did not associate capitalism with mass consumption or asset appreciation. He equated it with rooted ownership, with households that possess something tangible, something inherited and stewarded. Without that diffusion, he feared the slow advance of what he called “proletarianization”: the condition of citizens who participate in markets, yet own nothing substantial.
“The proletarian,” Röpke wrote in The Social Crisis of Our Time, “is the man who has no property…who is without roots.” His concern was the gradual transformation of citizens into rootless wage earners whose livelihoods depend upon systems too vast to influence and too distant to anchor them.
As he foresaw, and as we are increasingly beginning to see today, a society composed primarily of propertyless individuals who might remain productive for a time but lack the moral ballast required to endure is in trouble. Ownership is not merely a measurement of economic productivity, but concerns the very foundations of the regime.
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