Maggie's Farm

Many sites have linked Mark Boone's TCS essay titled How Republics Die. He begins:

Insofar as an economic downturn has traceable causes, the present recession seems to have origins in the behavior of at least three groups of people: reckless lenders, who encouraged people to spend their money irresponsibly; reckless borrowers, who took their advice and spent well outside the limits of need and the ability to repay; and a government which at times encouraged such behavior through organizations such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

This is old news to the astute observer and the regular reader of TCS. What they may not know is how vividly, and how long ago, great philosophers warned us just how dangerously our society was using money. The great philosophers understood that economics operates on a moral plane, indeed a spiritual plane; that economic problems are often moral problems; and that financial markets are corrupted as much by bad behavior as by bad economic theory. The antiquity of their advice only serves to belie its strikingly acute contemporary relevance.

The whole essay here.