Video Transcript: Is Capitalism Moral Defending the Free (Action Institute)

Robert Sirico:     

My brother watched the events of September 11, 2001, from the roof of his Brooklyn home. He later told me that the ashes of those murdered that autumn morning fell across every borough of New York. Ashes like the snowflakes of the close of James Joyce's story, The Dead, falling all across the city I know so well with its people and accents I am so well acquainted. After my brother related this to me, I had an image in my mind of those ashes settling on the lake at Prospect Park where I used to go fishing, softly descending on Coney Island, on the beach where I first learned to swim, and encircling the bell tower of Regina Pacis where I celebrated my first mass as a priest, wafting on to old Calvary Cemetery where my father was buried, and later my mother.

I see the ashes that bright and sparkling late summer morning making their decent on the whole of the city - the ashes of corporate executives, secretaries, and janitors, the firefighters from Brooklyn and Queens, men who lived in neighborhoods just like my own, firefighters like Stanley [Smagalo?], whose wife Denna was pregnant with their daughter, Alexa, when the towers fell.

I know this sort, their down-to-earth qualities and rough virtues of courage and hard work. I believe I may also now know something about the ideology employed by the man who orchestrated the attacks. In many people's minds, Osama Bin Laden was simply a holdover from a primitive form of Islam. But if you listen closely to some of the man's own recorded messages to the world, a more complex portrait emerges. And what may have been his last recorded video message, released just after he had been killed in after the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attack, Bin Laden said that "The path to stop the hegemony of capitalism is to carry out a real radical change so that President Obama will be liberated and with him and everyone else from the hegemony of these corporations.

Whether Bin Laden's political ideology was deeply influenced by socialist thinking is an open question. What is undeniable is that Bin Laden found it useful to tap into socialism's anti-capitalist mentality and classed warfare vocabulary.

With the fall of Soviet communism, many assumed that such thinking was in permanent retreat, but the impulse is never further away than human nature itself. It pipes a tune seductive to the darkest elements of the human heart - envy, sloth, and pride - while promising speedy solutions to problems that the better angels of our nature crave to see remedied.

Reporter:              

Coming up next, we'll have an early morning traffic update. But first these numbers from Wall Street. Dow lost six points, the S&P slipped four, and the NASDAQ slipped 14. Small businesses hit hardest as investors reacted to sluggish--

Robert Sirico:    

To build an authentically free and virtuous society is far more complicated and difficult, requiring habituation to just deeds, both visible and invisible. If we are concerned about the end of freedom in America and in our world, the decline and possible death of liberty and justice for all, then we would do well to remember the other end of freedom - the purpose and destiny of men and women called by their Creator to lives of liberty and virtue. In the final analysis, very few people will go to the barricades to defend the system's utility. But a way of life that protects all that we hold dear, a civilization that elevates our spirits, a culture that is rooted in the realities of eternal significance, this is a different story. For such a moral crusade, we will be able to raise a vast army.