St. Maximos' Hut

I’ve just returned from the first-ever Eucharistic Congress in my diocese. The turn out was overwhelming and the speakers and events got me thinking about how disordered are my life and the world around me. God wants us to make him the center of our lives and all we keep doing is getting distracted by less important things. Our most important decisions are about how to use our time. Once, we were compelled to spend much of it toiling to feed our families, but as we’ve harnessed our God-given ingenuity to solve this problem and loosen this constraint, we seem to have succeeded in getting farther and farther away from God - spending our time in meaningless, frivolous ways.

As we’ve discussed on this blog, the free market has many virtues when it comes to allocating scarce resources. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. externalities), it’s quite effective at bringing us to the point where the marginal cost of additional output equates the marginal benefit. But I’ve got this gnawing feeling that the free market has failed on a grander scale. In countries like the U.S., the free market machine has solved the problem of material poverty, but in its place we’ve got a problem just as big – not knowing what to do with our material abundance. Consumer sovereignty is the essence of the free market. If people want it and it can be made, producers will make it. The big problem is what people want. We (me included) want things that are so pathetically trivial. We spend our time chasing ephemeral desires.

Am I right in damning the free market for these failures? Is it culpable of abetting our culture in leading us farther and farther away from what’s really important?