This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 10th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

People who recognize the merits of capitalism over other means of allocating resources sometimes

turn sheepish when asked to make a moral defense of free

markets and private property. A new book produced by Students for Liberty and the Atlas Economic

Research Foundation aims to change that.

The morality of capitalism is edited by Cato Senior Fellow Tom Palmer.

One of the things that's quite striking is when you look at criticisms of the market,

in many cases what they're complaining about is

interventionism and cronyism, not really capitalism and that's a very

important distinction to make. Not everything that happens in the world should be

blamed on capitalism if you will.

These the financial crisis in particular is just quite evidently a failure of interventionism

trying to steer the market and it ended up going off the

rails and now markets are trying to correct themselves and governments are struggling

to not allow that to happen with more stimulus and trying to pump up property prices and so on.

After all of this has become clear, it's really time for us to go on the offensive for free market capitalism.

It's not responsible for the policies of the Federal Reserve or for the federal government

or for the deliberate pumping up of an asset bubble in real estate and then poisoning the world financial system has happened

through the Basel Accords.

And by the way, a great book that Cato published on this is Johann Norberg's Financial Fiesco.

It's a very clear, excellent, outstanding diagnosis.

...