Understanding Capitalism: Prosperity, Morality, and Freedom
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the spiritual elements of capitalism before introducing Dr. Charles N. Steele.
Capitalism rewards man with profit or punishes him with loss, depending on the merit of his actions. It expresses the freedom and rationality of human nature in an economic system. The capitalist system depends upon private property rights, the freedom of exchange and contract, sound money, and the rule of law that supports all of these through formal and informal structures. Such a system encourages innovation and morality along with economic prosperity.
Capitalism is not the simple pursuit of profit without regard for moral restraints. Capitalism produces wealth by serving the desires of society. A moral and free society will reward good economic activity, which in turn creates prosperity for the people.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. |
| 0:12.4 | I'm Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:13.9 | And I'm Juan Dabalos. |
| 0:14.9 | We're here for the last lecture of understanding capitalism, prosperity, morality, and freedom. |
| 0:21.6 | This is a great lecture, and it really caps off the course nicely. |
| 0:25.3 | When we were developing this course with Professor Steele, |
| 0:28.5 | I was very pleased that he wanted to bring in Matthew 25, |
| 0:31.2 | the Parable of the Talents, and has the capstone for a course on economics. |
| 0:35.6 | And that could be a little bit surprising. |
| 0:37.3 | One might think, well, |
| 0:38.2 | economics, we're talking libertarianism, we're talking cold reason. There's plenty of reason in |
| 0:43.1 | Professor Steele's arguments throughout the course. But his commitment to us, and he articulates |
| 0:48.0 | this in the first lecture, is that economics is a human science. It's designed to help human |
| 0:53.5 | beings flourish, and you can't flourish |
| 0:55.1 | without morality. That's a major theme of this final lecture. Yeah, it is my favorite lecture, |
| 1:01.6 | and I think because of that, now, I'm not an economist, although I really do like the economic |
| 1:07.0 | literature, and I do appreciate talks on economics, I've always liked it. But at the same time, |
| 1:13.3 | I think it's my favorite lecture because of that. Because, you know, once you, we're both students of |
| 1:18.8 | politics and we understand that there's an order in how goods are ordered in the world. And although |
| 1:26.1 | money is important, wealth is important. It is not the |
| 1:30.1 | highest good. And I think this comes across very clearly in this lecture. And also that any economic |
| 1:36.8 | system, it doesn't matter which one it is, depends on the people being moral and religious people. |
... |
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