Thank you David Brooks for naming the need for an ethic of “enough”

David Brooks and I don’t always see eye to eye, but his Oped in the NYTimes today is a ten. In The Next Culture War he speaks pragmatically and strongly for the moral imperative of material restraint – a stand that will make strange (and wonderful) bedfellows. He says:

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small…A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

Why the need for a “moral revival” now? Well, the signature of the US has been, since the beginning, two values that restrain one another: greed and frugality.