Carnival of the Capitalists also links to Vinod's Blog, which has a post on the American faith in democracy and capitalism as being the right thing for everyone. A few years ago at a meeting on doing business in China, I found it amusing that several of the businessmen felt a missionary zeal in bringing our business practices to the Chinese. I agree that democracy and free markets are generally a good thing, or at least the least of the various evils.

The business people are hardly unique in feeling that their own job is making an important contribution; despite all the cynicism, a lot of people still seem to feel the same way. (I don't feel that way now, in my marginalized field of study, and I suspect I'm too much of a realist/cynic/pessimist to feel that way no matter what my job was.) But everyone's in their own little world. All too often the businessmen look down on the liberal arts intellectuals as engaged in parasitic activities, while the intellectuals look down on what they see as money-grubbers engaged in parasitic activities, and the media mostly only reports the bad news about everything, while the reporters seem to think they're better than everybody else, even as they continually display their ignorance.

Hey, now I feel better!