For some wringing their hands about the impact of present events on "the economy," some thoughts from Erich Fromm: "for the scholastic theologians, such economic categories as price and private property were part of moral theology... 1/5

Through a number of steps eighteenth-century capitalism underwent a radical change:
economic behavior became separate from ethics and human values. Indeed, the economic machine was supposed to be an autonomous entity, independent of human needs and human will. 2/5

It was a system that ran by itself and according to its own laws. The development of this economic system was no longer determined by the question: What is good for [humanity]? but by the question: What is good for the growth of the system? 3/5

One tried to hide the sharpness of this conflict by making the assumption that what was good for the growth of the system (or even for a single big corporation) was also good for the people. This construction was bolstered by an auxiliary construction: (4/5)

that the very qualities that the system required of human beings egotism, selfishness, and greed—were innate in human nature; hence, not only the system but human nature itself fostered them." From To Have or to Be, 1976 5/5