Otteson makes a Smithian case:
What the free-enterprise system—Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty”—proposes, then, is the adoption of those political and economic institutions that manage to combine not one but two great moral imperatives: allowing people the opportunity to rise from the impoverished existence that seems to be humanity’s miserable, if equal, status quo; and respecting people as the irreplaceable and precious individuals that they are. That is a sublime conjunction of material prosperity and moral agency, the likes of which no other system of political economy has ever contemplated, let alone achieved.
Capitalism is not perfect. But no system created by human beings is, or ever will be, perfect. The most we can hope for is continuing gradual improvement. To this end, we must honestly examine the prospects of the available systems of political economy. The benefits of the free-enterprise society are enormous and unprecedented; they have meant the difference between life and death for hundreds of millions of people and have afforded a dignity to populations that are otherwise forgotten. We should wish to extend these benefits rather than to curtail them.
Would you say that the United States political economy is a “free-enterprise system”? That Smith's “system of natural liberty” tends to function rhetorically as a justification of capitalism-as-we-know-it suggests some confusion.
via Issues 2012 | An Audacious Promise: The Moral Case for Capitalism.
Will Wilkinson 