A free society is, in fact, not free. That is, a free society does not come free. More intellect, more effort, more decentralized power is required to sustain a free market order than the concentrated power needed to uphold an authoritarian society. In a free social order every person must work daily to think and do right. In despotism only the rulers must. For a just market order to flourish, every person-despite the human passions of avarice, ambition, and lust-must summon the will to respect the human and property rights of his neighbor. Individuals in a free society must govern themselves so that a limited self-government of the whole might lightly regulate the general welfare of all.

We learn from history and experience that people can be moved to do the lawful thing primarily by two social mechanisms-either a morally grounded conscience, or by the external threat of civil and criminal penalties. If a majority is moved to do the lawful thing only by coercion, penalties, and jail, then who would deny that a free society must in time become an armed camp of police, prosecutors, and prisons? As we learned from the late, unlamented, Soviet Union, the cynical admonition, "follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman around the corner" is no practical rule for a durable free society. When moral anarchy prevails, there can never be enough policemen! But a free society can remain free; the creative mind of man can achieve its loftiest aims; capitalism can be sustained in the long run, only if the vast majority is moved by the inner dictates of a well-formed conscience. Such a conscience, by itself, enables every person in the community to transact business without fear of unaccountable theft and bodily harm. The well-formed conscience is the simplest, lowest cost, and most efficient regulator of a free social order.

Where is such a conscience formed? I think this is the supervening question of a durable social policy. Conscience is primarily formed in children by the love and fair-minded instruction of their parents, their family, their teachers, their neighbors, the laws of their country and the faith of their fathers and mothers. It is the gift of love, from parents to children, that quickens into action the law written in their own hearts. It is the indispensable long run gyroscope of a free society.

Many cynical contemporaries hold to the spurious idea that the long run is a phantom, even that capitalism can be sustained without an objective moral code forming the conscience of every citizen. "In the long run we are all dead," John Maynard Keynes taught three generations of modern economists and college graduates. This dismissal of the long run may have come easily to Keynes. He seemed never to have been interested in children. Concern for children brings the long run into view, and with it the profound challenge to form and maintain the Judeo-Christian conscience- and its dependent economic institutions, called capitalism.