Excerpt:
"In a democracy with a free economy, the Common Good is the responsibility of the citizenry, not a dictatorship. In the current zeitgeist, the Invisible Hand of free markets is understood as a magical force that automatically generates the Common Good out of the churn of everyone aiming to get rich or die trying.

In other words, the Common Good is somebody else's responsibility: there's no need for shared sacrifices, the economy and society take care of themselves as we all get rich or die trying.

This isn't how a society actually works. Somebody has to mind the store of social capital that enables us to focus our energy on individual sacrifices made on our own behalf.

The single-minded pursuit of greed does not magically organize the economy or society to serve everyone's interests equally. As Adam Smith explained, capitalism and the social order both require a moral foundation, which in a free society takes the form of civic virtue: it is the responsibility of every citizen who is able to contribute to the social capital that serves us all to do so not in response to an oppressive state but of their own free will.

The Founding Fathers understood this and feared the decay of civic virtue as a threat to democracy. This was one reason why many of those active in the early decades of the American Experiment favored restricting voting to the class of citizenry who had the biggest stake in maintaining the nation's stock of social capital: the landed / commercial elites."