The good Rod Dreher claims, I think, to have detected signs of crunchiness in my favorable comments last week on that excellent article in the NYT on “freakoutnomics.” If he did, that’s a misperception. My feet remain unshod by Birkenstock, my stomach is unfed by guano-fertilized arugula, my soul is sated by the OC.

The real point of the NYT piece, at least as I understood it, was that, in a climate of job insecurity and pension destruction, here-and-now consumerism is not by itself enough to bring the piece of mind that is so essential to happiness. That’s something that should be pretty obvious. What most–not all–people want is a sense of security, a sense that they know where they are going, and that they have a reasonable chance of arriving there in one piece, having been treated fairly along the way.

The paradox we have to face is that the free market (particularly, as it operates in the U.S.) has by any measure done more any than any other economic system to build the prosperity that is such a key part in creating that sense of security, but that at the same time its logic is now moving in a way that is destroying the bonds, institutions, feelings of collective responsibility and shared values that, at some level, also play a part in creating that idea of community (dread word) that also has a crucial role to play in maintaining the notion (even, sometimes, if it’s an illusion) of security.

Topically enough, you see this nicely illustrated by the WSJ wing of the open borders crowd. At root, their argument appears to rest on the idea that people are little more than a factor of production (so import more to reduce the cost of labor). In a way that’s right, but of course, that’s wrong. Humans are more than simple cogs in the economic machine. Forget that, and we’re finished.

The free market alone is not the answer.

And now, Rod, I must go and buy some chemically bathed hot dogs off the local street vendor. I’m late for lunch…