A Fox or Two

I'm reading Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture, which gives a history and analysis of seven critical battles in the rise of Western power. I just finished the chapter on the Battle of Lepanto (1571), where a combined southern European navy defeated the Ottoman navy near Corinth. Hanson describes the role that a developed capitalism played in the West's superior and victorious fleet.

I thought his thoughts on why people resent capitalism were interesting:

"The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it" (p272).