Knight worried, in par tic u lar, about the moral life of marketcentered societies. It was neither common nor desirable, he observed, for individuals to decide how to act on the basis of rational calculations of their own fi nancial interests. Even those at the highest levels of business enterprise pursued profi t more out of a love of competition than a desire for monetary gain. He wrote in Risk, Uncertainty and Profi t that they “consume in order to produce rather than produce in order to consume, in so far as they do either. The real motive is the desire to excel, to win at a game, the biggest and most fascinating game yet invented, not excepting even statecraft and war.” Indeed, actions pursued purely for interests that economists would defi ne as “rational” were widely considered abhorrent. The “rational, economic, criticism of values gives results repugnant to all common sense,” he observed in his 1922 essay “Ethics and the Economic Interpretation,” and the “economic man is the selfi sh, ruthless object of moral condemnation.” Market societies encourage such undesirable behaviors while discouraging the production of values not refl ected by the price mechanism. … Knight believed that a capitalist society could sustain itself only to the extent that it consisted of individuals whose behavior departed from the norms it incentivized.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 95