The fouled and weary sea

"We were awash in wealth, or something that looked like wealth, and the secret of unleashing yet more of it was adherence to the notion that markets were in some sense free, and should be even freer so that this perfect rationality and maximization of utility could have its full, beneficent effect.  Simply stand out of the way, and the best of all possible world will emerge on its own, more or less inevitably.

The best of all worlds might not have been to one's taste, since it seemed to move toward its fulfillment with a vigorous disregard for the fragility of the plant and the finitude of its resources, and since it was driven by a calculus of self-interest that was materialist in the strictest sense of the word.  Child labor on one continent produced a plethora of cheap and disposable gadgets for another continent, which fouled and wearied the sea in their transit.  No matter.  There was a rationality in it all that made doubts about the value of it, objections to the destructiveness of it, sentimental and retrograde.  And unenlightened."

 - Marilynne Robinson, When I was a Child I Read Books: Essays