Throughout the twentieth century liberalism has been pulled in two directions at once: toward the market and(notwithstanding its initial misgivings about government) towards the state. On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle--the cardinal principle of liberalism--that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speak for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being in a world in which there are no values except those of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighborhood, and the church all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market. The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself: schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship into professional careerism, social work into the scientific management of poverty. Inexorably, it remodels every institution in its own image.

from The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy