Does the free market corrode moral character? (continued) Yes, too often. Critics rightfully grasp that the free market undermines the traditional, local arrangements that people depend on to teach and sustain morality. Consider especially the experience of children. hey irst learn morality from their families, with whom they are most emotionally bonded. Love attaches children to moral conventions and arouses essential moral emotions like sympathy and guilt. In a preindustrial society, these moral habits are further reinforced by the tribe or the village, as well as by religious institutions and folk tales. he developing child is surrounded by a kind of conspiracy of moral teachers, demonstrating lessons of character by word and (less reliably) by deed. Market economies weaken this cultural conspiracy in three powerful ways. First, they introduce novelty, which challenges established cultural habits and moral verities. Second, they stir up individual desire in ways that can easily weaken the self-discipline and moral obligations that make free markets lourish. (As the sociologist Daniel Bell famously argued, markets can end up cannibalizing their own moral infrastructure.) And third, as they advance, market economies become more likely to treat the yet-to-be-socialized child as an autonomous, adult-like actor rather than as an immature dependent. hey often turn the pliant student of moral obligations into a skeptical, even resistant peer. Two of the most inluential new products of the 20th century, the automobile and the television, perfectly illustrate the market’s potential to dilute moral consensus and personal loyalties. By exporting insiders and importing outsiders, the car reduced the sway of the local community and its moral requirements. By taking fathers to jobs far from home, it accelerated the separation of work from family life. Indeed, market evolution was the direct cause of the “separate spheres” that placed mothers at the helm of domestic life and fathers at a distant workplace. he car also scattered family members (uncles and aunts to California, grandparents to Florida) who previously might have buttressed the child’s developing moral sense. It increased opportunities for anonymity, which made it easier to escape shame and embarrassment over violations of moral behavior, and allowed individuals, especially teenagers, to avoid the judgmental eyes of adults. In the early 20th century, a juvenile court judge, noting the unexpected use to which young people were putting the new invention, grumbled that the horseless carriage was nothing more than a “brothel on wheels.” he cultural disruption wrought by television, and particularly by advertising, has been even more troubling than that of the car. Before the advent of the small screen, families could expect to do most of their moralizing work safe from commercial intrusions. Family life could be imagined as a “haven in a heartless world,” in the words of the sociologist Christopher Lasch. Salesmen may have come to River City, but they had to knock on doors and ply their band uniforms and instruments to domestic gatekeepers, usually mothers. Television allowed the salesmen to push past parents and sit down right next to the unmoralized child, tempting him with pleasures against which he had few defenses. More generally, television uses fantasies of revenge, violent mayhem, sexual license, and material excess to lure viewers, young and old. Of course, today the Internet is usurping television’s long-held status as the chief sponsor of hedonism, materialism, and anarchic egotism. If broadcast television had censors who clumsily expressed a cultural consensus about acceptable public speech, the World Wide Web knows no bounds. Moreover, just as the automobile gave Kay S. Hymowitz