As Donald Boudreaux has recently written, "If all that 'common good capitalism" means is capitalism as understood and championed over the past 250 years by liberal scholars… this new name serves no good purpose…it suggests (what I'll call) 'true capitalism'…doesn't promote the common good…Yet…advocates of true capitalism (including me), do indeed believe that true capitalism promotes the common good. And to back our case, we've got lots of sound theory and solid evidence."

Leonard Read, founder and guiding light of the Foundation for Economic Education, "the granddaddy of all libertarian organizations," was one of the strongest voices for there being no difference between true capitalism and capitalism that advances the common good for decades. He most directly addressed such issues in his "Exalting the Common Good," Chapter 13 in his 1982 The Path of Duty, the last book he published.

Read started with an inspirational quote, at least for those who believe in freedom, from George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1922 to 1938:

To sustain the individual freedom of action contemplated by the Constitution is not to strike down the common good, but to exalt it; for surely the good of society as a whole cannot be better served than by the preservation against arbitrary restraint of the liberties of its constituent members.

Unfortunately, Justice Sutherland's wisdom is a far cry from what most people today, or when Read wrote, seem to believe.

Most citizens in today's U.S.A. haven't the slightest understanding of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Sutherland, on the other hand, understood these writings as well as did the authors of these politico-economic, spiritual documents: the greatest in all history! The basic premise that separates the American experiment in Man-Government relationships from all others is contained in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.