" When the contentious questions are mainly economic (put aside such inflammatory but mainly noneconomic matters as capital punishment or abortion) they tend to fall into two grand classes: one relates to the maintenance of the essential character of the economic order (often, capitalism versus socialism); the other has to do with distributional conflicts within the economic order (often, the rich versus the poor). The two grand classes of issues share a common capacity to call forth moral, as opposed to instrumental, considerations. They involve not simply questions of what is technically better or worse; rather, they are seen to involve good and evil.32 Those who propose to deal “pragmatically” with such questions are doomed to fail— "

― Robert Higgs , Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government