. . . But Some Never Lost Theirs

Arecent news article about Food Lion pulling ahead of Ukrop's in the grocery wars noted that the local chain is running the race with a couple of ankle weights. It doesn't sell beer or wine, and it isn't open on Sun day -- the biggest shopping day of the week.

And therein lies a lesson for both liberals and conservatives: Money isn't everything.

Contrary to left-wing dogma, businessmen are not, by definition, rapacious, amoral incarnations of greed who would sell their own mothers to make a fast buck. Most companies abide by the principles of fairness and integrity. Some -- like Ukrop's and the fast-food chain Chik-fil-A -- go even further than the generally accepted norms of business ethics, forgoing huge revenue opportunities because their scruples tell them to.

Of course, that fact also should remind believers in the high church of market economics that some tenets of their faith might not hold up, either. Advocates of laissez-faire argue, for instance, that regulations forbidding racial discrimination in lending are unnecessary because rational economic actors will not pass up a profit opportunity for the sake of irrational bigotry. Yet if businessmen can give up revenue for a good cause they fervently believe in, then they also can give up revenue for a bad one.

On the other hand, it's possible that in time the Ukrop's story might redeem both ends of the ideological spectrum. Both left and right could argue that although an individual business might defy the god of profit for a while, it can't do so forever. For instance, laissez-faire economists might concede that a racist bank will not make loans to blacks, period -- but counter that because other banks will eagerly grab the customers the racist bank turns away, the racist bank eventually will have to change its ways or go out of business. The profit motive ultimately will prevail -- one way or another.

If Ukrop's continues to lose market share to its competitors, it eventually might be compelled to open on Sunday, to sell booze, or to do both. If that happens, then the ideologues who either love or hate the free market will be able to say, "toldja so." But it hasn't yet.

AND PERHAPS it never will. Superstores haven't killed off specialty shops, after all. Borders and Barnes & Noble haven't killed off the Christian bookstore. Market segmentation means not every store has to be everything to everybody. Generalization is dangerous.

That's a generalization, too, but one that was brought home recently in a local symposium about the Reagan era. The Reagan years commonly are viewed as a "Decade of Greed." But in 1992, a study appeared in The Public Interest casting the cliché into doubt.

The University of California at Irvine's Richard McKenzie crunched some numbers on charitable giving and found the following: Between 1950 and 1980, donations to charity rose at a compound annual interest rate of 3.3 percent. From 1980 to 1989, they rose at a rate of 5.1 percent -- or more than half again as fast as during the previous three decades.

Now, one could try to explain this away as rich people assuaging their consciences, or trying to dodge taxes, or people trying to offset the human misery caused by Reagan's ostensible habit of grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt with his boot-heel. Except that it wasn't just rich people who gave more; the Reagan tax cuts actually made charitable giving more expensive -- and why would a society suddenly consumed by selfish greed care about the plight of poor folk, anyway?

People, let alone societies and eras, aren't one-dimensional. As Arthur Brooks explains in Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, political conservatives, particularly religious ones, give more to charity than secular liberals. (Not just financially, either: Brooks finds that "if liberals gave blood like conservatives do, the blood supply in the U.S. would jump by about 45 percent.") They give simply because they think it's the right thing to do, and because they think taking care of the unfortunate is a job for neighbors, not the government.

What does it mean that members of the party of greed turn out to be more generous? Maybe simply that money matters, but it doesn't matter above everything else -- and certainly not on Sunday.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .