Bethany McLean ’92 (“Devils in the Details,” September 2011) is trying to wake Americans up to what is being done to our country. Something is profoundly wrong when so much wealth is directed into speculation and asset capture instead of real asset creation. We have forgotten that the economy is a tool, a set of organizing principles enforced with laws, to provide the Utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number.” Instead, we made it a god, a Moloch to which we sacrifice the old, the young, the weak, the ill, the poor, to feed its insatiable maw. Laws can be changed and the economy returned to servitude instead of rapacious mastery. This is the task of our generation. Bethany and courageous folk like her are showing the way.

Ron Hodges ’80, Montgomery Village, Md.