Yes, says the Tory-ish English philosopher John Gray. Excerpts:

[T]he larger fact is that the free market works to undermine the virtues that maintain the bourgeois life. When savings are melting away being thrifty can be the road to ruin. It’s the person who borrows heavily and isn’t afraid to declare bankruptcy that survives and goes on to prosper. When the labour market is highly mobile it’s not those who stick dutifully to their task that succeed, it’s people who are always ready to try something new that looks more promising. In a society that is being continuously transformed by market forces, traditional values are dysfunctional and anyone who tries to live by them risks ending up on the scrapheap.

More:

Today there is no haven of security. The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead. This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism and I think it’s going to be with us in any future that’s realistically imaginable. We’re only part of the way through a financial crisis that will turn many more things upside down.

There is no way you can call yourself a conservative and be in favor of an unrestricted free market — for precisely the reasons Gray cites here. Yet we’ve tried socialism, and we know that it is worse. Capitalism is what we’ve got, and no thinking person wants to replace it. Still, if it is going to be saved, our politicians have got to figure out ways to increase social stability — which is to say, pursue socially conservative economic politicies — amid the market gyrations.

As I said in an earlier post, it’s going to be a long, long time before my wife and I feel confident enough to go into debt for a house. We have no debt now, but we lost a pile when we sold our house in our 2010 move — a move we undertook in part because I lost faith in a long-term future in newspaper journalism (sadly, today there has been yet another round of layoffs at my old newspaper; God bless those folks). I no longer believe it will be possible to chart out a stable career path for myself, not in my field. This is going to increasingly be the case for most people. Now, my wife and I are the kind of people who would be in a good position to buy a house. Great credit, no debt, young family. But to take that risk now, even with interest rates so low, seems crazy. Who knows what the next year or two will bring economically, much less the next 30 years? But you know, if we remain renters, it will be harder ever to put down roots in a place … which is not necessarily a bad thing, from a strictly economic point of view, because I will have the flexibility to move if I have to for the sake of finding a job to support my family.

This is the new normal, most likely. There’s nothing conservative about it. Why aren’t conservative politicians talking about this?