MAILBAG: On the moral responsibility of individual capitalists

A Marxist understanding of politics undermines liberalism's most basic intuitions about personal responsibility.

From the mailbag:

Carl, you wrote it’s “plausible” to call [UnitedHealth CEO] Brian Thompson just a cog in the capitalist machine. Don’t you think he’s responsible for all of the pain and suffering he’s caused?

This email is in response to my recent post Was CEO Brian Thompson a killer? I didn’t answer it in that article because I was more interested in simply focusing everyone on that question among the many this killing has raised; but if readers are interested in my thoughts about this, the best response I have is “it depends.”