It's rare in politics to get anything approaching a virtuous bidding war.
When Marvel Studios began casting "Captain America" in late 2009, it did not initially consider Mr. Evans for the title character, a virtuous World War II hero who eventually finds himself in the present day.
When initiated for "good" reasons, war becomes virtuous, bloodless, and costless.
Just as the movie was seen as a classic allegory for the cold war, when the virtuous American sheriff tried to police a paranoid world with enemies lurking everywhere, so it has been cited by some conservatives who like to see it as an allegory of Bush II's "heroic" unilateralism.
Tilburina, a virtuous maid, laments the costs of war, Don Whiskerandos is captured and falls in love with her, and a battle is farcically enacted.
That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being "religious".
There have been cases when big government has encouraged virtuous behavior (in the U.S. during World War II), and cases when big government has encouraged self-indulgence and irresponsibility (modern Greece).
Anthony Blunt was the son of a vicar, an Evangelical Anglican who was in charge of the British Embassy church in Paris during the First World War, and of a shy, virtuous, dominant mother.
In times of war, it is seen as virtuous to defend ones country and fight ones enemies, yet this will in some contexts contradict legal but consistently contradict moral virtue.
The structural reforms begun in the depression decade of the 1930s generated just this kind of virtuous cycle in the three decades after World War II.
This is not to say that to be virtuous is to be the victor in a constant and permanent war with ineradicable evil impulses.
