MARKETS AND MORALITY

From Emphasis Added:

What’s been lost is a sense of civil virtue and recognition of the value of community. This is not by accident. It’s the result of a deliberate ideological campaign by free-market conservatives to undermine the social assumptions that lead to public policies such as corporate regulation, progressive taxation and redistributive government programs, which they oppose on principle. At some point, economic conservatives knew they would continue to lose these debates on political grounds so long as citizens felt that their rights and responsibilities as members of a community entitled them to set boundaries on individual and corporate behavior, and to appropriate a share of private wealth to provide for those at the bottom. The solution was to valorize individuals over communities – a common theme in libertarian-conservative ideology – and position the notion of the “free market” as some kind of abstract force of nature, rather than a human institution subject to human rules and in service to human goals.

That this has largely been accomplished is not a complete surprise. The free market has many benefits and has brought rising prosperity and the benefits of innovation to vastly improve quality of life in all kinds of ways. Government efforts to regulate its activities often have unintended consequences. The changes it forces on communities are often for the better. Occasionally, its internal self-correcting mechanisms work as intended. Defending it, therefore, is not an intellectually-disreputable position, or even necessarily an immoral one.

The problem is that to defend it down the line, you need to downplay a lot of human suffering and ignore a raft of indubitably negative social consequences.

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Well, well. What do you know? There actually is a morality to economics--of course, you wouldn't know this from reading your high school economics textbook. Essays like this need to be trumpeted loudly: for too long we've all been told that cutthroat neo-liberal philosophy is the only possible, workable vision for human existence. The guy who wrote this, Rob Salkowitz, does quite a good job of concisely verbalizing what seems to be so hard to get out during conversation with conservative know-it-alls; indeed, he uses much less column space than I did when I hit on the subject last year.

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