But Russ, it's not only a question of what we expect the market to give us. It's a question of what the market demands. Because the market, in its disinterest and neverending incentives, will not leave the landscape of morality unplundered.
To deny the moral activism of the market would be as myopic as to deny the suppression of human ingenuity & intrepidness under communism.
You can build institutions with no connection to the market. But they will be subsumed by the market unless you fight constantly against it.
You can build institutions with no connection to the market. But they will be subsumed by the market unless you fight constantly against it.
In a world with perfect human rationality, utilitarianism, and the golden rule, where people measure externalities and track the reliability of providers of goods and information, the market might bend firmly towards positive morality.
But just as communists and anarchists must answer for what communism and anarchism actually are, not merely what they would be if the world were how they would have it remade, so must free marketers answer for what the free market actually is.
The market is credit unions and angel investment. But the market is also pyramid schemes, insider trading, Wells Fargo-style consumer fraud, bait-and-switch offers, get rich quick schemes, mailers and calls that pretend to be from the government, door-to-door elder fraud.
These are not merely bad things that are bad.
They're morally devastating to the people who perpetrate them, and the people who fall for them. They're morally devastating for the families, such as 3 generations of Trumps, who confuse taking successful advantage with virtue.
They're morally devastating to the people who perpetrate them, and the people who fall for them. They're morally devastating for the families, such as 3 generations of Trumps, who confuse taking successful advantage with virtue.
And this gravity of immorality is constant. Start a small business, make it successful -- and soon, inevitably, INEVITABLY, there will be voices and pressures pulling it towards maximum permissible immorality.
That means cutting corners to the legal limit -- or, often, beyond it, taking fines and punitive repercussions as an acceptable cost. That means venue shopping, finding other jurisdictions where more immorality is permitted.
That means running competitors out of business, even if it means incurring a large loss, if it means you won't have a shop where workers could go work instead. That means colluding with other owners of capital. That means regulatory capture.
And none of this need be planned centrally; it's a pattern that happens again and again, in well-intentioned business after well-intentioned business, as if guided by an invisible hand.
There is an inexorable corrupting, degrading, denuding, rapacious drag on all moral existence in any society subject to the market and its calculus.
It makes reasonable people deliver poison to our children's bodies. It makes reasonable people live lives of lies. It makes reasonable people sell things they know are less than worthless. It makes reasonable people cheat and defraud their fellow citizens.
It makes a mockery of the sanctity of life, a mockery of communities of prayer, a mockery of the honor of hard work. And if it has a leading light like you blind to the extent of its morally disemboweling force, that's a sign that it makes a mockery of intellectualism, too.
