Markets and ethics
Uh… no. Jimmy, an element seems to be missing from your analysis: what it is we are trying to exchange. This is not a matter of taste or ideology. We have established markets work really well for private goods with no externalities – say, potatoes. Not much debate there. However, they don’t work as well for collective goods, or private goods with externalities – say, clean air or the continued existence of the Welsh language. More debate here, but I am hoping the “Einstein test” (only a fool keeps doing the same thing expecting different results) is enough to at least agree that in practice markets that do not work on their own cannot be made to work.
There are other two interesting things that I think merit consideration:
- Markets do have an ethical value. In most of the philosophical literature I know of, that value is overwhelmingly positive. John Stuart Mill thought commerce to be "the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race" and that it would "rapidly render war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it". Graeber agrees, and raves about the civility of the muslim trading cities of the Indian Ocean pre-Reconquista. He also adds an interesting spin: in those cities, what passed for the state (armed desert bedouins who mistrusted city life and culture) refused to enforce contracts. If your business partner screws you over, that's your problem, you are on your own. This ended up fostering a climate in which reputation capital was very important, and commerce never led to violence, public or private. Now that we have translated his masterful piece on merchant communities, I would love to have the opinion of @lasindias on this.
- However, market logic tends to "bleed" out of its original context. Graeber (again) has a very interesting story about the Nuer, a tribe of pastoralists originally from Southern Ethiopia (coincidentally, I am in Addis Ababa as I write this and I see the occasional Nuer on the streets – they are hard to miss, very tall and almost black-skinned, many Ethiopian models tend to be Nuer). The Nuer, as many African tribes, had a currency that was not used to buy everyday things, but only offered as compensation for what can never be fully compensated: human life, specifically the life of young women of fertile age. The idea is: you can't buy a bride, if you marry my sister you have to offer me yours. But then, market logic kicks in: suppose I don't like your sister, or she is three years old. What happens then? You give me some copper rods, symbolizing the debt of one young woman your clan has with respect to mine. I can then go to your second cousin and reclaim his sister. But then what happens is: someone becomes economically successful in "normal" goods, and accepts payment from a struggling partner in copper rods. At this point, the crafty businessman owns a woman from a clan without having to give one. Fast forwards ten generations, add European- and Arab-led slave trade to Africa and – you guessed it – you get a full fledged market for human lives. Some stewardship! Graeber's argument is complex, and my stickman rendition does not do it justice. But it did leave me wary of applying market logic to anything that is not a private good, no externalities.