http://articles.marketwatch.com/2013-04-29/commentary/38851356_1_capitalism-market-triumphalism-values
Commentary: In a Market Society, everything is for sale
April 29, 2013|Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
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SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, capitalism is working ... for
the Forbes 1,000 Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000
to 1,426 recently. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s
wealth, while the income of American workers stagnated.
For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion live on
less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding to 10 billion
by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling revolutions, wars, adding
more billionaires and more folks surviving on two bucks a day.
Over the years we’ve explored the reasons capitalism blindly continues on
its self-destructive path. Recently we found someone who brilliantly
explains why free-market capitalism is destined to destroy the world,
absent a historic paradigm shift: That is Harvard philosopher Michael
Sandel, author of the new best-seller, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral
Limits of Markets,” and his earlier classic, “Justice: What’s the Right
Thing to Do?”
For more than three decades Sandel’s been explaining how capitalism is
undermining America’s moral values and why most people are in denial of the
impact. His classes are larger than a thousand although you can take his
*Harvard
“Justice” course online* <http://www.justiceharvard.org/>. Sandel recently
summarized his ideas about capitalism in the Atlantic. In “What Isn’t for
Sale?” he writes:
“Without being fully aware of the shift, Americans have drifted from having
a market economy to becoming a market society ... where almost everything
is up for sale ... a way of life where market values seep into almost every
sphere of life and sometimes crowd out or corrode important values,
non-market values.”
Sandel should be required reading for all Wall Street insiders as well as
America’s 95 million Main Street investors. Here’s a condensed version:
*In one generation, market ideology consumed America’s collective spirit*
“The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of
market faith and deregulation — an era of market triumphalism,” says
Sandel. “The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the
key to prosperity and freedom.”
And in the 1990s with the “market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and
Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the
primary means for achieving the public good.”
Today “almost everything can be bought and sold.” Today “markets, and
market values, have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not
arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if
it came upon us,” says Sandel.
http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/300969.html
Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
Mon Apr 29, 2013 10:50PM
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Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
Yes, capitalism is working ... for the Forbes 1,000 Global Billionaires
whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,426 recently. Billionaires
control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, while the income of
American workers stagnated.
For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion live on
less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding to 10 billion
by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling revolutions, wars, adding
more billionaires and more folks surviving on two bucks a day.
Over the years we’ve explored the reasons capitalism blindly continues on
its self-destructive path. Recently we found someone who brilliantly
explains why free-market capitalism is destined to destroy the world,
absent a historic paradigm shift: That is Harvard philosopher Michael
Sandel, author of the new best-seller, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral
Limits of Markets,” and his earlier classic, “Justice: What’s the Right
Thing to Do?”
For more than three decades Sandel’s been explaining how capitalism is
undermining America’s moral values and why most people are in denial of the
impact. His classes are larger than a thousand although you can take his
Harvard “Justice” course online. Sandel recently summarized his ideas about
capitalism in the Atlantic. In “What Isn’t for Sale?” he writes:
“Without being fully aware of the shift, Americans have drifted from having
a market economy to becoming a market society ... where almost everything
is up for sale ... a way of life where market values seep into almost every
sphere of life and sometimes crowd out or corrode important values,
non-market values.”
Sandel should be required reading for all Wall Street insiders as well as
America’s 95 million Main Street investors. Here’s a condensed version:
In one generation, market ideology consumed America’s collective spirit
“The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of
market faith and deregulation - an era of market triumphalism,” says
Sandel. “The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the
key to prosperity and freedom.”
And in the 1990s with the “market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and
Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the
primary means for achieving the public good.”
Today “almost everything can be bought and sold.” Today “markets, and
market values, have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not
arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if
it came upon us,” says Sandel.
Over the years, “market values were coming to play a greater and greater
role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the
logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It
increasingly governs the whole of life.”
Examples: New free-market capitalism trapped in American brains
Yes, it’s everywhere: “Markets to allocate health, education, public
safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection,
recreation, procreation, and other social goods unheard-of 30 years ago.
Today, we take them largely for granted.”
Examples ... for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons ... outsourcing war to
private contractors ... police forces by private guards “almost twice the
number of public police officers” ... drug “companies aggressive marketing
of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice ... prohibited in
most other countries.”
More: Ads in “public schools ... buses ... corridors ... cafeterias ...
naming rights to parks and civic spaces ... blurred boundaries, within
journalism, between news and advertising ... marketing of ‘designer’ eggs
and sperm for assisted reproduction ... buying and selling ... the right to
pollute ... campaign finance in the U.S. that comes close to permitting the
buying and selling of elections.”
Why should you worry? Capitalism breeds corruption and inequality
But the 2008 crash challenged our faith in free-market capitalism: “The
financial crisis did more than cast doubt on the ability of markets to
allocate risk efficiently. It also prompted a widespread sense that markets
have become detached from morals.”
Then comes the big question: So what? “Why worry that we are moving toward
a society in which everything is up for sale?” Two big reasons concern
Sandel:
First, inequality: “Where everything is for sale, life is harder for those
of modest means.” If wealth just bought things, yachts, sports cars, and
fancy vacations, inequalities wouldn’t matter much. “But as money comes to
buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.”
Second, corruption: “Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt
them ... markets don’t only allocate goods, they express and promote
certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.” Also “corrupt the
meaning of citizenship. Economists often assume that markets ... do not
affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their
mark.”
Warning: Morals are new commodities auctioned to highest bidder
Sandel warns that our new dominating capitalist mind-set is crowding out
“nonmarket values worth caring about. When we decide that certain goods may
be bought and sold,” they become “commodities, as instruments of profit and
use.”
But “not all goods are properly valued in this way ... Slavery was
appalling because it treated human beings as a commodity, to be bought and
sold at auction,” failing to “value human beings as persons, worthy of
dignity and respect; it sees them as instruments of gain and objects of
use.”
Nor do we permit “children to be bought and sold, no matter how difficult
the process of adoption can be.” The same with citizenship ... jury duty
... voting rights ... “we believe that civic duties are not private
property but public responsibilities. To outsource them is to demean them,
to value them in the wrong way.”
Many things should never be commodities.
America transforms from mere market economy to new market society
Sandel’s core message is simple: “The good things in life are degraded if
turned into commodities. So to decide where the market belongs, and where
it should be kept at a distance, we have to decide how to value the goods
in question - health, education, family life, nature, art, civic duties,
and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic
ones.”
Unfortunately, we never had that debate during the 30-year rise of “market
triumphalism. As a result, without quite realizing it - without ever
deciding to do so - we drifted from having a market economy to being a
market society.”
And “the difference is this: A market economy is a tool ... for organizing
productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market
values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social
relations are made over in the image of the market.” The difference is
profound.
Not only did the debate never happen. It may never. Why? Because
politicians aren’t up to debating values, may be pushing us past the point
of no return.
Today’s “political argument consists mainly of shouting matches on cable
television, partisan vitriol on talk radio and ideological food fights on
the floor of Congress,” says Sandel, so “it’s hard to imagine a reasoned
public debate about such controversial moral questions as the right way to
value procreation, children, education, health, the environment,
citizenship and other goods.”
Dysfunctional politicians pushing Americans past point of no return
Can we change? “The appeal of using markets to put a price on public
values, is that there’s no judgment on the preferences they satisfy.”
Debate is unnecessary. Markets don’t “ask whether some ways of valuing
goods are higher, or worthier, than others. If someone is willing to pay
for sex, or a kidney ... the only question the economist asks is ‘How
much?’ Markets ... don’t discriminate between worthy preferences and
unworthy ones.” Markets may never draw the line, but do politicians, in
secret?
What is certain: Capitalism is eliminating moral values, as Nobel economist
Milton Friedman and capitalism’s philosopher Ayn Rand had been preaching to
the generation. As Sandel puts it: “Each party to a deal decides for him-
or herself what value to place on the things being exchanged. This
nonjudgmental stance toward values lies at the heart of market reasoning,
and explains much of its appeal.”
But unfortunately, market capitalism “has exacted a heavy price ... drained
public discourse of moral and civic energy.”
The good professor is a great teacher, with only one glaring flaw in his
logic: he’s too idealistic, too quixotic. You don’t have to be a fatalist
to know that without a total economic collapse, market capitalists -
including 1,426 billionaires, Wall Street bankers, hedgers, lobbyists and
every other special interest getting rich off the new market society - will
never voluntarily surrender their control over the American political
system.
Rather, they will blindly continue down their self-destructive path with an
absolute conviction they are divinely guided by the Invisible Hand of Adam
Smith, and perhaps even God.
Meanwhile, we have no choice but wait patiently till the collapse,
anxiously aware that our bizarre political system will just keep degrading
America’s moral values, pricing, buying, selling, trading morals like
commodities, because in the final analysis everything has a price and
everyone has a price in our hot new exciting Market Society.
AHT/AGB
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