Xenophage
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- Joined
- Jan 10, 2008
- Messages
- 3,098
The free market operates under the assumption that everyone is out to achieve the greatest personal benefit at the lowest personal cost. This goes for buyers as well as sellers, and for employees as well as employers. There's a basic moral premise involved: people have the right to be selfish. If you disagree with that moral premise, you will have an extremely difficult time with the notion of a free market. If you don't think people have the right to be selfish - and I mean *totally* selfish, as long as they engage one another by persuasion and mutual agreement - you will have a moral contradiction with the free market. When I say "free market" I mean "laissez faire." You'll come to the conclusion that you probably believe in *some* government regulation, ownership of production, etc., in order to curtail people's natural tendencies to be selfish and greedy. Maybe you think some selfishness is okay, but only in moderation.
If so, you should recognize that the acceptance of such a moral principle necessitates the sanction of physical violence. If someone is being greedy, you will have to threaten to shoot them, beat them with clubs, burn them on a stake or throw them in jail in order to force them to act the way you want them to. That is the essence of government. Every law, no matter how seemingly trivial, from seatbelt laws to an obscure code regulating how many workers you can hire each month, is backed by the same threat of force as every other law: Pay a fine, or go to jail. Resist arrest and die.
You can make people more equal by beating down the top, but you cannot elevate society that way. Is your goal, in eliminating or controlling selfishness and greed, to improve the plight of the poor man, or simply to bring down the rich man? Equality, or progress? The two goals are mutually exclusive, which I'll demonstrate briefly, so you can't have it both ways.
When two people, motivated by greed, trade an item for money, the net result is more than a simple transfer of wealth. Neither party would consent to such a trade unless they believed that they were obtaining greater value in exchange for what they gave up. A person who buys a car values the car more than the money they paid for it, and the person who sells the car values the money more than they value the car. Since economic value is completely subjective, both parties have mutually *increased* their wealth. This is why people in capitalist countries are said to "make money." Both parties have become wealthier, by their own subjective standards of value.
The same is true of employers and employees. Neither party would consent to the employment arrangement unless each considered that it would get more out of the arrangement than it cost them. The employee values their money more than their time and energy, and the employer values the employee's time and energy more than they value the money. If the money is too low, the employee won't value it more than their time and energy, and if the money is too high, the employer won't value the time and energy more than the money. Simple equations. The bottom line is: By working somewhere, you are not only increasing your personal wealth, but you are also increasing the wealth of the company. In this way, your productive achievements are added to the net wealth of an entire society.
Observe then, that the wealthy person who trades with the poor person becomes richer, and so does the poor person! IN FACT: This is the *only* manner in which wealth has ever or will ever be created, and it is the *only* manner in which the poor can elevate their standards of living. Why? Because all material human values have to come from *productive achievement.* The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the bed you sleep in, the movies you watch, the video games you play are all the result of someone, somewhere exercising their rational mind in conjunction with an expenditure of time and energy to produce that item for the sole purpose of being SELFISH and GREEDY, so they could trade it with someone else and increase their personal wealth.
Rational minds, producing and achieving great things, do not operate nearly as well when they have a gun pointed at them. Rational minds do not sanction their own victimization. Rational minds do not sacrifice the values that keep them alive in the name of mystical, irrational morality that holds that someone's *need* holds a claim upon the lives and energy of the people around them.
Ultimately, in a capitalist society there will be individuals whose personal achievements are greater than the vast majority of the rest of the population, and if they are wise with their money their wealth will accumulate to untold levels. They'll leave the rest of society in their wake. But in that wake, the rest of society will have been dragged along. From the modest day laborer to the poorest of the poor, they will have seen their personal wealth grow leaps and bounds beyond where they might have been, and where they would have been if they had attempted to stamp out the producers with laws and regulations and guns and taxes.
But this is all contingent! I've painted a picture of something that doesn't exist, because there is no completely free market in the world, and the poor people are not the only people who can use government force! The rich can do it too, and perhaps more effectively, even when they're significantly outnumbered in a democracy. We see it today, when the fat cat Wallstreet bankers get their bailouts, when the large mega corporations attempt to monopolize markets by abusing patent laws and advocating costly regulatory measures that prevent smaller start-ups from getting ahead or even forming. This is one source of the income disparity you see today. Inflation that wipes out the middle class, regulations that destroy the small investor. The poor can't get jobs in this country, but the big corporations don't have any problem finding cheap labor. They simply go overseas or import their workers through special visa programs.
So there you have it: when you get the government involved in the marketplace you end up with corporatism or socialism. It's hard to argue that either is any worse than the other, or even that terribly different, and they're essentially based on the same fallacy: that might makes right.
We need to free ourselves from each other. We need to end coercion, not create it. We need to progress together, not stagnate equally.
We need liberty.
