Posted on 03/10/2007 9:48:43 AM PST by A. Pole
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The father of modern economics, Adam Smith, wrote more than 200 years ago about the all-powerful "invisible hand" of the market. It was tough, he said, but good for all.
The late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was the great champion of the invisible hand and free markets. Governments, he said, should just let markets do their work.
Economist Duncan Foley, in his new book "Adam's Fallacy," says wait a minute. This is free market theology, he says, and it's producing a value-free society, an unequal society, an immoral society.
This hour On Point: the author of "Adam's Fallacy" meets the defenders of Adam Smith.
Quotes from the Show:
"Ultimately, material productivity comes because people are working hard. It doesn't come because they are following a particular value system or correctly playing the market." Duncan K. Foley
"I am not against markets." Duncan K. Foley
"We tend to neglect the fact that markets exist in a context created by other institutions." Duncan K. Foley
"Adam Smith also wrote a book on morals." Allan Meltzer
"To make a whole person, we don't have to do it all in the economics classroom." Allan Meltzer
You sound like an anarchist.
I suppose you could say that government causes immorality by defining what human economic activity is immoral, however, without the definition, the behavior would still exist.
What were his views on slave and opium trade? What did he think about the condition of Irish peasants?
Duncan Foley must have been born in 1989 cuz he's forgotten the values and morals a controlled market society produced.
I hope you understand the meaning of what you're talking about. What makes you think hedge funds in general cannot exit any their positions ? Do you even know what a short position is and how would one exit it ? People invested in the hedge funds meet the following characteristcs : high net worth individuals, who are investing the money they can afford to lose. High risk, high gain, potential high loss. Hence the whole 'money you can afford to lose'.
Hedge funds are speculative investments. I'm a portfolio manager for one. We trade equities derivatives in highly concentrated positions. And yes, we can get out any time we like. Not necessarily for a profit, mind you - but never the less, if we weren't present in the market, there would be so much less liquidity in the derivatives market. For every hedge fund you hear about that exploded (-70%), there's another one made the investors 100-120%. We did 32.78% of the portfolio in February when DOW crashed those 416 pts.
LOL. I have never heard anyone claim that limited government is anarchic. Congrats. You win the Hillary Marx award of the day.
Astounding. By your logic one is either an anti-capitalist or an anti-capitalist.
You are correct that free enterprise is impossible when government prevents competition based on its support of anticompetative industry. You are wrong, however, when you claim that only corrupt government can exist in a buyers market.
What you wrote is:
Government is the cause of immorality in the market, not capitalism.
How does government cause one to act immorally in the market?
Our government is by definition not corrupt. It is what has been bought and paid for. It is what people want and are willing to tolerate.
For example, pretty much everyone not living in caves has known for quite some time that the VA is a horrible place to go for medical treatment, and yet everyone has tolerated it until the recent hoo-haw.
We get what we pay for. And those with the most money get more. And if they don't buy the government they need to advance their corporate agendas, then they are being stupid and naive, and are not being good capitalists.
It does not. Government influence in the market removes natural consumer forces thereby reducing the influence of moral dynamics.
True. But the principled capitalist wishes for all market distorting rent seeking to go away. This principled capitalist understands Public Choice Theory and just how much it (rent seeking behaviors) robs growth and prosperity from society. In the end, the principled capitalist knows that there are more opportunities for honest and profitable outcomes the more commerce/enterprise/activity can be kept from government meddling or outright control.
This is a very loaded term. By "principled" one could mean steeped in Judeo-Christian morality and ethics or one could mean fully supportive of the notion that the shareholder demands, and must receive, the best possible return for his investment.
Lawyers defending mass-murderers that they know are guilty will argue that by defending their clients to the utmost they guarantee the fairness of the entire judicial system.
Likewise corporate officers who engage in rent-seeking behavior because it is more profitable and causes the stock price to go higher may believe deep down that it would be better in the long run to increase R&D spending but who's to stop them? Deep down they may want rent-seeking behavior to be banned, but at the same time they know they are capable of lobbying to keep rent-seeking behavior legal.
If someone could come up with a new definition of "truly free markets" which would make rent-seeking illegal then I might support it. However, it seems that few people who support free markets are against all forms of rent-seeking. In fact, they get all in a tizzy when you suggest that certain activities should be made illegal.
Somehow the true believers think that all rent-seeking behavior will, in the long run, be shaken out of the system if only the government would get out of the way.
But that is pure utopian thinking in my mind.
And the profit motive has no conscience.
He, he. He makes a wish?
I hear all this whining about the immorality of the market and that 'something' should be done about it. The problem is that all the solutions (one way or the other) to this supposed problem involve sending armed men to take away even more of your stuff by force 'for your own and society's good'. How's that for immoral?
A.Pole thinks more socialism in America is the moral solution for our problems.
"The corporate market as it exists today was not the case when Adam Smith was around. If Smith could see the predatory practices and the open borders/free trade ideology that is so prevelent, he would be appalled."
I think more rcently we had an excellent advocate and spokesman for free markets. Milton Friedman. He was not appaled.
Sowell and Williams are two other widely read economists. Both not appalled.
It is good to see a classical Christian liberal on this forum like a.pole.
In 18th century Britain, Adam Smith knew nothing of what was appropriate for a “modern capitalist society”. He certainly never speculated about the society that he could not foresee in the late 19th century. By then, society had irreversibly changed from the agricultural society Smith knew well (his family were land improving farmers in Fife) into what we now call the industrial revolution.
Smith did not write about ‘capitalism’ – the word was no invented until the 1850s. He wrote about agrarian markets in which commercial markets were reviving after the long centuries of stagnation and decline following the fall of Rome 1300 years earlier.
The education reforms Smith advocated were to serve the needs of the society he knew about, not ‘a modern capitalist’ society that he nothing about. He wrote about the superior education he believed was prevalent in ancient Greece and Rome (Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.: 788) and why the state should fund education of the ‘inferior ranks of people’ to prevent them becoming misled by ‘the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which among ignorant nations, frequently occasions the most dreadful disorders’.
He continued:
‘An instructed and intelligent people besides are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. They feel themselves, each individually, more respectable, and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors. They are more disposed to examine, and more capable of seeing through, the interested complaints of faction and sedition, and they are, upon that account, less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government. In free countries, where the safety of the government depends very much upon the favourable judgement which the people may form of its conduct, it must surely be of the highest importance that they should not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously concerning it’. (Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.61: 788)
Also Smith did not like corporations much - favoring private ownership and dismissing corporations as an inferior business model.
I mean classical Christian liberal - small "L" - not the Liberal as Americans use the term these days to mean leftists. - Sorry for any confusion.
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