Posted on 10/08/2009 7:35:11 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Inevitably, the crisis on Wall Street has revived the never-ending notion that markets undermine morality. Oliver Stone, ever restless to recapture the days of former glory, has begun production on a sequel to the 1987 movie Wall Street, which immortalized Gordon Gekko as the symbol of markets and greed. But the debate on how markets affect morality has not always been a slam dunk for capitalism's naysayers. Matthew Arnold, especially in his influential 1868 book, Culture and Anarchy, might have been spectacularly critical, but Voltaire's passionate defense of markets, most eloquently stated in his 1734 Philosophical Letters, made him the most influential hero of the new bourgeois age. He proposed quite reasonably that peace and social harmony, as opposed to the religious strife common until then, would flow from the secular religion of the marketplace.
After two and a half centuries of this fascinating debate, I have to say that my own sympathies lie with those who have found markets, on balance, to be on the side of the angels. But I should also add that I find the specific notion that markets corrupt our morals, and determine our ethical destiny, to be a vulgar quasi-Marxist notion about as convincing as that other vulgar notion that ownership of the means of production is critical to our economic destiny. The idea that working with and within markets fuels our pursuit of self-interest, greed, avarice and self-love, in ascending orders of moral turpitude, is surely at variance with what we know about ourselves.
Yes, markets will influence values. But, far more important, the values we develop will affect in several ways how we behave in the marketplace.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Pardon!!! Of course, my fingers went off on their own. It’s Madoff.
ok, forget the hammer if it bothers you. a market is a social entity, anyways, and therefore is “alive.” its very existence is a moral proposition.
i’m sorry. what on earth are you saying? greed has already been defined. greed is not a virtue. greed had a meaning before socialists used it, and attempted to link it inextricably to capitalism, which of course is one of the more enduring modern myths.
“i’m sorry. what on earth are you saying? greed has already been defined. greed is not a virtue”
I’m saying listen closely to the dialogue. He clearly says “for lack of a better word”. You may not agree that redifining it is appropriate, but that’s what’s being done. Oliver Stone is deck-stacking, obviously, poisoning the speech before it even starts. He expects, as is reasonable, for the audience to dismiss him at the inception. Therefore, any concessions he makes to free market philosophy is pure profit. He gets to please its defenders knowing all along the fix is in.
“a market is a social entity, anyways, and therefore is ‘alive.’ its very existence is a moral proposition.”
Morality is not about what is; it’s about what Ought To Be. No living entity, be it a blade of grass or a social system, makes any moral claim by itself. As Hamlet said, there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Is this a definition?
Why? Wherefrom does this follow?
Not a definition. A way to tell the two apart. Madoff was greedy, he destroyed wealth. Gates worked in his self interest, he created wealth.
Because capitalism does not have a social component. It
functions in the economic sphere, however it needs a free
and unfettered economy to function. That’s where a democratic form of government comes in. Socialism, on the
other hand, is all encompassing: it mandates a government
controlled social structure and government controlled economy.
"Because capitalism does not have a social component."
The same is true about socialism in its strict form: one allows for individual property rights to private goods, and another for government's rights.
Democracy refers to the process of selection of a government.
"functions in the economic sphere,"
Also problematic: one speaks of a legal environment of an economy, not the other way around.
Both greed and self-interest refer to motivation, that is, something existing before the act. According to you, however, we cannot tell the two apart until we see the results, that is after the act. That is certainly problematic, isn't it?
Actually, "greed" is in the same relationship to "self-interest" as "rich" with respect to "wealthy."
The latter terms are value-neutral, and the former are their disparaging equivalents. That's all.
Also, what evidence do you have to support your claim that Maddoff destroyed wealth? Fraud is not necessarily wealth-destroying: in every transaction the amount of wealth is constant. Think about that.
This is a fascinating and complex topic. You make some interesting points. Off the top of my head, let me respond to your challenge that fraud doesn’t necessarily destroy wealth.
Every time someone is a victim of fraud he is marginally less likely to participate in the market in the future. Fewer market transactions, less wealth. In a free market it is a transient effect. The first time someone mixes sand with his wheat to get a dishonest profit the market is disrupted. If every one starts doing it, the market would adjust, prices would drop and things would get back to normal (except the end user would be stuck with the expense of separating sand from the wheat). Fraud is worst in a regulated market. Say the price of a basket of wheat is fixed at 10 moneys. Now when people start mixing sand with wheat everyone gets poorer and stays poorer.
This well may be, but (i) one has to differentiate the existing wealth and wealth creation, and (ii) the model is incomplete: one has to model explicitly choices other than abstention from the fraudulent market (the victim typically goes to some other market when suffering a setback in a given one --- witness the real estate bubble after the burst of the DotCom bubble --- in which case even creation of new wealth is unchanged).
I agree with you when you say that this point fascinates many. My personal take is that it is because of the "common sense" perpetrated by media and uneducated folks: fraud is equated with robbery, hence loss. People do not understand, of course, that the loss is NOT macroeconomic: there is a countervailing gain to the robber. But, if a robbed one feels a loss, the folks reason, there must be a loss.
The problem is that markets are essentially an amoral tool and we are trying to overlay morality on top of this. Markets are a collective tool, morality is a quality that individuals bring with them when they participate.
No serious definition would use "controlling" without specifying what is being controlled.
"without individual rights"
This is false: socialism is government's ownership of the means of production.
"(that is my definition)."
You are being a bit self-congratulatory here: your own definition has already become "common?"
Can you name one dictatorship that allows free market
capitalism? Socialist countries control more than the
means of production: for example, Sweden and Denmark.
It makes perfect sense: it is clear that among other elements
there must be a “controlling central government” to
enforce its social doctrine upon the people.
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