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Do you believe that the free market is a moral or just economic system, or way of distributing goods and services? I'll save my own opinion for after a few people respond...
(I don't mean this as a question of "whether capitalism works better than socialism or social democracy," but simply as a matter of morality... assuming each system "works" as it's supposed to, which is the most preferrable from a moral standpoint. For the sake of argument discard pragmatism.)
Do you believe that the free market is a moral or just economic system, or way of distributing goods and services? I'll save my own opinion for after a few people respond...
(I don't mean this as a question of "whether capitalism works better than socialism or social democracy," but simply as a matter of morality... assuming each system "works" as it's supposed to, which is the most preferrable from a moral standpoint. For the sake of argument discard pragmatism.)
Economic systems aren't moral and just. The're amoral, like the weather.
I'd spin the question a different way: is forfeiting the accountability of our elected representatives in favor of governance by the free market moral & just?
Economic systems aren't moral and just. The're amoral, like the weather.
I'd spin the question a different way: is forfeiting the accountability of our elected representatives in favor of governance by the free market moral & just?
That's true. No system is really going to be "moral" or "just" in itself... but I get the impression from some people that they believe the free market is a system where people generally get what they deserve, or pay is intrinsically linked to productivity (don't tax the rich cause they deserve what they have, etc.) so I was wondering what people's thoughts were on that. Is the free market a meritocracy? Is a meritocracy desirable, or should a system be designed to achieve more utilitarian goals?
Economic systems aren't moral and just. The're amoral, like the weather.
I'd spin the question a different way: is forfeiting the accountability of our elected representatives in favor of governance by the free market moral & just?
I liked your weather analogy. Good explanation.
" is forfeiting the accountability of our elected representatives in favor of governance by the free market moral & just"
If I understand your question correctly, I would say that when the electorate chooses (and I believe they do choose - can't blame others) to not make their leaders accountable, and to provide a balance against unbridled capitalism, they've behaved irresponsibly and taken what I believe to be two good systems (democracy and capitalism) and squandered their resources.
The electorates behavior, or lack of, is immoral and unjust in that case..
A market that is determined by government is not a free market. If you want a free market, the only decision the government can make is to keep their hands off the market, no matter what.
It is possible for a free market to take many different shapes. That's sorta the definition of "free" (as in "without rules", not "without cost").
So, the question really becomes, should the government set any rules?
That's true. No system is really going to be "moral" or "just" in itself... but I get the impression from some people that they believe the free market is a system where people generally get what they deserve, or pay is intrinsically linked to productivity (don't tax the rich cause they deserve what they have, etc.) so I was wondering what people's thoughts were on that. Is the free market a meritocracy? Is a meritocracy desirable, or should a system be designed to achieve more utilitarian goals?
The free market is a system where people generally get what they deserve. What someone "deserves" is subjective, and IMO is simply a product of one's behavior and choices in the market. I don't think that makes it moral or immoral. I don't see how an object is within the scope of morality. It's like asking if the letter "J" is moral - it doesn't make any sense. When I think of morality, I think of actions, not objects.
Pay is not intrinsically linked to productivity, however it is intrinsically linked to your value to your employer, which is likely influenced by productivity. In other words, working hard only gets you so far; it's more important to work smart.
The free market is a system where people generally get what they deserve. What someone "deserves" is subjective, and IMO is simply a product of one's behavior and choices in the market. I don't think that makes it moral or immoral. I don't see how an object is within the scope of morality. It's like asking if the letter "J" is moral - it doesn't make any sense. When I think of morality, I think of actions, not objects.
Pay is not intrinsically linked to productivity, however it is intrinsically linked to your value to your employer, which is likely influenced by productivity. In other words, working hard only gets you so far; it's more important to work smart.
Right... I should have phrased this whole thing differently, but you can look up seemingly hundreds of articles on the internet with philosophers and economists arguing over the relative "morality" and "justice" of everything from lassiez-faire capitalism to Marxism, so I decided I'd try to get the debate going here because I was bored.
But to keep it going... you hold to the belief that the free market is a system where people generally "get what they deserve..." "Deservingness" is obviously subjective, but how does this reconcile with the fact that the ranks of the wealthy are disproportionately made up of people who were born wealthy, just as the ranks of the poor are disproportionately made up of those who were born poor? How much of a meritocracy do we really have?
But to keep it going... you hold to the belief that the free market is a system where people generally "get what they deserve..."
I think that the free market works within certain boundaries of scale. At the small to medium scale supply & demand hover around an equilibrium, prices are rational and everyone is rewarded for effort & risk.
But global corporations have a size & gravity that's so large that they can distort normal market behaviors. Take labor, for example: when the local supply of labor falls below demand, wages should rise. But for multinational businesses, they can avoid the S-D curve altogether source their labor in a lower-cost location, like China. This is one example of how size distorts the market.
Free market economics are kinda like physics...the normal Newtonian mechanics work nicely within a certain scale. But go very big or very small, and the whole framework falls apart.
We could always change our economic system over to one like they have in North Korea. Maybe that would be better.
I don't think anyone would really argue that would be better, but there's infinite shades of grey between the two extremes of libertarianism and communism. Almost every country in the developed world rests somewhere within that grey area... in America we're largely capitalistic with some mild social democracy, in Sweden they're more like half socialist, half capitalist, Venezuela and Cuba would be closer to the communist extreme...
So do you believe that economically we should move closer to pure capitalism, stay approximately where we are now, or shift to the left in some areas?
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