When Everything Is For Sale

From The Atlantic Magazine: Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.

We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, 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... [A]s growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. 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.   

[...] Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale? 

For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption. First, consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence—or the lack of it—matters. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to afford yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would matter less than they do today. But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.   

The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.   

Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about. 

--- "What Isn't For Sale?" by Michael J. Sandel, The Atlantic (April 2012)

This is an article everyone should read and think about. Everyone. Yes, it is long, but do it anyway. For we have come to a place where it appears economic processes are no longer understood as mechanisms to be managed and regulated to best serve and protect society. Rather, the nature and value of people and society are understood and justified by how they are shaped by and conform to ever more compromised and unregulated forms of market capitalism. And as a result, the very notions of humanistic values, of public goods and services, are under attack and flagging.

But as the introduction noted, this broader understanding or perspective is one that eludes most people. They feel it, but they cannot put their finger on it or explain it. Sandel helps clear up the picture and our understanding considerably. It is interesting to me because my recent thinking has been taking me in those same directions--pondering the fact that the marketplace and the market capitalism has more and more moved toward a self-justifying ideology/religion that defines who we are as a society, where we are placed in it, and by that determination, our personal value.

I was tempted to say there is more a sense of Ayn Rand's Objectivism ascendant. But Ayn Rand would rightfully object, I think. Our marketplace and capitalism is anything but pure; it is distorted by an uneven economic and social playing field that is controlled by dominant financial and industrial forces, and the wealthy individuals created by them. And political power falls in line behind the influence of that wealth. Mediating and ameliorating legislation and regulation are denied or frustrated in application.

It is an anachronistic process that fails to recognize and serve more modern, better-informed notions of humanistic values in the role of society. It ignores the research and realities that demand a more civilized and stronger society--both economically and humanisticly--and the increasing importance of the federal government's role in providing and strengthening the essential building blocks: equal opportunity, education, healthcare,  justice, and support for the aged and unable.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/what-isn-8217-t-for-sale/8902/