Markets And Morality

Why laissez-faire is misguided

Allan Milne Lees

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Image credit: Sky News

Evolution works by means of organisms adapting to their environments over long spans of time through the gradual accumulation of traits arising by chance from DNA copy-errors. It’s obvious from this that our primate-centric notions of “morality” have no relevance to how the wider world actually works. Indeed, as scientists learned more and more about the natural world as the technologies of the Industrial Revolution provided ever-greater insight, it became abundantly clear that Romantic babble about “the harmony of nature” was based on pure ignorance and wishful thinking. Fungi that parasitize living creatures and insects larvae that eat their hosts from the inside-out are well beyond the bounds of any human conception of morality and of course also rule out any simple-minded nonsense about benevolent invisible magical pixie creators. Evolution is therefore a process outside any conception of morality.

Likewise markets also embody impersonal forces that if left to themselves will act so as to maximize economic efficiency without concern for whether or not individuals will be harmed as a result. Just as evolution has no “guiding hand,” so too is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” likewise non-teleological. But whereas we humans until very recently couldn’t do much to influence evolution (except by exterminating species wherever we go), we can to some degree attempt to shape markets so as to conform to generalized notions of “the public good.” But we can only do this if we first of all have some definition of what “the public good” means in practice, and if we also attempt to perform the very difficult task of understanding the ways in which variables interact so as to produce certain outcomes.

Neither of these prerequisites is easy.

Before we attempt to tackle these issues, however, we need to understand why markets are intrinsically impersonal and therefore cannot be relied on to deliver beneficial outcomes, contrary to the beliefs of economists such as Hayek who felt that markets prevent distortions that cripple human freedom and thus should be interfered with as little as possible. While Hayek was correct in his analysis regarding distortions (he was heavily influenced by the failed Soviet experiments with planned economies), he failed to understand how…

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Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.