Michael Sandel's current book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, is an eloquent statement of some very basic moral convictions that many people share about the subject. His basic idea is that it is morally obnoxious to think of all goods as being best distributed through a market mechanism -- through a price, a seller, and a buyer. In an interview on NPR this week he made the point very eloquently: we are moving from a market economy to a market society; moving from looking at the market mechanism as an important social tool, to looking at it as the supreme social value. He argues that this movement in values and thought has the result of crowding out more substantive moral values....Understanding Society
Sandel's sociological insight is this: markets subvert many values by commercializing social relationships.....Many economists now recognize that markets change the character of the goods and social practices they govern....So Sandel calls upon us, as Karl Polanyi did fifty years ago in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, to re-tune our moral antenna, and to recognize that there are moral and social values that are far deeper and far more important than price and market.
Social obligations and markets
Daniel Little | Chancellor, University of Michigan-Dearborn
5 comments:
It is horrifying but not surprising that a true half-wit like Daniel Little could be in charge of a small suburban state university. “The market mechanism” means VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE BETWEEN FREE PEOPLE which is under constant and relentless assault by both the “progressives” and the neo-con “right”. The only alternative to VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE BETWEEN FREE PEOPLE is coercion by the police. It’s either one or the other. Further, a person who calls our present predicament of unconstrained government spending, snooping, war, intrusion, monopoly fiat funny money and looting an expansion of “the market mechanism” is an imbecile. It’s beyond belief.
Bob you should keep educate yourself.
You should read old Austrian Karl Polanyi,born in Vienna 1886.His book The Great Tranformation is the best in Austrian tradition,but you haven´t read it of course?
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is a farrago of confusions, absurdities, fallacies, and distorted attacks on the free market. The temptation is to engage in almost a line-by-line critique. I will abjure this to first set out some of the basic philosophic and economic flaws, before going into some of the detailed criticisms.
http://mises.org/daily/1607
" VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE" "FREE PEOPLE"
Oh, the big words... how do you define 'free people' Roddis? Or it's one of these tautological self-evident axioms austrians like so much?
"Not even wrong" my friend (google the phrase to know what I mean).
Blogger Bob Roddis said...
“The market mechanism” means VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE BETWEEN FREE PEOPLE...
The only alternative to VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE BETWEEN FREE PEOPLE is coercion by the police"
I guess you must distribute goods within your family utilizing the market to price goods & service that are then bought & sold between family members, each thinking only to maximize their individual utility.
Otherwise how could you be free?
Who cares if my kid can't afford to pay for his food, I'm free, fuck everybody but me!
Most people wouldn't call this freedom, they deem it & you psychopathic.
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