Revised and updated: reconciling our conflicting views of the market through consistent principle and morality.
A Christian friend is an avowed socialist and another associate is determinedly left wing. I asked them recently what socialism meant to them. The answer was essentially “people being good to one another”: kindness, compassion, fairness and justice, even liberty. Who would oppose that?
But can force make it so?
Though I write with great affection for my friends, when I hear or read “socialism”, I understand a quite different thing: misery. Everywhere Marxist theory was determinedly put into practice, the result was tremendous suffering, not utopia, and yet Marxist ideas persist in our thinking.
Socialism, though formally hopeful, causes misery because a socialist society must force individuals to take particular courses of action for the good of all. For example, Lenin’s acclaimed Marxist philosopher Bukharin wrote:
For a long time yet, the working class will have to fight against, all its enemies, and in especial against the relics of the past, such as sloth, slackness, criminality, pride. All these will have to be stamped out. Two or three generations of persons will have to grow up under the new conditions before the need will pass for laws and punishments and for the use of repressive measures by the workers’ State.
And so socialist societies have justified sustained repression.
When the Soviet Union fell, it seemed we all accepted that public ownership of the means of production was a dead end. New Labour and the “Third Way” came to prominence, despite the third way being nothing new, merely the idea that government can successfully intervene in a market economy to bring about positive outcomes. The problem is, it does not work.
Today, we have a financial crisis, a credit crunch, but few reflect that for a long time we have laboured under the most pervasive price control of all: deliberate manipulation of the rate of interest. Around the world, millions have waited with trepidation for committees of wise men to announce the interest rate. We have had a combination of historically low levels of saving combined with historically high levels of borrowing. Where did this mismatch come from? The rate of interest has been deliberately suppressed, misleading people into saving less and borrowing more than would have been sustainable.
The phenomenon is rather like a gym in which the treadmills may be remote controlled. If just a few people slow down, the central controller does nothing. But imagine the controller sees “too many” people slowing down at once for a break. “This will not do!” he cries, “We must have higher levels of activity!” He turns up all the treadmills at once, and keeps turning them up as exhaustion builds. Eventually large numbers collapse at once. Do we take a break and rebuild ourselves? No! We must inject adrenalin, take sports drinks, anything to get back to peak activity immediately. Eventually, this must end in catastrophe for the participants, but with artificially-low interest rates and quantitative easing, this is what we do to individuals and corporations in the economy.
The consequence is social disaster: high levels of government debt, unemployment and the direct creation of new money, a phenomenon which can only widen wealth inequality because new money is given to the wealthy. Yet this is the consequence of just one intervention in the free market.
When people set out to intervene in the economy by force of authority, they usually fail to realise a simple point: you cannot control the economy without controlling people. The economy comprises the actions of thinking, purposeful human beings with their own ends and means. Socialism requires intervention in that striving, intervention that at best has unintended consequences because the information necessary to intervene successfully is simply not available. Jamie Whyte’s The kindness of geniuses explains charmingly.
Those of us of good faith all want the same thing: prosperity, kindness, compassion, fairness, justice, liberty. People being good to one another. The twentieth century teaches us that state planning of the economy does not deliver these things, so how should society be organised?
Views of the free market
I asked my friends how they reacted to the term free market. They understand this term to mean exploitation. I understand it to mean freely-chosen cooperation for mutual benefit.
As we were sitting in a bar, I asked “Where was the exploitation when you bought that last round?” We wanted a drink, we had earned it in our own ways and the barman was happy to serve it to us. Perhaps the barman was there against his will, but how are we to know? Are we all to approach every transaction with a questionnaire? Should the barman have asked us if we had been exploited before serving us? Are we to invent possible exploitation somewhere up the supply chain for beer? Is it intrinsically exploitative for one man to serve beer to another?
Of course, this is absurd, but people suppose the free market inherently exploits without demonstrating how. This is not to deny the existence of isolated exploitation, but to question how free exchange is inherently exploitative, or corrupting, or the cause of whatever harm is perceived by the commentator. This is Marxist thinking and we know where it leads.
Before me, I have four books which begin to reconcile these difficulties:
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