Anticapitalist propaganda—a subset of the Communist propaganda now increasingly in vogue—often takes the form of denying the reality of free markets and mocking those who affirm it. “So-called” usually precedes the reference. The mockers deem market-realists as being in need of therapy, not argument.
Given the platforms that anticapitalist forces have, I decided to use mine to lay out a pro-market argument, one that presupposes that human flourishing is a good thing. It’s a slightly modified excerpt of chapter 20 of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic. The “polemic” was my apologia for the free-market Austrian School of Economics against a critic, but you won’t need to know that spat’s background to follow this theoretical portion.
Yes, theoretical: you’ve been warned! Unless philosophy is your meat and drink, you might be skip it (or save it as a substitute for Sominex for your next sleepless night). I have little doubt, however, that you’re dealing with the malign consequences of anticapitalist error. What follows might help you think about ways to engage its purveyors.
—Anthony Flood
What are “Free Markets”?
Defining terms
By “real” we mean the logical contrast of the illusory, the delusional, the fictional, the artificial, etc. When we know or suspect that we are in the presence of the latter, we appeal to some notion of the real to negotiate our encounter with it. A good analogy is found in the contrast between the true and the false: the notion of truth emerges only through the experience of falsehood. (If we could never experience being in error, or being deceived or lied to, we’d have no use for a notion of truth.)
Whatever is a function of real entities is also real. A market is a network of exchanges that persons, according to their human nature, spontaneously form. (That is, they do not engage in exchange because they read in some book that that’s what they must do.) Markets are functions of persons, and persons are real. (Persons are entities with causal efficacy, however, markets are not.)
The market is an order—specifically, a network of exchanges—that persons naturally create in pursuit of their flourishing (which exceeds in value their mere biological sustenance and continuance).
Since persons generate that order by acting in accordance with their nature, it is a natural order, one level, aspect, or dimension of several that make up the universal natural order. Violations of that order, which tend toward human self-destruction, is not to be put on the same ontological level as that which contributes to human flourishing.
Nodes and ties
Persons are the network’s “nodes” out of whom radiate catallactic “ties” (as distinct from, say, familial, ecclesiastical, or military ties). And so, the reality of free markets is the reality of persons who, in order to achieve their goals freely make, accept, and decline offers of goods and services that are within their natural right to make, accept, or decline. (What A offers to B can only be title to scarce resource R that A has justly acquired.)
The reality of the free market is a function of the natural desire of real persons for a good life or happiness (human flourishing) to which free markets are conducive. A person may, of course, have desires that are not conducive to that end, which are therefore not even implicitly a desire for free markets. Further, the existence of free markets may be a necessary but is by no means a sufficient condition for human flourishing.
Good Life-seeking: eudaimonia
The desire for human flourishing—εύδαιμονία, eudaimonia, “living and doing well”—is real, and that reality extends to the network it generates, despite any failure to eliminate all forcible interference with voluntary exchanges. Eudaimonia is not, however, the concern of economics (catallactics) per se. The pursuit of economic knowledge—the logic of human action and interpersonal exchange—can only presuppose an interest in it on the part of those who pursue it.
But there is no necessary connection between the two. Malevolent people can join their analytical knowledge of the laws of supply and demand, for example, to their empirical knowledge of the supply and demand for a particular commodity and act to effect human misery.
This holds true for the knowledge of any other kind of causal laws. Economics, however, does not judge the malefactors. Only a eudaimonistic ethics, which affirms that the end of man is eudaimonia or happiness and that end ought to be pursued and misery and extinction avoided, can so judge them.
The free market is a good of order, as distinct from goods of immediate satisfaction. The regular enjoyment of such goods requires that persons explicitly regard the good of order as worthy of attainment and protection. (Not just, for example, “This meal for me now,” but also “Good meals for me and my family several times a day, every day.”)
Essential freedom and effective freedom
Persons face a moral challenge when they realize that they can enjoy a good of immediate satisfaction only by rending the fabric of the good of order. In the name of eudaimonia, they must at times forfeit particular satisfactions.
Human beings enjoy essential freedom. They are free by nature. They can conceive of alternative futures, prefer one of them, understand the causal path to it, and act so as to set that causal chain in motion.
But although it is natural for them to honor the good of order, they are perfectly capable of perversely, self-destructively, dishonoring and undermining it. That is, they can perceive a conflict between the good of order and a satisfaction attainable only at the cost of that order and still subordinate the order to the satisfaction.
That is, although they are naturally ordered to pursue a good life, which depends upon the good of order, human beings can, through their exercise of essential freedom, irrationally act to undermine that good.
One consequence is the diminution and even loss of their effective freedom, a constriction of the range of choice. The smoker, for example, has less effective freedom to quit smoking than he or she had to start, even if his or her essential freedom to conceive of a smoke-free life has not diminished.
Human beings can, and do, inject the surd of sin into the historical equation, effectively “throwing a spanner in the works.” Sin is not just immoral: it is also irrational, absurd. There may be non-rational causes, but never a reason for it.
No historical era favors one cardinal sin over another
One way to describe history is as the story of pro-market and anti-market choices and their consequences.
By counterfactual praxeological analysis, we can understand the logic of market exchange.
By eudaimonistic criteria, we can morally approve of the pro-market side (peaceful offers of exchange of justly acquired property and responses thereto) because it favors human flourishing.
Anti-market choices (violent interference with peaceful offers and responses thereto) invite only deterioration, poverty, enslavement and other miseries, which can logically terminate only in human extinction.
And if that most unnatural telos is programmed, so to speak, into the anti-eudaimonistic ethic of anti-market ideologies, then they have no ethics worthy of the name.
Freedom and the attempt to suppress it are not ontologically on the same footing, any more than are natural living shoots and the artificial concrete slabs that, although temporarily stronger, will crack and crumble as the burgeoning tree slowly but surely pushes through. One is in accord with man’s nature, for it promotes his flourishing; the other, unnatural and potentially fatal to him.
The free markets that human beings generate, however imperfectly and inconsistently, is therefore as real as they are, and attempts to hamper it are only as real as sin, surds for which there are no reasons and which enjoy no permanent abode.
Greed (φιλαργυρία, avaricia) is a constant in human history (as is every other deadly, capital, or cardinal sin). What is present at all times, however, distinguishes no time from any other.
The ability to resist the temptation to commit a deadly sin varies from person to person, but we can generalize to say that no one is immune from being “within range” of an occasion of sin. We can imagine how the ways of being within its “gravitational pull” can vary in number and intensity from territory to territory and from era to era.
But by what conceivable warrant might one propose in 2020 there is more latent greed—the inherent capacity to act on a greedy impulse—than there was in 1917, 1848, 1776, 1688, 1517, 1492, 1378, or 1204?
We can contrast one period of history with other in terms of the occasions it makes available for the expression of a given vice. Human nature’s fallen state, however, is not an historical variable, at least not those who share the Biblical worldview. The advent of photography, for example, brought with it more opportunities to excite lust (πορνεία, fornicatio) than existed in the age of oils, graphite, ink, and charcoal; the age of film brought even more; then came home video, and now the Internet.
But is there a good reason to believe that this technological progress corresponds to or reflects an increase in the level of latent lust? We can think of none.
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