His Truly Free Market
Interestingly this week, while reading Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation my daughter was assigned a three minute speech debating the pros and cons of tariffs vs. free markets. She had me read her speech wherein she biasedly sided with free markets, with the understanding that the freer the better. Using some critical thinking analysis, I began to probe her with questions regarding possible negative affects of a free market, if any at all. What possible collateral damages might there be in a totally free market with no government intervention? How would a society be affected if free markets were allowed to run without any government restrictions or interventions? We had a wonderful eye opening discussion. I challenged her on the notion that markets by themselves may not lead to efficient, let alone equitable outcomes. She redrafted her speech concluding that the choice between government intervention such as tariffs and free markets indeed calls for a needed symbiotic relationship having both positive and negatives to continually balance out the economics, political, and social implications; at the same time not destroying the very society they are working to sustain. I had her even understanding KP’s logic (hey, we have gotten close this week), that the true criticism of market society is “not that it was based on economics – in a sense, every and any society must be based on it – but that its economy was based on self-interest.”[1] Everyone doing what is right in their own eyes, for their own welfare and their own economic gain, will never produce positive results for a society, albeit the economic gains of that society could show an increase.
As we learned from both Weber and Bauman social progress is a messy thing established through agreed upon imaginaries; imaginaries which often contain collateral damages – which the society chooses not to imagine. To continue this concentration, I would like to focus on KP’s noted affects economic progress may have on any given society. Society as a whole is expected to develop in a stable manner so as to provide for the care and nurturing of the inhabitance of that society. Yet the very essence of economic progress within the society causes the laborer to be separated from the other activities of life that deem it a life worthy of sustaining. This was highlighted by KP in his chapter Market and Men where he speaks of the separation of labor and other life activities, thereby “annihilating all organic forms of existence and replacing them with a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one,” [2] thus compartmentalizing the human life away from society and degrading the very life one seeks to sustain. Other things in ones life that would compete with the ability to make money – by selling your labor – do not have that contractual hold, such as kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed and therefore would need to be liquidated since their claim would restrict the freedom of the laborer to work more and thus get more.[3] Could this be the flight we see from face-to-face relationships to online virtual relationships? Relationships cost time. Face-to-face relationships rate at a higher time toll than the virtual ones. The less obligation I have to a particular relationship the less time I will give to it, my neighbor who only pulls into the garage and has the door shut behind him before I can get out of my car to speak to him, is a classic example. The virtual online relationships that so many run to can be more controlled. Time allocation is therefore less intrusive. I can be online and off when it fits my schedule. Yet as we continue to liquidate organic society, the very society that, as KP noted, would not let an individual starve,[4] we must ask is this good progress? Where will all the “virtual” friends be in the time of “real” need? The conclusion is that “instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”[5] Again, is this good progress?
Unfortunately we see this, selling-of-one’s-soul to the exclusion of all other aspects of life, all the time in our modern social imaginary. The lie is: that the almighty dollar is what one ought to give their life for and at the end of it one has only “it” to show for one’s exchange of his life. Was Jesus on to something when he offered us, indeed even commanded us, to have a life that was in service to God rather than mammon, knowing that we could not serve both? The question for us to answer in the light of our economic history is what is our life worth? What can a man give in exchange for his life, for he may gain the world but lose his own soul? Regardless of the modern social imaginaries, potential collateral damages, or the political and economic origins of our time, the great transformation that God calls us to is to recognize His market. For His market truly is a free market.
“Ho! Everyone who thirsts, Come to the waters; And you who have no money, Come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk, without money and without price.”
Isaiah 55:1
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