Free Market – Fraternized

I read in the Winter 2016 issue of THE WHEEL (a new journal of Orthodox literature and thought) the article by Anthony Artuso, “On Dominion and Progress: Sacramental Action in a Secular World.” Artuso makes a few interesting claims that I piqued my interests. He says that …

“The original political idea of the Enlightenment was to create a religiously neutral public sphere where governments supported by the will of the people, would make decisions to enhance overall welfare.”

The proponents of the 18th Century European Enlightenment and their successors felt some oppression from the existing religious structures in Europe and the wars between Christians which were frequent at that time. The movement toward separating church and state was an effort to disentangle society, government and religion in the hope that people might behave more rationally and less passionately in disagreements. By pushing religion to a more private sphere, some thought people would behave more rationally. The reality is that people don’t need religion to become passionately driven on issues as a number of communist atheist tyrants have shown. Religion does not automatically lead to irrationality, nor does the absence of religion guarantee humans will be reasonable.

But relying purely on human reason, allowed them to imagine that commerce/ the market/ capitalism would serve the people by keeping individual greed in check. The market had an interest in a moral order and in spreading the benefits it brought about to a wide range of people (or so they believed). Artuso says the market was to be

“always under the guidance and management of the state, which alone was entrusted with safeguarding the interests of all.”

The state was in their idealist view the preserver of reason. This may have been the ideal, but this ideal in the 18th and 19th Centuries for Enligtenment advocates, but it must not have been working which led President Reagan to identify the government as the problem, not the solution to the problem. But then, even under Reagan, the government grew and the national debt doubled. The government may have been the problem, but his policies enlarged the problem.

Artuso says the drive for deregulation of the market was a response to a feeling that the government wasn’t in fact a benevolent guide for the free market but could be turned into a monstrous tool of political interest groups. So the new idea came to be to free the market from government oversight. Artuso puts it this way:

“We have entrusted ourselves to the invisible hand of the market which we vaguely conceive as being wielded for our benefit by the god of progress.”

Therein is a dilemma. Adam Smith, the patron of the free market, apparently thought the government was to manage the market for the public good. But in modern America, the government came to be viewed as part of the problem because the government proved not to be a neutral force in the free enterprise system. It was a huge force that could be manipulated by interest groups to carry out agendas other than the general welfare.

But, the market freed to move as it wishes without government oversight becomes a large and largely undirected force. What or who guides the market and for what purpose? Perhaps we are to think that the unguided force of commerce is always benevolent, but what would make us believe that is not clear. The market can be manipulated by organized forces with particular agendas. Is it too big to allow it to go where it will? Or in fact will some clever folks be able to guide it to their own benefit without regard to the general welfare?

The market is driven by greed if by anything, and certainly does not want to keep greed in check. The market imagines unbounded growth which, at least in recent years, certainly has benefited the wealthiest people. Unbridled growth in the market (as well as in the government!) seems to fit the American attitude that wealth is a god which we should always serve.

Our money says on it, “In God we Trust“, but perhaps the god we trust in is money itself. St. Paul warned that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). We tend to think on the other hand that money is THE solution to every problem. [Think also about how much money gets invested in our elections – some do think money can influence the direction of governement]. Wealth and more wealth are assumed to be always a good, the more the better. The notion of any kind of self-control by individuals, commerce or the government is out of favor these days, or perhaps in America always is.

Wealth of course is not a god, is not infinitely wise and can, as we have experienced throughout history, suddenly disappear throwing the world into depressions and recessions. Wealth is not a neutral force unaffected by the greed and powerlust of people. It certainly is a major force in human life and history, but it never claims to be benevolent towards humans. It is always being pushed and pulled in various directions. And to imagine that ever increasing wealth can only produce more good, we might ask: Would an infinitely rich Hitler have created a better world? To imagine that wealth or the market are simply neutral, and unmanipulable is to ignore history where people were always striving to use the market for their own goals.

Besides all of this, studies have continuously shown that increasing wealth does not automatically equate with people being happier. Certainly it doesn’t guarantee people being wiser, kinder, more generous, more humane, more civic minded. Money can be a good servant, but it is a bad master.

People are attracted to power, and the free market represents a huge power in the world. People have and will continue to attempt to use government, wealth, the market, for their own ends This is the fact that we have to be aware of and prepare for.

The devastating crisis in world financial markets today is very much the result of America’s advocacy for “free market” thinking. Apparently the belief was that left to itself the free market would make the few filthy rich, sustain the middle class in their position, and help lift the poor by at least giving them hope for upward mobility. To achieve this so the theory seems to have been the governments of the world must keep their hands off the market and no kinds of restraint and no regulations must be imposed upon the market.

The end of course is the current effort to bailout the free fall Wall Street has caused around the world. What seems to be missing in this is any discussion of ethics. What is the morality of profit? Where is the discussion of the ethics of global free market thinking? The only ethics seems to be that profit is always the highest good and can therefore never be doubted let alone questioned. There seems to be no ethics involved, at least according to the politicians who advocate the free market, regarding how much wealth the few CEOs carry away even when everyone else experiences financial failure and crisis. Third World development will come to the grinding halt of poverty, and millions will suffer not because of the bad decisions they made, but because a few Wall Street executives were not guided by any morality except greed. To steal a phrase: if it weren’t for bad morality, they’d have no morality at all.

Millions will suffer because of the greedy decisions of the few; no matter what happens these few will walk away with millions. And no one will hold them or their cheerleading investors accountable. It is the free market after all, and accountability would put regulation on it – put on cost on those who profit most from the free market. And that, in this theory, is unthinkable, as are the consequences of said greed.

And why do political parties, especially those which love to make character and ethics a major issue, never want to address the ethics of the economy? Why is it that when it comes to money – to greed aka “profits” – Americans do not want to hear about morality?

Are we to believe that there is no correction to the free market system and that we must simply all enjoy prosperity when it comes and then bail out the wealthy when they fail the rest of us? Are we to believe that regulation is always bad, and bailout is the only response to failure? Between unregulated and totally regulated, there sure seems to be plenty of gradations to be used.

And strangest of all, how is the American government going to pay for this huge bail out? By borrowing more money. By vastly increasing the national debt we will bail out Wall Street – we will pay for the billions they supposedly were creating for the country’s wealth but were not in reality. Especially we will be paying for the incredibly greedy salaries of CEOs and those who caused the debacle in the first place. We will borrow hundreds of millions of dollars so that a few can continue to get wealthier, and we will ask nothing of them. I suppose one could say that the US government indeed is Christian – they are going to give expecting nothing in return.

Maybe the “free” in the Free Market is going to be the hundreds of millions the US government will have to give to keep the system afloat. Fortunately, all they have to do is print more – nobody has to pay for that, right? If ethics don’t apply, you can do anything you want in economics, can’t you? The free market won’t cost anybody anything, it is all about profit. What could go wrong when profit is your guiding virtue?

Besides, its an election year, they won’t let anything really bad happen. Or are there forces we really don’t control? Perhaps the free in “free market” has really become “free” of our control – we attained what we had never imagined!