Okay, I know we’re supposed to be the land of the free, home of the whatever. So we don’t like The Man in the form of The Government telling us what to do with our bodies (at least some of us don’t), our property, our money, our talents, etc. Yet some of us would invite regulation by The Man in the form of The Government to regulate business, health care, etc.
Some of these folks, myself included, might be chided for being hypocrites. After all, how can we call for The Man to stay out of our personal issues and bodies and then tell Big Business (perhaps another offshoot of The Man) what it can and cannot do?
Well, so far as I understand it, people are granted freedom in this country because of the notion that there is dignity in being a human, that humans are inherently free, the way that God/nature/chance made us. And, so far as I can tell, business, health care, etc. are human creations, not endowed with anything divine or any special dignity (which is not to say there is necessary indignity per se in business).
I think that being accused of hypocrisy when one votes for freedom for individuals and regulation for business (or The Man, by The Man) is hogwash, or rather, the hog’s dirty bath water.
I honestly don’t understand business and economic theory, but I assume there are other reasons for a lack of regulation on The Man that escape me. Some are probably even pretty good; I wouldn’t know. But to base the “free market” in any way on human freedom is ludicrous. You might as well give total freedom to any human-created entity. I could create a robot that got everyone hooked on coffee. We’d be fools to let it run wild (or would we, hee hee hee). Hell, maybe even the person who set my creation free is morally and legally responsible for everything it might do, no?
But, like I said, maybe folks have good reasons for believing in a free market? If you do, you’d do a service to your position by not being a jerk and getting your comment deleted. (And remember: Bloggers don’t have to share your beliefs. Nor do they have to publish them in comments, when you’re uncivil. If you’re that passionate about something, go start a blog about it.)
In my opinion, personal freedoms go only so far in that one person should not be allowed to be so free as to injure others. Many examples and arguments have come from pinning down the details of that statement alone.
In the free market, a corporation, as a separate entity would be allowed to do whatever it wants as well, until it steps on someone else’s feet. We can think of many examples for arguments here as well.
The marketplace solves some of these disputes ‘democratically’, i.e. popular businesses do well, unpopular ones lose money. From what I remember of high school, ‘Good’ and ‘popular’ should not be confused as the same thing, a fact which companies use to their advantage. Regulation is seen as a ‘marketplace independent’ forum for people to guarantee that businesses don’t overstep their bounds. Two problems with this (for starters) are…
1. A corporation could be viewed as a big individual, or as the collective whole of all it’s members (owners, employees, patrons, etc…) From a regulatory standpoint, I think anti-regulation people see businesses as the sum of many people exercising their collective will. The pro-regulation crowd just sees a large entity tramping the local community.
2. Government has become yet another business with its own set of independent interests its trying to satisfy, so regulation doesn’t necessarily yield a ‘democratic’ solution.
I think #2 is the problem free market economists react to the most viscerally. Business would also love it if there was no regulation just because that would be one less hoop for them to jump through.
One shudders at the idea of a “collective will” after such feats of human evil as Nazi Germany and human nuttiness as electing Dubbya twice. :)
The phrase ‘collective will’ does have the tendency to invoke that image of a democratic process that’s moving fast and has come off the rails, doesn’t it?
Get marketing and media into the mix and you’ve got a REALLY interesting experiment then…
Get too many wills together, and something besides the individuals with wills starts to control things. :)
I wish I understood the market/economy better, but there’s a pseudo-Thoreauvian voice nagging in the back of my head telling me to read something else. My brother does understand it well and explains a lot of it to me when I have questions. What he says makes sense to me (though I don’t agree with most of it from a philosophical/ethical perspective), but it doesn’t sound like what the pundits say. Hell, they probably don’t understand the market any better than I do. :)
I think you’d be interested in the movie The Corporation if you haven’t seen it. I could not get through the whole thing because I felt it got a little too pedantic, but that was my take on it. One of the premises is that the Corporation was created by humans to serve humans, but has in fact turned out to control humans and now humans serve “The Corporation.”
It was definitely an interesting film. The fact that I couldn’t get through it might have had something to do with having a 3 months old baby when I tried to watch it too.
On a side note, I’d like to see such a robot…especially if it would make my coffee for me in the morning.
That does sound cool! Thanks! I’m trying to get to as many films on my list as I can before mid-April! :)