{"id":19852,"date":"2013-04-14T10:15:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-14T15:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19852"},"modified":"2013-04-14T10:15:00","modified_gmt":"2013-04-14T15:15:00","slug":"competition-and-co-operation-in-a-free-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/04\/14\/competition-and-co-operation-in-a-free-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Competition and co-operation in a free market"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2013\/04\/14\/the-free-market-is-a-beautiful-thing\" target=\"_blank\">Sheldon Richman<\/a> suggests that some people&#8217;s objections to free trade and free markets isn&#8217;t so much ethical as aesthetic:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Market advocates tend to respect the intellect of their fellow human beings. You can tell by their reliance on philosophical, moral, economic, and historical arguments when trying to persuade others. But what if most people\u2019s aversion to the market isn\u2019t founded in philosophy, morality, economics, or history? What if their objection is aesthetic?<\/p>\n<p>More and more I\u2019ve come to think this is the case, and I believe I witnessed an example recently at a lecture I gave at St. Lawrence University. During the Q&#038;A a woman asked, in all sincerity, why society couldn\u2019t do without money, since so many bad things are associated with it. She also suggested that cooperation is better than market competition. I replied that since money facilitates exchange and exchange is cooperation, it follows that money facilitates cooperation \u2014 a lovely thing, indeed. Government, I added, corrupts money.<\/p>\n<p>I also said that competition is what happens when we are free to decide with whom we will cooperate. I don\u2019t know if my response prompted her to rethink her objections to the market, but I am confident her objection was aesthetic. For her, money and competition are ugly. Perhaps I didn\u2019t respond on an aesthetic level; it\u2019s something I have to work on. But I tried, and so must we all when we encounter these sorts of objections.<\/p>\n<p>Like that nice woman, many decent people dislike markets because they find them unattractive. And they associate markets with other things they find unattractive besides money and competition: (rugged, atomistic) individualism, selfishness, and profit. F.A. Hayek noticed this, writing in \u201cIndividualism: True and False\u201d, \u201cthe belief that individualism approves and encourages human selfishness is one of the main reasons why so many people dislike it.\u201d If that\u2019s the case, philosophical, moral, economic, and historical arguments may fall on deaf ears. The objections must be met on an aesthetic level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sheldon Richman suggests that some people&#8217;s objections to free trade and free markets isn&#8217;t so much ethical as aesthetic: Market advocates tend to respect the intellect of their fellow human beings. You can tell by their reliance on philosophical, moral, economic, and historical arguments when trying to persuade others. But what if most people\u2019s aversion [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,25,10],"tags":[484,271,320,563,576],"class_list":["post-19852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-competition","tag-ethics","tag-freetrade","tag-money","tag-philosophy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5ac","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19853,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19852\/revisions\/19853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}