The
following is from What Money Can’t Buy:
The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael
J. Sandel © 2012; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York, NY; pp. 8-9. Dr. Michael J. Sandel is an American
political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known
for the Harvard course "Justice." Dr. Sandel’s comments are very
applicable to discussions about the economy today.
The uses of
markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal
justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social
goods were for the most part unheard of thirty years ago. Today, we take
them largely for granted. Why worry that we are moving toward a society in
which everything is up for sale? For two reasons.
#1 Inequality
In a society
where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The
more money can buy, the more affluence (or lack of it) matters.
If the only advantage of affluence were
the ability to buy yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of
income and wealth would not matter very much. But as money comes to buy more and more – political influence, good
medical care, a home in a safe neighborhood rather than a crime-ridden one,
access to elite schools rather than failing grades – the distribution of income
and wealth looms larger and larger. Where all good things are bought and
sold, having money makes all the difference in the world.
This explains why the last few decades
have been especially hard on poor and middle-class families. Not only has the gap between rich and poor
widened, the commodification of everything has sharpened the sting of
inequality by making money matter more.
#2 The Corrosive Tendency of Markets
The second reason we should hesitate to
put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about
inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life
can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they also
express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged.
Economists often assume that markets are
inert, that they do not affect the goods they exchange. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket
values worth caring about.
Of course, people disagree about what
values are worth caring about, and why. So
to decide what money should – and should not – be able to buy, we have to
decide what values should govern the various domains of social and civic life.
The most obvious example is human beings. Slavery was appalling because it
treated human beings as commodities, to be bought and sold at auction. Such treatment fails to value human beings
in the appropriate way – as persons worthy of dignity and respect, rather than
instruments of gain and objects of use.
The TOV Center
is committed to human life as the highest value and these top priorities: the protection of lives, preservation of
lives, making lives more functional, increasing the quality of lives and making
actions transparent.
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