Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Free Market Fundamentalism's absurd contradiction

Regular readers know that I have been debating with a free marketeer.

Free market fundamentalism (FMF) has an inherent internal contradiction:

How come that a free market, 
which consists of sinful* men 
competing against each other for filthy lucre, which is the root of all evil, 
can produce the best of all possible economic worlds?

This is the opposite of axiomatic. 
(Green economics is based on three axioms or self evident truths)

All they can do is to say that law makers who seek to influence the market may make errors also. This is true: but the law makers are working, however imperfectly, from a position of being democratically elected to serve the interests of the people, and if the interests of the people are logically worked through, they will arrive at the aforementioned three axioms. 

The fact is that Free Market Fundamentalism is a species of philosophical idealism, perhaps the last remaining in an age when most real philosophers have abandoned idealism. 

Its idealism is of a free market whose Invisible Hand will make everything right. This is clearly not the case, but when faced with this, FMFs blame the contamination of the ideal with interference by Governments. 

They overlook the tendency for market actors themselves to interfere in the free market, distorting it by forming cartels and also by bending public opinion away from reality, as in the case of AGW sceptics.

FMF is absurd, and it's continued existence is a tribute to the power of money to influence thought and opinion.   


*Tories seem to believe in original sin, but it still works without original sin, by substituting self-motivated individuals.

No comments: