Thursday, February 14, 2013
TGIF: Does the Market Exhibit Cooperation
Last week's TGIF rebutted a challenge to the view that the market does not embody literal social cooperation. I think it does. Read it here.
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While it's deceptive to conflate presently existing capitalism with an actual freed market, it's also deceptive to imply that an actualized freed market would necessarily be structurally more cooperative than presently existing capitalism. An actual freed market, presumably, would have a variety of regimes of property; however free the market itself from coercive intervention, property systems themselves privilege certain ends over others. Naturally, the property regime that works for 90 people will not necessarily work for 100 people. But, in order to make free cooperation possible, free markets require uniform property regimes that make market transactions stable for everyone. But the latter cannot be done without, to some extent, enforcing a property system that the market works through based on value hierarchies that will likely benefit some people over others in a way that puts the latter at a disadvantage in the market. Thus any given market system, even a freed one on the whole, will be characterized by both conflict and cooperation.
I guess what I'm saying is that, while self-ownership and methodological individualism might work for an abstract concept of free markets, they are contradicted by the need for property regimes upon which freed markets are based.
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