:: walterindenver ::

:: Thursday, January 23, 2003 ::

Are Markets Inherently Moral?

That's the question Matt Miller asks on Tom Paine.com. Well, that's the headline to his article, and a silly question. A market is amoral, it's just an inanimate thing, a framework for action. Actions, of course, may be questioned on the basis of morality. Markets may then be used for moral or immoral actions. But Miller gets to the real question in the article:

Is the distribution of income produced by the free market presumptively moral?
People who say "yes" tend to believe there's a necessary connection between accepting markets as the best means of organizing economic life, and accepting the results that markets produce as making moral sense....
On this view, market outcomes reward virtues and qualities that it is right to reward -- things like work, responsibility, thrift, innovation and risk-taking. You can reject markets, they say, but you can't accept them (as most Americans do) and then deny that their distributional results have some claim to being considered presumptively fair.

Ah, yes I can. I will emphatically state that life, and markets, are unfair. Some people become wealthy without merit, some are poor without blame. But no one has come up with any economic system that guarantees completely merit based outcomes. Miller continues:

We also note the obvious: The distribution of income in free markets is affected dramatically by factors beyond the virtues cited above -- such as a person's inherited brains, health, talents, wealth and looks, as well as the family into which one is born and the early schooling one is given.
These are things for which people can't take credit or be blamed. Given how heavily these morally arbitrary factors influence the distribution if income, it's silly, we argue, to think that market outcomes could be presumptively moral.

Let me repeat, actions are subject to moral judgement. Outcomes are amoral, although outcomes may be greatly affected by the morality of the actions from whence they are produced. Let's examine, briefly, the actions necessary to circumvent free markets, namely, someone must forcibly curtail the free interaction of people. That is immoral in itself. The moral superiority of free markets is based on the morality of actions, not results. That means if the actors in a market are acting honestly, morally, interference in that market is immoral, as that interference constitutes a violation of the personal rights of the actors.

:: Walter 7:02 PM [+] ::
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Women V.S. Men on the PGA Tour

Last year Connecticut club pro Suzy Whaley won the local PGA section championship, which earned her a spot in this year's Hartford Open, a PGA tour event. She is the first female to qualify for a PGA event in many years. The odds of her being successful there are monumentally long, as women play from shorter tees at section events, but she will have to play from the back tees with the men at the Hartford Open. I wish her the best of luck, it took a lot of guts to agree to compete in Hartford.

Annika Sorenstam, however, is by far the best woman golfer out there. If any stand a chance competing against the men, it would be her. And now, she's expressing an interest doing so. As a professional golfer, I welcome the competition between the sexes, as I feel it can only strengthen the public interest in the game.

To add to the intrigue, a Hawaiian thirteen year old girl named Michelle Wie is doing things perhaps never before seen from a girl that age, including a credible attempt to qualify for the Sony Open. She fired a 73, not good enough to make it, but outrageously good for a female playing from the men's championship tees. Did I mention she's only thirteen years old? Sheesh.

:: Walter 9:58 AM [+] ::
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Retaliation

Libertarian candidates fared pretty well in Colorado in last November's elections. Not surprisingly, the result is a bill in the State House designed to make minor party ballot access much more difficult. The bill is designated HB03-1142 (PDF file)

A Green Party activist e-mails:

This change will supersede our bylaws and require us to implement many layers of organization, including having a county central committee for each county, a state central committee, a congressional central committee, a state senatorial central committee, a state representative district central committee, and a judicial district central committee, each of which has a prescribed membership and officers, to make a lot of organizational decisions. There are filing requirements for each and most of these committees have their own bylaws, as well. We won't be able to keep up with this,...

Libertarians will have similar difficulties. Only a party with thousands of involved activists can keep up with those sorts of requirements. Even the largest upstart political party will have trouble creating such a large organization. We'll fight it, of course. Letters to the editor, a campaign to write and call the legislators, whatever we can think of. But when we started to put together a strong Libertarian party we knew there would be consequences. Dems and Repubs don't like the competition.

:: Walter 10:09 PM [+] ::
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