“Free” Markets
The very first lesson one used to learn in business school back when I went 50 years ago was that there was no such thing as a free lunch. We all sort of know what that is supposed to mean and there have been many euphemisms that have expanded on that notion, most notably in the tech world of social media where it is said that if you cannot find the product, that means that you are the product. This is all about behavioral algorithms that suck data out of you and then compile it for sale and use by other Big Data based businesses which find ways to make a buck off of that data. It is all a vast expansion of what we all grew up understanding was the advertising model where we got to watch Have Gun Will Travel because the American Tobacco Company was willing to pay for the show just so they could subliminally make us want to smoke their cigarettes. We understood the trade-offs even if we didn’t like it and would have preferred no commercial interruptions. Strangely enough, when I lived in Italy in high school, the government tightly controlled TV programming and it was anything but a free market. Consequently, there were no commercials during the soccer matches and the news shows, but they did allow ten minutes every night for something called Carosello, which was a compendium of ads. At the time, it was, literally, the best show on Italian TV. If the U.S. TV market was a free market, and the Italian TV market was not, that pretty much proved the point that people wanted a free market product more than government controlled broadcasting.
In my business ethics course this past semester, one of the seven questions I asked about on the final exam was whether free markets are truly ethical? That verges on heresy to business students in the United States because we have all come to equate free markets with capitalism and we have inadvertently in the past forty or so years taken to equating capitalism with democracy. When we celebrated the symbolic taking down of the Berlin Wall during the Reagan administration and the concomitant fall of the Soviet Union, we thought we were showing that democracy had triumphed over autocratic communism. Now we have come to realize that what we were really celebrating was the fall of the Communist economic system and the ascendancy to the economic throne of Capitalism more than Democracy. In fact, we are all aware that Democracy as a form of governance has gone into marked decline, especially in the last twenty years while Capitalism in its strongest and most distorted version has gone into ascendancy. We should actually define it more closely and call it predatory or Darwinian Capitalism.
One of my gurus in economics is Bob Frank at Cornell, who acts as the Wealth Editor for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal while teaching at Cornell’s business school. What I like about Bob’s way of thinking and writing and what has gotten him to such a respected place by both the left and the right sides of capitalistic journalism, is that he refuses to let himself get pigeonholed as a liberal or a conservative. In fact, I would suggest that the closest definition I can give of him is that he is a caring and open-minded libertarian who prefers to forge his own path and defy classification in a traditional sense. This is the man who wrote The Darwin Economy and The Winner Take-All Society and even co-authored a classic textbook on Macroeconomics with Ben Bernanke, the ex-head of the Federal Reserve. He purposefully straddles the liberal/conservative line to objectively chronicle the manner in which we as a society are driving the economy and in so doing, I believe, he makes it clear that the current approaches that are creating such great wealth disparities may not be in our collective economic self-interest. His conclusion closely mimic mine and may well have helped to form mine.
I made a point when organizing my business ethics course to focus the reading on the economic and finance side of business ethics since that is my area of greatest expertise and experience. I assigned Maureen O’Hara’s book Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street. At the time I felt mildly guilty about inflicting so much finance on a general business student population, since the course was a required course for ALL MBA students, not just those pursuing a concentration in finance. But as I start thinking about my course formulation for business ethics in the Fall semester, I find myself reconsidering my harsh self-criticism. Free markets need not just be about the equity and bond markets. In fact, free markets are supposed to represent the supply and demand dynamics of all goods and services and are therefore a necessary component of all business. Since we live in a capitalistic country (perhaps THE capitalistic vortex of the world) and, indeed, the rest of the world seems inclined to mostly agree that capitalism is the superior economic model known to man, free market theory is at the center of that world as much or more than any other equilibrium-based concept that guides and informs the way we are supposed to consider the moralistic fabric of business.
Day after day we keep seeing that we are faced with a never-ending array of Hobbesian dilemmas about finding the path to that place where the common good is served best while personal liberty is equally well-served. It reminds me of that old Maine joke where the driver pulls his car to a stop beside an old Mainiac farmer to ask directions and the farmer, upon pondering, is forced to say, “Come to think of it, you can’t get there from here…” There simply is no way to reconcile most cases of personal freedom and absolute liberty with a moralistic outcome that serves the greater good. I’m not enough of an evolutionary thinker to say this, but I suspect that Darwin wasn’t terribly concerned about the greater good of mankind, but was more intent on describing an evolutionary system that he thought accounted for how the world of nature operates and perhaps why that is relatively optimal and nonjudgmental. This sounds great, but ethics and morality demand some degree of judgement. Man is not protoplasm that simply reacts to stimuli, he is capable of overlaying a moral sentiment of what is right and wrong. Since the earliest days, man has needed to establish norms, rules and regulations to govern his collective actions specifically so that he was NOT stuck in a purely Darwinian system where might determines right.
The next time someone claims that free markets are an imperative for life as we know it, challenge them. Remind them that there is no free lunch and nothing is without cost, and especially not in the broad marketplace. Markets can neither be free from all regulation and guardrails nor do they exist such that someone somewhere doesn’t have to pay the cost of that very freedom that is implied as inherently something for nothing.