In a free market, there is no such thing as a market failure. There is only a perception of failure, when the outcome is not what someone would wish or expect. Free market cannot fail , it just is.
This is classic economic ideology. Substituting an image of "nature" (the sun cannot fail, as it is part of "nature") The social Darwinian project of claiming that the economic aspect of human society should be treated as an external, value-free, "natural" phenomenon which is self-regulating and perfect works continuously to remove the ethical responsibility from individual and collective choices. It ignores the utter dependence of "the free market" on state and other social consensus mechanisms. A few services required for the free market: state monopoly over socially sanctioned violence, state regulation of monopoly structures, state/bank partnership to supply the basic trading commodity, money, state intervention to produce land as a tradable commodity (see the enclosure movement), and state/corporate colonial practices to produce/reproduce the commodity of labor in environments external to the capitalist society. Military domination and the threat of starvation was generally necessary to force peoples external to europe to view themselves as workers, it was also necessary to rid these people of their traditional collectivism and institute the lovely notion of "rational self-interest", the value/worldview which allows for that "externality", the suffering of the weak, to be dismissed from the conscience of the exploiter. The belief in the "naturalness" of this process (the recasting of the costs to humans of the mode of production as a healthy process of "survival of the fittest") is as politically necessary as it is arbitrary and stupid. This is just a riff on Polanyi's "Great Transformation btw. |
