My personal tolerance... long ago exceeded... is likely not the most relevant point ?
Your Dad was "mostly right"... the whole world is crooked... and, while important in your self interest to fully understand, it is also not the most relevant point ?
Corruption is not without costs... The question then becomes... what are those costs... and how (and when) are they recognized... and who pays the costs when the costs are finally recognized in a real sense?
In free market theory (note, theory, not reality) it is the market that determines "tolerances"... in the aggregate. Theory has it that when corruption becomes overly egregious... consumers will alter preferences... and the market will punish those who exceed the markets tolerances... therefore, no state intervention is ever required... because the free market will punish the miscreants appropriately... by making their businesses fail.
But, that's wrong... so I don't fully agree with that version of "free market theory"... both because it clearly fails quite badly in the real world... and because I think it deliberately mis-states what a free market is, how it functions... and what its proper relationship to society requires... which is not posing its optimum expression as a wholly non-interventionist economic system... laissez-faire... but as a pro-active moral code that minimizes intervention on moral grounds... while maximizing the protection of individual rights... on moral grounds.
That leads me to redefine a free market as "no fraud, no monopoly, and no obstructions to participation"... meaning that you can't optimize the function of the market... without enabling systems to prevent fraud and corruption, and the imposition of barriers to market participation... all of which will occur if you leave private actors an unfettered field in which to organize to violate and exploit others.
So... "free markets"... for child sex traffickers... become self correcting... how... and when ?
Free markets... don't exist where private actors act with impunity... as they will... where anarchy is allowed.
The legitimate role of government... is thus limited to preventing frauds, monopolies, and other violations of individuals rights... while doing more than that... converts government into a part of the problem.
An efficient market... will be one in which participants are largely self regulating... because the morality of the society is in tune with those requirements... so that they are imposed as a moral code not by state enforcement, only, but by willing adoption in cooperation... as that best enables mutual success.
Consider lawyers and doctors professional "self governance" in that context ? How well does that work ?
Reality is... that "efficient" outcome isn't a very common occurrence... and, it is becoming less common, because many aspects of market behavior... tend to be cyclic... including "market corrections"... which are those events in which the corruption of lesser competitors, leading to their failures, has them being removed from the market... which they are... only when the market is allowed to work in removing them.
Today, "corrections" in markets are prevented by state action... in order to protect the corruption of failed institutions... intending to sustain then... ensuring the corruption grows at an accelerating pace, over time. The banks failed in 2008... and as correction of their frauds was prevented... they have instead been enabled in expanding their frauds throughout the system... ensuring that correction, when it comes... will be epic... in scope and scale, and its destructive swath... rather than mildly disruptive and all and only beneficial... as it might have been in 2008.
Markets are not the only thing in which we see that cyclic behavior, in humans ? From the Roaring Twenties and the Flapper Era... to the Great Depression... with shifts from a wide open society, to realizing the consequences of that... into the the enforced morality of the 1950's... diametrical opposite to the 1920's ? How crooked things are at a given time... depends on wider social tolerance... that changes over time... on a roughly 40 to 60 year reactionary cycle... Market gurus used to talk about that impact in the markets as the "Hemline Index"... about which far too much has been written... almost all of it inane opinion best ignored. But, market cycles are certainly real... as are cycles in other aspects of human behavior... including significant malleability in other socially driven features of behavior, and biology, even including the average age of puberty... which changes in synch with other aspects of the social environment. Society is self referential in its responses to social change.
That's important to understand... not only because society is constantly changing... but, because change does not occur synchronously, in different places, without fairly strong social links. Hemlines in the west might be dictated in Paris, Milan or New York... not Beijing, Mumbai, Tehran, or Riyadh ? But, what's a la mode, de rigeur or already passe in Paris, might take a few years to make it to Omaha ? Convergence... at best, imposes social schizophrenia... that can't be rectified... and at worst, something more like a manic depressive sociopathy... requiring random Amadinajads to try to dictate changes in the spring line... or, you know, the ongoing survival of the Jewish people...
But, of course, I'm really talking about freedom... morality... business ethics, and corruption... being cyclic in the same way as other social tendencies in fashion, intolerance or genocide...
Good fences make good neighbors... because most people have enough crazy shit going on in their own houses, that they really don't need the crazy shit from the neighbors wandering into the back yard ?
So, how does social convergence between widely disparate societies... influence self correcting functions?
When Al Capone ruled Chicago... and Eliot Ness sought to bring him down... which one of them was the more corrupt... not in the specific... but in the larger sense of being 180 degrees out of synch with society ? Answering that in narrow terms of no fraud, no monopoly, and no barriers to market participation... different than in the broader sense of being aligned with the general trend in social morality and tolerance ?
Prohibition, in 1919, was apparently an significant over-reaction to the social excesses of the prior era... which totally failed to prevent the social excesses of the 1920's ? But, by 1933 the country was already becoming far more conservative in reaction to other change occurring... and that's when prohibition ended ?
And, we managed all of that... all by ourselves... without throwing in "convergence" issues... and it still took fourteen years to figure it out it was a mistake... and then fix it ? Timing... also an issue...
Have I failed to answer your question adequately ? |
