It’s time to get emotional about markets
Posted on October 10, 2011Free marketeers have long faced a puzzling mystery. Despite priding ourselves on logic, amassing vast amounts of well argued evidence and indeed having the bulk of human history to call on in support of our case, we still struggle to win the political battle outright.
Indeed, it continues to be fashionable to be opposed to markets, to reject and deny the virtues and benefits of competition. The Occupy the London Stock Exchange protesters may be a motley bunch, and are apparently a bit too keen on Starbuck’s to maintain their “solidarity”, but for millions of people they have the dash and the perceived moral high ground, while the city workers walking past them to their desks emphatically do not.
Why is this?
Put simply, it’s because of the tension between the heart and the head. Armed with logic, statistics and evidence the Right thought for too long that it didn’t need emotive arguments. The closest analogy I can think of is the American war effort in Vietnam – their kit was so good, their helicopters so costly and their body armour so high tech that they thought the fact that the Vietcong had a stronger sense of morale and ideology than the conscript GIs wouldn’t matter. As history showed, they were wrong.
Humans are emotional beasts as well as thinking creatures. It’s not enough to know the science of making paints and pigments, or the mathematics of constructing a picture, you need to have the passion, imagination and vision as well in order to create a masterpiece that will stir the soul of the beholder.
Perhaps it’s because we were animals before we evolved to become civilised thinkers that emotion without logic succeeds in gathering popular support more often than logic without emotion. In a battle between the protesters on the steps of St Paul’s tugging at the heart strings in favour of the big state (despite the woeful historical record of the anti-market statism they support) and Excel-wielding wonks displaying the evidence in defence of a market economy, the former pose a serious threat in terms of public opinion.
Advocates of the market should continue to compile and deploy evidence, of course. It’s right and inherent to our views that we build our case on solid, thought-through foundations. But we need to speak from the heart and get a bit emotional about markets, too.
And there is an emotional case to be made.
It is the market that sets us free to do as we wish – to buy a book; to treat our loved ones to flowers or meandering adventures in the countryside; to aspire to and secure more for ourselves, our families or our neighbours.
It is the market that allows people to do the silly things that make us gloriously and touchingly human – for a close friend of mine to buy a Big Issue from every seller that she sees, leaving her struggling home with a handbag full of never-to-be-read, identical copies of the same magazine; to get that ill-advised and sadly mispelled teenage tattoo; to buy those green wellies with frogs’ eyes on the toes.
It is the market that gives its own critics the education, the technology and the freedom to seek to destroy it – the tents gaffa taped outside St Paul’s cathedral; the phones tweeting outrage against the mechanism that developed them; the Starbuck’s hosting a 50-yard queue of anti-capitalist protesters keen to warm their hands on a coffee in the October air.
It is the market that developed and provides the materials and the means for all of our great art to be created – from the straining fingers of the Sistine Chapel to the chaotic vases of Grayson Perry.
Most importantly of all, it is the market which acts as a ladder for uncounted people to climb inexorably upwards, out of the brutality, the muck, the misery and the disease that has for so long dogged human beings’ existence.
Poverty is deadly – sometimes swiftly, when an earthquake strikes a village built of mud bricks, but normally slowly, from the first breaths of smoke from an unventilated fire to the last struggle for a threadbare blanket to keep out the cold of winter. People say that wealth isn’t everything, but it is often a prerequisite to stay alive long enough to embellish just living with the things that matter, like family, personal achievement and happiness.
The steps of this ladder don’t wear out, and it is so high that we haven’t got within sight of the top yet. Billions of people are still far too far down it – but we should be clear and unashamed that it is the best way to raise them up, to allow them to pursue the glorious and the petty things that make life so beautiful.
Tags: Capitalism, City of London, Economics, Free Markets, Freedom, Occupy, opinion, Politics, St Paul's Cathedral
Categories: Economics, Opinion, Politics
All very good but can you have the infinite growth you talk about on a planet of finite resources? Watch the Crash Course videos at http://www.chrismartenson.com. Infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. Time to change the way we do things.
17.10.2011 14:01
Sorry but I think this is a tiny bit simplistic to be honest. Of course the market can help keep us all free, of course it is great for things like coffee shops and clothes. (Although I suspect if there wasn’t a starbucks there might still be a local coffee shop of some other kind). But also there are things which AREN’T profitable, and cannot be run for profit as good provision of, say, health care for elderly or mentally unwell people or whatever runs contrary to the demands of the market. That means we end up with a system roughly like the one we have.
BUT what a lot of people, from socialists and commies to Ron Paul supporting Tea Party types, are objecting to is the manipulation of the market, corporations being exempt from the law, a LACK of competition, a lack of choice, i.e. ‘crony’ capitalism, instead of free markets. This makes a total mockery of the system we all (mostly, to some extent or another) actually support and want to keep. Responding to any criticism of the failures of the market – which there ARE – with ‘ah but Starbucks make it easy to get a cup of coffee,” as if that wins the debate is why the debate is left up to those people who actually want to destroy the market and the positives it brings altogether.
If you love a child, you raise them properly. If you love your country you want it be as good to its citizens as it can be. And if you love a system of government or way of life – capitalism – you want to make sure it doesn’t eat itself.
17.10.2011 14:12
Mark, I’m afraid I think you are misreading here is what a lot of us on the left object to. I’m not an #occupylsx type so I can’t claim to speak for them but from my point of view… I’m not against markets, they’re quite nifty things for all sorts of reasons, neither am I particularly against capitalist forms of ownership.
The big problem from my point of view is that in our current combination of capitalist ownership and markets sees an awful lot of the wealth becoming concentrated in the hands of a small elite, that small elite overlapping quite nicely with the senior people at the various financial institutions.
When I look at the vast payouts and excess in the city, I wonder what on earth they can do that justifies those rewards, I also wonder who pays for all that excess, because I’m pretty sure that when you get right down to it, it’s working folks like me. To me, the city looks like a corrupt elite spending our money.
17.10.2011 16:09
Absolutely brilliantly put Mark.
The only thing I’d add, beyond the emotional, automatic adoption of a “high ground” mentality that many on the left take is also their idea of Manifest Destiny. e.g. – a common dismissal to questions is ‘do the research’. What they actually mean by this is – ‘do the research and then you’ll agree with us. If you don’t agree with us then you obviously didn’t do the research’. They can’t tolerate the idea of others coming to different conclusions with the same evidence…
17.10.2011 16:13
Is it true you have an ‘Ellvis’ tattoo?
20.10.2011 10:53
If you are going to defend free market ideology, you should try to avoid accepting the received wisdom that we currently have a free Market in banking. There does seem to be an entrenched view that banking was “de-regulated” and free Market forces caused the crisis. Banking and financial services is probably the most regulated industry in Britain today. The banking industry is a government sponsored cartel, not a free Market!
Not sure why iPhones always try and capitalise the word Market…
10.11.2011 13:02