The Necessity of an Ethical Foundation for Your Politics
After I wrote Stephen Brown's Broken Window and posted it on a bulletin on MySpace, onelittlebrother sent me the following:
Right on, Drizz, but it'll only get worse. Just wait til the cries of 'gouging' surface.
I replied:
My ears have been bleeding from those cries since Monday, dude.I'm not sure if I want to post a bulletin about that subject yet. The raw, abstract economics makes sense to me, of course, but the moral resistence to accepting "gouging" is intense. This is one of those cases where people simply don't give a shit about economics: they see it as a matter of right and wrong.
From that perspective, the only coherent theory of morality that I think a free market person has is based on or similar to the Objectivist ethics of egoism and self-interest. Unfortunately, it is opposition to that very kind of code that drives the "gouging" rhetoric.
I mean every word of that.
At this moment in time, if I were to argue in front of my friends and family that it is OK for a business to increase the prices for its products and services as it sees fit, uncompromising support for my position would rise to zero. This is one of those avenues where altruism has made massive headway because its advocates have latched onto the rhetoric of emergency over so many years. Emergencies, they declare, are events where one can abandon a principle in favor of pragmatic solutions to immediate problems. People must survive and life must be preserved first. Their ethics says concern for others should be primary and doubly so for times of crisis.
The contradictions in this position are profound, but routinely ignored. Yet despite them, it remains the dominant philosophy and carries immense inertia. Simply asserting the economic or utilitarian benefit of letting people determine what happens with their property won't cut opposition that is fundamentally rooted in thinking it is cruel and wrong to deny the demands of the desperately needy. Calculations of marginal benefit and efficiency aren't going to sway the guy who thinks the businessman serves the community first and foremost. Arguing for or against a specific outcome must ultimately rest upon some coherent theory of morality and justice.