A market is a human institution. It's got its strengths. It's got its weaknesses. It's important
to understand those weaknesses so that we don't get bamboozled by right-wing folks who want us to
bend over and pray to the market in the way that we were warned not to let false gods lead us into
idolatry, if you may remember. The market is a false god, and Americans know that.
Let me give you some examples of where we don't allow markets. One of them is inside our home.
How do we arrange for the division of labor in a typical family household? Somebody takes care
of the garbage. Somebody washes the dishes. Somebody cooks the meals. Somebody goes out
shopping. Somebody mows the lawn. Whatever. Do we use a market? Do we pay somebody to mow the lawn?
Junior, you mow the lawn. I'll give you four dollars. Okay. Mom, I'd like a piece of cake.
Okay son, here. Three dollars. We don't do that. We don't use market exchange.
If we do that, we get a lecture from our parents or grandparents
saying, 'In this family, we don't do that. We help each other because we love each other.
That's why we do it. We don't do it- I'll give you two, you give me four. Mm-mmm.'
Here's another example. We don't organize our public parks. I live in New York City. If I go
to Central Park, I don't have to buy a square of lawn to put my blanket down and have my picnic.
We all put money in a pot together don't we, and that takes care of having a beautiful clean
park for us to go to when and if we wish to. And I don't begrudge my neighbors three children
going to the park because I only have one child and go. We don't live like that. We
don't calculate like that because we don't want to market in park access. Public school.
We put a fund together to run our elementary schools and our high schools. You go if you
need it. You go if you're a child. You go if you want an education, etc, etc. We don't do:
'You got to pay six bucks for two hours worth of instruction in arithmetic.' There's lots of places
we don't and here's an irony for you. Many of the largest corporations have gotten large by what we
call vertical integration. That is, they bought the company from whom they used to buy something,
and they brought it inside the corporation. You know why? If you read the literature, because
they don't want- you'll love this- the insecurity, the uncertainty of markets. They don't want their
business... For example, an automobile company doesn't want to worry that it can't get the steel
or the copper it needs at the price it can afford at the time it needs it. If it uses the market,
it never knows. So, it buys the companies from whom it all used to purchase, brings them inside
and then, even a greater irony. Once the company has brought in, merged if you like,
with all these others, you know how it organizes the movement of goods and services among the units
of the company? By central planning. They have a whole office that plans how the corporation works:
the very thing that the head of that company denounces in the larger society (planning) is what
that corporation does inside. Don't be fooled. The market is a sometime institution. It's got
as many flaws as virtues. It has to be regulated and controlled like every other institution.
And nobody should ever allow someone to tell you it's a perfect mechanism. The next time a
politician tells you leave it to the market, you now know what the real message there is:
leave it to the tiny minority of employers to do what they want for their profit and the rest of us
pick up the chips wherever they fall. That's what celebrating the market is really about.