An excerpt from George Will’s latest Newsweek article, entitled Pencils and Politics:
Capitalism…is a profit and loss system. Corfam—Du Pont’s fake leather that made awful shoes in the 1960s—and the Edsel quickly vanished. “[T]he post office and ethanol subsidies and agricultural price supports and mediocre public schools live forever.” They are insulated from market forces; they are created, in defiance of those forces, by government, which can disregard prices, which means disregarding the rational allocation of resources. To disrupt markets is to tamper with the unseen source of the harmony that is all around us.
The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation—the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize—is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.
At the tail end of my post Monday, I referenced Mayor Menino’s opposition to retailers like CVS opening medical clinics inside their stores. His reasoning again:
“Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong.”
My short response suggested that the overall quality of health care decreases without the profit motive. An argument of consequentialism or pragmatism.
But, to be fair, I think the Boston mayor was less interested in the ends involved (convenient, quality health care) and more concerned about the means used (free enterprise) to achieve those ends, which – according to the mayor – are exploitative. I’m not sure why Menino limited his target to “retailers”, but in any case, for him, personal autonomy is compromised when the free enterprise system attempts to treat illness. When health care becomes a business.
In an article entitled “Hating Free Enterprise“, John Stossel rallies against this line of thinking, defending personal autonomy, and thereby the use of free enterprise, in an area where the support of “government and professional societies” is not: human organ sales. Check it out.
And if this doesn’t satisfy your philosophical proclivities, take a look at John Stacey Taylor’s Stakes and Kidneys: Why Markets in Human Body Parts Are Morally Imperative. I got the chance to see Dr. Taylor speak at an IHS seminar in 2006. Seriously? It changed my understanding of the human condition. Autonomy!
