‘Markets’ Obscure Questions of Justice

There is no ‘neutral’ or ‘free’ position: the market is regulated one way or the other. And in either case, there will be economic consequences, concrete distributions of wealth….The question, at the end of the day, is not whether to favor ‘freedom’ or ‘constraint’—in both cases, we are both freely and coercively imposing a legal regime with or without options. The question instead is to determine exactly who benefits and by how much, and more importantly, to assess politically and normatively the justice of those outcomes.

It is precisely that normative assessment that is prevented by faith in natural order and market efficiency. So long as the distributional consequences are viewed as the natural outcome of a natural order, they become far more normal and necessary.  Their assessment becomes practically futile, or at least beside the point, for it makes little sense to challenge the justice or appropriateness of such natural outcomes. It is only when we let go of the illusion of natural order that we truly open the door to a full and robust political assessment of those distributional consequences—as well as of the politically and socially produced norms and rules that regulate markets and shape those outcomes.

Barnard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order

Laissez-faire is a Utopian Dream

The dependence of present economic conditions, in part at least, on the government’s past policy concerning the distribution of the public policy concerning the distribution of the public domain, must be obvious. Laissez-faire is a Utopian dream which never has been and van never be realized.

Robert Hale