The following are excerpts from the first chapter, “Freedom and Unfreedom”, of Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire by William T. Cavanaugh. In this chapter, the current state and practices of capitalism and the free-market are critiqued, and a more appropriate approach to the free-market, informed by Christian theology, are suggested.
“There is no point to either blessing or damning the ‘free market’ as such. What is required is a substantive account of the end of earthly life and creation so that we may enter into particular judgments of what kinds of exchanges are free and what kinds are not.”
“A market is free if people can satisfy their wants without harming others…”
“Augustine’s view of freedom is more complex: freedom is not simply a negative freedom from, but a freedom for, a capacity to achieve certain worthwhile goals. All of these goals are taken up into the one overriding telos of human life, the return to God.”
“Freedom is something received, not merely exercised. Therefore, in order to determine whether a person is acting freely, we need to know much more than whether or not that person is acting on his or her desires without the interference of others. In Augustine’s view, others are in fact crucial to one’s freedom.”
“… There are true desires and false desires, and we need a telos to tell the difference between them.”
“The key to true freedom is not just following whatever desires we happen to have, but cultivating the right desires.”
“… Augustine’s broader point about the relationship of desire to ends is valid, and it goes to the heart of our discussion of the freedom of the free market. The point is this: the absence of external force is not sufficient to determine the freedom of any particular exchange. In order to judge whether or not an exchange is free, one must know whether or not the will is moved toward a good end… Where there are not objectively desirable ends, and the individual is told to choose his or her own ends, then choice itself becomes the only thing that is inherently good. When there is a recession, we are told to buy things to get the economy moving; what we buy makes no difference. All desires, good and bad, melt into the one overriding imperative to consume, and we all stand under the one sacred canopy of consumption for its own sake.”
“To desire with no good other than desire itself is to desire arbitrarily. To desire with no telos, no connection to the objective end of desire, is to desire nothing and to become nothing.”
“The problem with the ‘free-market’ view is that it assumes that the abolition of objective goods provides the conditions for the individual will to function more or less autonomously. The reality, however, is quite different. For, as Augustine sees clearly, the absence of objective goods does not free the individual, but leaves him or her subject to the arbitrary competition of wills. In other words, in the absence of a substantive account of the good, all that remains is sheer arbitrary power, one will against another. This is what Augustine calls the libido dominandi, the lust for power with which Pharaoh was possessed.”
“In the absence of any objective concept of the good, sheer power remains.”
“[Business defending increasing disparity between executive and employee pay.] In other words, it it considered good business practice to maximize the disparity of power between employer and employee in order to increase the profit margin of the corporation. All of this is done in the name of ‘free’ trade. As Augustine saw, in the absence of any substantive ends, what triumphs is the sheer lust for power.”
“When they [businesses] blame the move [off-shoring of labor] on necessity, they recognize a very real sense that the ‘free’ market does not leave them free to act in ways that they might believe are more just.”
“Considerations of goodness and justice only seem to apply to the [theoretical] capitalist system as a whole. Friedman and other free-market advocates argue that capitalism as such is the best system based on its ability to give people what they want. A system that is allegedly based on individual rights is thus ironically justified by a utilitarian justification of the system as a whole, to which individuals and their freedom are sacrificed.”
“However, in order to judge which exchanges are truly free and which ones are not, one must abandon Friedman’s purely negative and functionalist approach to freedom and have some positive standard by which to judge… Once we admit that freedom defined strictly negatively is inadequate, we are pushing ourselves toward the recognition that Augustine was right; to speak of freedom in any realistic and full sense is necessarily to engage the question of the true ends of human life. Yet such ends are precisely what free market advocates would banish from the definition of the free market. To enter into judgments about the freedom of particular exchanges, we must abandon Friedman’s definition of a free market, and we must also abandon any claims for the goodness of ‘the free market’ as such. There is no point to claiming that ‘capitalism produces freedom’ unless one wants to claim that ‘any economic exchange that produces freedom is capitalism,’ in which case one has simply uttered a tautology.”
“There is simply no way to talk about a really free economy without entering into particular judgments about what kinds of exchange are conducive to the flourishing of life on earth and what kinds are not… From a Christian point of view, the churches should take an active role in fostering economic practices that are consonant with the true ends of creation. This requires promoting economic practices that maintain close connections among capital, labor, and communities, so that real communal discernment of the good can take place. Those are the spaces in which true freedom can flourish.”
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