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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2013
Over the years, two criticisms of free markets have been repeated over and over again, by very prominent academics. One concerns the subjective theory of values many pro-market economists embrace, the other involves the move from something being good to do to requiring the government to make – or ‘nudge’ – us do it.
1 Some of the most prominent free market journals and magazines pay no attention to either Sen or Nussbaum and have little interest in remedying this negligence, while they publish books after books, papers after papers at the most prominent academic presses and in the most prestigious academic journals. In consequence, that they are paid attention to by nearly all defenders of the welfare state and international redistribution of wealth goes without saying.
2 Sen, Amartya, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 642Google Scholar. Sen book includes many of his previously published essays.
3 By ‘free’ here is meant ‘capable of’, as in ‘I am free to build a home’ or ‘He is finally free to fly to Europe.’
4 Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism’, Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May 1992), 228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 For a development of these ideas, see Machan, Tibor R., Capitalism and Individualism, Reframing the Argument for the Free Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990)Google Scholar. The matter then becomes one of comparative advantage – is a fully free market more beneficial and just than one in which some people coercively redistribute wealth? Even a modified public choice theory that Sen himself would find of merit would support the fully free market alternative, given the value-individualism Sen fails to consider.
6 For the details of this argument, see Machan, Tibor R., Private Rights and Public Illusions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1995)Google Scholar. See, also, ‘Should Business Be Regulated’, in Regan, Tom (ed.), Just Business, New Introductory Essays in Business Ethics (New York: Random House, 1983).Google Scholar
7 Among philosophers who recognize this we find, ironically, Aristotle, who tells us that ‘the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice’. Nicomachean Ethics, 1106a3&4.
8 Whether Aristotle would have sanctioned massively coercive redistributionist national and even governmental agencies is another matter and not the issue here. Suffice it to say that Aristotle had a very non-egalitarian idea of human nature that the egalitarian Nussbaum is not justified to use so as to derive strong paternalistic policies for governments. For more, see Machan, Tibor R., ‘Aristotle and Business’, Journal of Value Inquiry (forthcoming).Google Scholar