we can readily see reasons why Smith's principle might well break down. Today there are many disruptive influences within markets: oligopolies limit competition's control of prices and quality, inequality of knowledge between buyer and seller affects the wisdom of many market decisions, firms pass on costs (and harms) to others as externalities. (11) There is also an inexorable pressure for managers to frame all choices on the short-term need to boost the price of a firm's stock. Among consumers, as well, the market helps reshape values and perceived needs so that consumption is increasingly a central. although unreflective, force in people's lives. The financier George Soros warns, 'As the market mechanism has extended its sway, the fiction that people act on the basis of a given set of nonmarket values has become progressively more difficult to maintain.
advertising, marketing, even packaging, aim at shaping people's preferences rather than, as laissez-faire theory holds, merely responding to them. Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value.' (12)
It has been argued since the 18th century that, despite its many pernicious effects, the market does generate certain moral values. Most recently Ian Maitland has argued that the market develops trustworthiness because business is impossible between people who so fear being cheated that they demand all possible protections. For similar reasons, successful businesses display fairness in their dealings with various stakeholders. The market also breeds self-control, for people in business must learn to restrain themselves for the sake of long-term gratification. (13) Maitland makes good points that doubtlessly hold true for many firms that are settled and prosperous in their secure niches within the market and community. In an era of downsizing in order to increase profits, leveraged buy-outs, poison pills, two-tiered employment, and the like, however, Maitland's assurances take on an air of nostalgia for a form of business fast disappearing. Moreover, as Bill Shaw
notes, Maitland's enumerated virtues are not developed because they are goods in themselves, righteous ways of doing business, but only because they produce profits. (14) When fairness to employees is measured against a boost in stock price, for example, management usually seeks to raise the stock price.
One fact is undeniable: the market looms large in all political thought and policy formation today. Although modern market theory stresses radical individualism and self-reliance, in fact, markets rely heavily upon government for such things as infrastructure, education of the workforce, and stability among trading partners. Citizens, likewise, look to government for regulation in the workplace, safety in products, truth in advertising, and the like. At the same time, today's global markets are less and less under the sway of the state. Nowhere is this clearer than in employment, for within the global market firms can relocate production anywhere that labor is cheap and submissive. The result is greater job insecurity everywhere, with increased pressure on governments to provide for the unemployed and unemployable. The private enterprise system inevitably depends upon public support from government as well as from various nonprofit agencies that provide education, housing, healthcare and other services for sometime workers.
Given the marke
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