Are Markets Moral?

Even Aristotle warned against free markets

Val Lenox
The Apeiron Blog

Photo by S. Ruvalcaba on Unsplash

At the height of the Great Financial Crisis, in a year when over 5 million people lost their jobs, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein defended outsize banker bonuses by claiming the investment bank was doing “God’s work.” Worse, Blankfein seemed to genuinely believe the million-dollar payouts benefited society:

“Is it possible to have too much money…to have too much ambition…[to be] too successful? As the guardian of the interests of the shareholders and, by the way, for the purposes of society…it’s hard for me to argue for a cap on their compensation.”

While news outlets dismissed the comments as typical of Blankfein’s wry humor, the truth is that Wall Street has always believed its behavior is morally justified, and they don’t even hide it while taxpayers bail them out to the tune of billions of dollars.

The Philosophical Myth of Markets

Milton Friedman infamously argued that free markets are the only way to political freedom, and after the fall of the Soviet Union this idea was taken to its logically absurd extreme: free markets must be one of the inevitable natural laws of humankind. We even believed that with laissez-faire capitalism we’d reached the end of history.

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