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By Root 1516 0

advocates like Wriston boast about the failure of the Bretton Woods Treaty (by which sovereign nations tried to govern the international currency exchange after World War II)—proof that “Big Brother” (his caricature of all states, democratic as well as autocratic) has been forced out of business. Unfortunately, Big Brother’s role as a guardian of social justice has also been superseded and the many junior siblings who have displaced him turn out to be both more intimidating and far less accountable. National regulatory commissions can curtail in-country labor exploitation with minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and safety regulations, but who can set and enforce such standards for the global market where unrooted companies can chase low-wage labor from country to country as they please? Far more today than in the nineteenth century, the workers of the world need to unite to offset the exploitative consequences of monopoly capital on a global scale. Yet never has there been less likelihood that they could do so.

Multinationals cannot be blamed for promoting high profits at the price of high unemployment or sacrificing the local environment to the economic benefits of free trade. It is the job of civil society and democratic government and not of the market to look after common interests and make sure that those who profit from the common planet pay its common proprietors their fair share. When governments abdicate in favor of markets, they are declaring nolo contendere in an arena in which they are supposed to be primary challengers, bartering away the rights of their people along the way.

Markets simply are not designed to do the things democratic polities do.22 They enjoin private rather than public modes of discourse, allowing us as consumers to speak via our currencies of consumption to producers of material goods, but ignoring us as citizens speaking to one another about such things as the social consequences of our private market choices (too much materialism? too little social justice? too many monopolies? too few jobs? what do we want?). They advance individualistic rather than social goals, permitting us to say, one by one, “I want a pair of running shoes” or “I need a new VCR” or “buy yen and sell D-Marks!” but deterring us from saying, in a voice made common by interaction and deliberation, “our inner city community needs new athletic facilities” or “there is too much violence on TV and in the movies” or “we should rein in the World Bank and democratize the IMF!” Markets preclude “we” thinking and “we” action of any kind at all, trusting in the power of aggregated individual choices (the invisible hand) to somehow secure the common good. Consumers speak the elementary rhetoric of “me,” citizens invent the common language of “we.”

Markets are contractual rather than communitarian, which means they stroke our solitary egos but leave unsatisfied our yearning for community, offering durable goods and fleeting dreams but not a common identity or a collective membership—something the blood communities spawned by Jihad, reinforced by the thinness of market relations, do rather too well. Cybernetic and automatic rather than deliberative and genuinely voluntary, markets produce collective consequences that cannot be foreseen in the simple feedback loops established by consumers making individual choices and markets responding to them. What Ludwig von Mises blithely called the “daily plebiscite in which every penny” gives consumers the right to “determine who should own and run the plants, shops and farms” is a charming fraud; for the self-interested motives on the basis of which consumers spend their pennies have nothing to do with who runs anything, let alone with the kind of civil society these same consumers hope to live in or the civic objectives they forge together as citizens in democratic political arenas in order to control the public and political consequences of their private consumer choices.23 Recall Felix Rohatyn’s warning that markets entail “a brutal Darwinian logic … They are nervous and greedy