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By Root 458 0

memories include Norman Rockwell scenes of perusing Superman comics in the downtown magazine store, shopping for baseball pants at Finkel’s General Store, and eating the blue plate special at the lunch counter near the courthouse. (I try not to whitewash my memories completely—our downtown movie theater was still racially segregated when I was in high school, fifteen years after the Civil Rights Act.) About the time I went away to college, Walmart opened a store on the outskirts of town, and it was an instant sensation. Their prices were lower. They had everything in stock. And it was all under one roof, from comic books to baseball pants to lunch counters. The effect was exactly what you would imagine. The family-owned businesses downtown could not keep up, and eventually most of them failed. In effect, the town’s center of gravity moved from the courthouse square to the Walmart parking lot.

This was not completely a bad thing. Many people were able, in the words of Walmart’s current slogan, to “save money” and “live better” because Walmart was there. Sometimes businesses should fail, especially when faced with competitors that are better.

But consider this: the change in the town brought about by everyone shopping at Walmart was not a choice in any meaningful sense. It was the result of thousands of individual decisions about where to buy things. The nature of markets is that the decision about what kind of town you want is chopped up into thousands of individual decisions about, for example, whether to get a twenty-dollar hammer at the downtown hardware store or a fifteen-dollar hammer at Walmart. The ultimate effect of the two decisions—you keep a lively downtown with the twenty-dollar hammer and end up with no downtown with the fifteen-dollar hammer—is invisible until it happens. And then there is no going back.

Markets allow you to “vote” with dollars (or Euros, or rupees), and that’s fine when you’re voting on which hammer offers the most value. But sometimes, your vote on the hammer is also a vote on the nature of your hometown. That’s not a decision that should be atomized. It should not be the unintended product of thousands of individual purchasing decisions, especially when the cost of each decision is hidden and borne by others. Markets elbow aside collective decision making with their focus on individual decision making. Even if we wanted collectively to object, the market does not offer us a mechanism to voice that objection other than with money. And no one wants to be the chump who spends twenty dollars for a hammer in the hope of saving his hometown if everyone else is buying fifteen-dollar hammers anyway.

This problem of markets chopping up big decisions about important things into little decisions about money is known as a “collective action” problem. Markets do not provide ready ways for people to act collectively, to make decisions about big things. There are thousands of other examples. Clean air and water, adequate public transportation, and access ramps for the disabled—to pick just three—are choices that markets simply do not provide. Absent government regulation, a company that pollutes will produce its products more cheaply. Absent government subsidies, public transportation will be too expensive for people to use. Absent a government mandate, no business will spend the money for wheelchair ramps. If we want to live in a society where we have clean air and water, public transportation, and the ability of the disabled to be part of society, we have to elbow markets aside and make those decisions in another way. On its own, the market will commodify everything, including the decision to have a hometown or not, to have clean air or not, or to treat people fairly or not. The “prices” of those decisions will be hidden in products and services all around us, whether we like it or not.

Markets not only commodify decisions that ought to be made in other ways. They also commodify things that ought not be bought and sold at all.

For one example, consider the horrible choice facing Rab Nawas.16 Nawas