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By Root 390 0

occasional cinematic thriller that presents the horrible possibility.22 I also do not worry much about the need to buy a kidney, although that might change quickly if I or a loved one contracted kidney disease. But whether or not you feel that sex slavery or organ trafficking touches your life, the fact is that markets have a persistence that is virtually impossible to resist. Eventually, everything gets monetized. If children and body parts have market value, it is no surprise that the market also monetizes sex, votes, wombs, and lives.23 (My son told me that people sell their souls on eBay. There is a soul for sale as I write this, with an opening bid requirement of $500. No one has placed a bid yet, with nine hours remaining in the auction. Another soul has a current bid of ninety-nine cents. That soul’s owner was thoughtful enough to offer free shipping via email.)

In one sense, the market’s pervasiveness—its insistence on monetizing everything—is a measure of how much it prizes choice. If you want to sell your daughter, rent out your womb, or buy sex services, a free market will provide you that choice. We can also choose not to sell a daughter, rent a womb, or buy sex.

What a market does not offer is the choice to not have these things monetized. By their very nature, markets cannot give us a choice to protect our most prized and sacred things. And once they become monetized, something important is lost—their pricelessness.

We cannot use markets to limit the things markets can buy and sell. We have to use law. In order to have the choice to live in a society where children, organs, or sex services are not sold, we have to limit the kinds of choices people can make in the market.

It is undoubtedly true that the market provides us with an incredible range of choices. Just walk into your local superstore and witness the abundant options available to you. At the same time, the market restricts choice in ways that are just as profound, if more often ignored. Because it allocates everything according to who can pay, you don’t have choice if you don’t have money. The market gives marketers incentive and opportunity to exploit our tendency to make unreflective decisions. It monetizes everything—including our children, our sexuality, and our decisions about what kind of society we want to live in—whether we want to commodify those things or not. The pervasiveness of markets makes it nearly impossible to opt out of them.

Like the constraints on choice posed by the makeup of our brains, the power of culture, and our tendency to obey authority, pervasive markets operate to keep us within narrow bounds. We revel in the choice we have when we shop at Target or surf through hundreds of television channels. But the offering of so many consumer choices makes it difficult to see how we’re constrained and left open to manipulation.

There is one choice the market will not provide: a way to limit markets.

III

What to Do

7

The Problem with Personal Responsibility

Bartender, make it straight and make it two— One for the you in me and the me in you.

—Melvin B. Tolson, An Ex-Judge at the Bar, 1944

It is not the responsibility of knights errant to discover whether the afflicted, the enchained and the oppressed whom they encounter on the road are reduced to these circumstances and suffer this distress for their vices, or for their virtues: the knight’s sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds.

—Don Quixote, in Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605)

ONE OF THE ODDEST POLITICAL firestorms of Barack Obama’s first year as president began with his announcement that he would address the nation’s children on the morning after Labor Day, when most of the country’s schools began the new year. His speech, delivered at a school in Virginia, would be beamed live into classrooms, auditoriums, and gymnasiums across the country. Schools set aside time for children and teens to assemble to hear the president’s message.

The outcry began