The Market and Care

The idea behind commerce is that I do something for you not because I care about you, but because I can get something else from you. There is something impersonal and inauthentic about it. It takes many people to make a single pencil, but they don't even know each other or care about each other.

Adam Smith the father of free market economics summed up the operation of the market likewise: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"

What kind of society can be held together without benevolence? Without love? We can get our meals, but will subsist in a world foreign to our own humanity. Our world separated from ourselves. Others having only instrumental value in our lives.

They are strangers, but they are involved in our lives in an intimate way. We depend on these people for our material subsistence. And yet we don't care about them. We do need them. We are more dependent than ever on others thanks to the market. The market is an intensely social relationship. But an impersonal, cold relationship. Imagine a family running like that.

Market exchange values individuals only extrinsically, not intrinsically. As means to an end and not an end in themselves. When we do something because it makes us happy, the value of the activity or thing is intrinsically rewarding. It ceases to be a thing foreign, in opposition to ourselves. When we do something in order to get something else, we see no inherent value in the activity or thing and are willing to dispose of or cease using when it doesn't procure what else we want.

Why not care for those whom we depend for our daily bread? As opposed to the absurdity of the atomic isolated individual dependent on the labor of others.

Nobody prefers the impersonal with people they care about. Nobody wants to be inauthentic with things they care about. Why not apply this thinking to society?

This is why I say a market economy yes, but a market society no!