New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

HANIEH: Praising Empire 175
block would no longer remain the self-contained individual. Another
factor would exist at a more basic level than individual preferences and
the individual and society would need to be seen as mutually constituted.
Likewise, it is necessary to assume that all market participants have
perfect knowledge of market conditions (what is available, competing
products, and how much they cost). If knowledge is incomplete there
is no necessary connection between what an individual chooses and the
benefits they obtain as an outcome of that choice. If this is the case, then
individual choice may not lead to the best outcome. 17
A third assumption is that of perfect competition in which all market
participants are price-takers. If some market participants are pricemakers
and are able to influence the price of a good through their
strength in the market (that is, a monopolistic position), then the market
price does not reflect subjective individual preferences but the actions of
producers.
Clearly these assumptions do not hold in reality. Real-life markets
are imperfect and monopolized, and people are influenced by a range
of factors. For some mainstream economists, this means that state
intervention is permissible in order to increase social welfare, alter distribution
outcomes, and address “market failure.” This intervention may
include taxation measures, public spending programs, central bank
intervention in monetary policy, or social welfare spending.
Most neoliberals, however, strongly disagree with this attempt to “fix
the market.” Drawing from the Austrian school of economics, neoliberalism
believes that the market will automatically tend to produce
optimum outcomes. Consequently, this school generally opposes any
attempt to make ethical judgments on social welfare outcomes: the only
judge of an individual’s welfare is the individual in question. There is no
way for an outside observer to judge the utility or rationality of an
individual’s decision; the individual is the sole arbiter of whether they are
better or worse off. 18 It is ethically wrong, therefore, to utilize the state to
impose any “patterned end-state” on social outcomes.
Lal, for example, denies that it is possible to provide any value judgment
on the fairness of social outcomes, distribution, or inequality. Only the
process by which the outcome has been achieved can be judged ethically.
He explicitly denies that egalitarianism or questions of distribution
should be considered in judging the relative performance of countries.
“[Welfare judgments based on the size and distribution of national