Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Economists think we live in a free marketIn no system that could be rationally defended would thestate just do nothing’ (Hayek 2001: 40). The question, then,is how much the state should do.Capitalists don’t like free marketsChang says that the market economy has the appearanceof being free ‘only because we so unconditionally acceptits underlying restrictions that we fail to see them’ (Chang2010: 1). But free-market economists do see them and theyoften challenge them. Far from being one of the things‘they don’t tell you about capitalism’, free-market economistscontinually point out that we do not live in a freemarket, not because they desire a lawless state of naturebut because they believe that regulations are often unnecessary,including several of the laws which Chang says we‘unconditionally accept’. There are strong social and economicarguments for legalising the sale of narcotics andhuman organs, for example (Meadowcroft 2008). Manyfree-market economists oppose minimum wage lawsand immigration controls, and some have made the caseagainst bans on child labour, particularly in countrieswhere there is extreme poverty and no schools (Norberg2003: 1999). Plenty of people support ending the war ondrugs, or removing the minimum wage, or allowing thefree movement of labour between countries, but supportersof a market economy are perhaps the only people whotend to hold all three of these views simultaneously.The thrust of Chang’s critique is that capitalists embraceregulation when it suits them, but complain about53