Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Economists think we live in a free marketprice mechanism to inform them about supply, demand,costs and the value consumers put on goods and services.The planners lack the information to respond to changesin the market and are liable to cause widespread havoc,including famines, if they are misguided, uninformed orfoolish.It is fatuous to equate the competitive free market withits mirror image. Of course entrepreneurs draw up businessplans, but they are privately arranged and must competewith thousands of other business plans. Their planmay fail, but unless the government foolishly bails themout, the cost of failure is borne only by the businessman,his employees and shareholders. Others will succeed at hisexpense.The key distinction is that there is no grand plan subsumingindividual plans. Chang’s argument amounts towordplay. He resorts to semantics because he wants toargue for a dirigiste economy and greater regulation ofmarkets. By reminding us that capitalism is already highlyregulated, Chang intends us to embrace further regulation,but this is also fallacious reasoning. Laws should be judgedon their merits. The existence of the minimum wage is notan argument for implementing a maximum wage (whichChang appears to support (Chang 2010: 257)). The prohibitionof slavery is not an argument for introducing tariffs.The existence of regulations does not preclude the existenceof a free market and the fact that government is alreadyactive in modern economies does not justify Chang’scontention that ‘government needs to become bigger andmore active’ (Chang 2010: 260).59