Moral Markets?

Public regulation and structuring of incentives can align private interests with morality, to produce moral outcomes. What is the relationship between government regulations and the free market? The two are not ontologically opposed. Government regulations incentivize market outcomes, for better or for worse. Pogge writes the “the root of the evil lies not in how corporations do business, but how we regulate and incentivize them” (28). The shape and form of the free market is the product of government regulation. A more apt comparison might be how a stream’s current is the product of the rocks and terrain in the riverbed. Our current government structure imbeds incentives for producing drugs geared toward affluent consumers. Pogge’s solution is pull programs--prize money awarded based on impact--which can foster a market competition:  “A full-pull market scheme replaces a central planning solution with a competitive-market solution”(22). Companies are part of the solution to GDB because “the immense powers of free enterprise will be marshaled against the great diseases that bring so much misery”(29). If you are an opponent of the free market (What’s up, Marx?), believing that the free market caused or magnified the world’s ills, then you acknowledge the immense power of the free market, for better or worse.  But the powers of the market can be harnessed.  Can capitalism be used to eradicate the world's most fatal diseases?

In blog post on his website, Robert Reich explains, “In reality, the ‘free market’ is a bunch of rules about (1) what can be owned and traded… (2) on what terms (equal access to the internet? the right to organize unions?... (3) under what conditions… (4) what’s private and what’s public… (5) how to pay for what”. The free market is a written, constructed set of rules. Mr. Reich continues, “These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t ‘intrude’ on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them.”  Markets are the rules that define them. If the rules create the right incentives,  the market can be guided to produce the moral outcomes. 

http://robertreich.org/post/61406074983