I want to start out by saying that this paper genuinely was of great interest to me. I have already purchased Dr. Sandel’s comprehensive book on the topic of moral limits on marketplaces after reading his paper. Ever since I started studying economics, I wanted to express that it has come off as a bit cold and unnerving in a respect to many of its conclusions without consideration of the humanistic element. In economics, we converse greatly about negative externalities, business shutdown decisions, recessions, and depressions, but often completely ignore the fact that these terms are harsh realities that are being faced in real life (especially in the middle of a global pandemic). In a recession, divorce rates increase, the frequency of mental illness increases, and suicides increase, but it is also to see that stock prices decrease and can be bought en masse. It is very easy to be inconsiderate of hardships that are faced when every economic correction poses an upside. Economics started as a wing of moral philosophy and rhetoric, but it seems as it has quickly divorced itself from its critical roots as time has passed. Economics as a whole is not as necessarily concerned with the humanistic counterparts it so gallantly toys with, as it once was.
A student with a limited view of the entire breadth of economics may come out of the first few fundamental classes with the idea that the laws of supply and demand can apply to any market at his/her whims or fancy without a greater consideration towards the ethical and moral ramifications that can result with poor mismanagement and allocations of such markets. It is very easy to run wild with theories such as Adam Smith’s The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace or the Coase Theorem, and leave everyday people at the unnerving forces of the market. I say these things because as early as last year, I was this naive student. I used to believe that all (and I mean all) goods and sellers should be exposed unadulterated to the market. I believed that domestic industries should not receive subsidies to compete with foreign competition. Businesses should not receive any help or consideration from the government to survive and banks are not too big to fail, I thought, as I completely ignored the fact that businessmen and bankers have to put food on the table and keep the lights on.
What corrected my aberrated view was looking at instances of price gouging during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Left at the hands of the market, and an opportune moment where the world’s supply chain was left crippled, price gougers purchased toilet paper, hand sanitizer, facial masks, and water bottles in massive quantities. They then took to online markets such as eBay and Amazon to sell their begotten treasure at a ratcheted-up price. Individuals such as the elderly and those with comorbidities who especially needed these goods were cut out of the deal because they could not afford the high price. At the end of the day, this is what the market wanted right? People who could afford the high price were willing to clear the market supply at a price those who needed the goods the most could not possibly afford. My view changed as I realized that microeconomics was still at play here, but morality and ethics were not. Markets in sensitive areas need to be managed by forces that understand the eccentricities of ethics and morals in the respective domain. Economics paints an idealistic view of markets that seem to ignore the plight of everyday people. Not all goods, sellers, and buyers are left uncorrupted by the forces of the market in every instance of trade.
