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Free Markets and

Morality
Ricardo and Marx

Free markets and Utility: Social


Darwinism
Social Darwinism
Survival of the fittest in human societies

Governments interference in competitive markets


would impede progress
Economic misfits should not be given government aid
Criticisms of the idea
Survival of the fittest is not necessarily survival of the best

Free Trade and Utility: Ricardo


Specialization and free trade boost total economic
output and everyone can share in this increased output.
Criticisms

Resources move from one country to another


Production costs are not constant
Workers suffer when a company closes down
The role of WTO

WTO Kills Farmers


My warning goes out to all the citizens that human
beings are in an endangered situation that uncontrolled
multinational corporations and a small number of bit
WTO members officials are leading an undesirable
globalization of inhuman, environment-destroying,
farmer-killing and undemocratic. It should be stopped
immediately otherwise the false logic of the neoliberalism will perish the diversities of agriculture and
disastrously to all human beings.

Marx and Justice


Capitalism necessarily produces extremes of inequality
Two sources of income
Sale of ones labour
Ownership of means of production

The problem of alienation

Products that workers produce are taken away


Dissatisfying and unfulfilling work
Forced into antagonists relations
False views of human needs and desires
Bourgeois and proletariat classes

Marx and Justice


Commodity Fetishism
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious,
trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange
thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties.

In becoming a commodity, a thing becomes abstracted


from the conditions in which it was produced
Commodities are the product of a specific set of human
relationships

Marx and Justice...


The purpose of government
Protect the interests of the ruling economic class

Economic substructure
Materials and social controls (forces of production and relations of
production)
Production relations depends on the kinds of forces of production

Social superstructure
Government and popular ideologies

All major historical changes are produced by changes in societys


forces of production
Historical materialism

Capitalism in the 21st Century


Thomas Pikettys magnum opus
Sharp increase in income inequalities over the last 25 years
A fundamental conflict between free markets and democracy
The bottom 80% of the US population has only 5% of the wealth
The top 5% has 72 %

Why is it so?
r>g

Europe up until the first world war is a picture of patrimonial capitalism


From 1987 to 2013, the global rate of return on the wealth owned by the
average adult was 2.1 per cent
During that same period, the rate of return on wealth owned by the
average billionaire was more than 6.5 per cent.

Neoliberalism
Critics claim there is a basic hypocrisy in the economic
policy of Western governments
Devastating results of experiment of the past 30 years

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