When supermarket eggs were getting expensive a while back, a local farmer’s market vendor said she was raising the price of her eggs. Not because her input costs were increasing—they hadn’t, she said–but simply because the supermarket price had gone up. To paraphrase from memory, “It’s not right that I should not get paid just as much for my eggs, since they are a superior product.”
Nice timing from my friend Jeremy in his post on “luxury localism.” The first thing it reminded me of was the way that luxury localism has basically always been with us. Whole Foods (and Fresh Fields before them) was always a business model that hopes to eat other businesses for lunch. It lost no soul in its its acquisition by Amazon — that was pure destiny, baby. The target demagogic were the “eco-affluent” playactors who longed for “simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence,” to use Dougald Hine’s description. (I owe the discovery of Hine to Jeremy as well.)
But it’s great timing because I was just chatting about this over the weekend. Post furniture moving on Saturday, I was shooting the shit with a couple guys and complaining about lamenting the seldom articulated difference between a free market that sets appropriate prices (what we think the market does) and one that basically asks “What’s the highest price I can get away with?” (what the market actually does).
“Unconstrained maximization” to use a phrase from MacIntyre that I was just reading today, which is another reason it’s great timing. In fact MacIntyre, speaking of the unnecessary and harmful dichotomy between relationships of mutual advantage and relationships of sympathetic affection, gives a great example of this:
Affective and sympathetic ties are always more than a matter of affection and sympathy. And in a similar way relationships of rational exchange, governed by norms to which it is to the advantage of each participant to adhere, are also embedded in and sustained by relationships governed by norms of uncalculated and unpredicted giving and receiving. So it is with those institutionalized relationships that make possible the exchanges of markets.
It is indeed true that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations I, ii). And just as butcher, brewer, and baker generally act with regard to their own interest, so too do their customers. But if, on entering the butcher’s shop as an habitual customer I find him collapsing from a heart attack, and I merely remark ‘Ah! Not in a position to sell me my meat to-day, I see, and proceed immediately to his competitor’s store to complete my purchase, I will have obviously and grossly damaged my whole relationship to him, including my economic relationship, although I will have done nothing contrary to the norms of the market. Less obviously and less grossly, even if I respond to his condition only by satisfying those minimum requirements that will enable me to rebut quasilegal accusations of irresponsibility—I call an ambulance and the moment the medical technicians arrive I leave—I will still have undermined my relationship to him and his, by my avoidance of my larger responsibility. Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local nonmarket relationship, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they so often in fact do, undermine and corrupt communal ties.
Norms of giving and receiving are then to some large degree presupposed both by our affective ties and by our market relationships. Detach them from this background presupposition in social practice and each becomes a source of vice…”
Going back to that Ian Marcus Corbin interview, there was a moment when he was describing something similar, and similarly hilariously tragic. “If you had a tribe where a small number of the people in the tribe were getting phenomenally personally wealthy by doing harm to the other people in the tribe,” Corbin say, “you would go whack those guys over the head with a club.”
Earlier in the interview he says
And I think it leads to the kind of baffling levels of hoarding and indifference that we see in a society like America right now.
Black Elk, who I mentioned before, he visited New York City in the late 19th century and he wass like, What is this? This is insane. He’s like, You have people who have more than they could ever use in their whole lives and other people who are starving, and they’re just near each other, and they’re not giving it to the people who need it. This is bananas. And you have other European observers being like, Whoa, this is so weird. Money means way too much. What’s going on?
What’s goin on is that we’ve isolated a market relationship, called it one of “mutual advantage,” and asked it the one, simple question: What is the most I/we/it can get away with? And we call the answer “fair market value.” And if asked to think further, about justice or righteousness or virtue, we shrug. What business is that of the Free Market’s? What are you, a Marxist?