Experience seems to indicate that most people tend to think
of business as simply business and they give its effects on other cultural
realms short shrift. But how a people do
business – or act economically – reflects and affects the whole cultural landscape
in which it operates. It definitely affects
a people’s sense of what is right and wrong.
This posting approaches this relationship from a recurring aspect in
life everyone confronts, standing in line.
This blog has
visited this concern before. A general
description of it can be found in the posting entitled, “Being Efficient and/or
Moral?”[1] The reader is invited to look it up. It mainly claims that efficiency is served by
introducing a pricing system to the inevitability of having to stand or
otherwise wait on a line – TSA, fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, etc. – but
despite efficient outcomes, it can and does pose moral questions or challenges. This posting attempts, while sticking to the
issue of line-waiting, to broaden the concern that the earlier posting posed.
Generally, the
question of lines can be narrowed to a choice:
abiding by the “first come, first-served” principle or custom or
allowing those who really want the product or service to pay for an earlier
access to it. This paying can take
various forms – it can even include paying others to stand in line for an
ultimate buyer or buying a “scalped” ticket from someone who bought the ticket
for the purpose of reselling it.
The goal is two-fold: attain the good or service and avoid the discomfort
of waiting and/or standing. The standing
option can be referred to as the ethic of the queue and the second as the
pricing option. Overall, with the
adoption of capitalist thinking, natural rights dispositions, and a shifting
toward secular thinking, pricing has taken over from relying on nonmarket
norms. Michael Sandel[2] shares his
thoughts over this distinction. Here,
this posting begins with two arguments he points out regarding the pricing
option, its advantages.
The first one
reflects the natural rights view; that is, “[i]t maintains that people should
be free to buy and sell whatever they please, as long as they don’t violate
anyone’s rights.”[3] So, this libertarian notion sees laws
hindering or outlawing people being able to scalp tickets to sporting events or
concerts as unjustified intrusions on people’s rights. As long as one is considering the actions of
consenting adults, governments or possibly corporation policies should not get
involved.
If this sounds
a bit short-sighted or overly simple, there is another argument. The second argument has a more utilitarian
standard. Assuming no one is coerced to
sell or lease a good or service, each party is getting what he/she wants. Enough of that happens, and voila,
people in general are better off than they would have been if such activities
were prohibited. While some might still
think this is too simple, at least there is a concern for the common good.
What are some
complications? Well, and admittedly a
lot of this is presented on a theoretical plane, by allowing scalping there are
negative consequences; that is, they really counter the common good. How?
By using up or abstracting scalped tickets from the market, this lowers the
supply of non-scalped tickets – and decreases the available supply of the
product. This, in turn, pushes the price
of the product higher and takes it out of the reach for some – usually lower
income people.
One response
to this critique is that by upping the price, the supply is better reserved for
those who want the product most – they are the ones who are willing to pay the
higher prices. But again, this is not
necessarily true. One can have someone
who values it more but cannot purchase it because of a lack of money to afford
the item.
Therefore, pricing, at best, can be
considered an imperfect measure of who values the good or service the most. Further, if one believes goods and services
should go to those who want them most – who are willing to sacrifice the most
for them – standing in line might be a better measure. And besides, are utilitarian standards the
best bases by which to determine the distribution of all goods and services?
And here is where things can become
more general, beyond standing in lines or not.
How about access to politicians – like members of Congress? Should the government charge a special tax to
provide that access to people? Some
might argue that meaningful access is already up for sale not in the form of
taxes, but in the form of campaign contributions. Be that as it is, many consider the role of contributions
– what the courts have ruled as a form of speech – as an unfair advantage for
those who can pay. Or is it, “pay to
play?”
Bottom line, ordinary citizens are to
varying degrees deprived equal access and the interests of those groups are more
easily dismissed in the tumble of Congressional deal-making. One can justifiably claim, this whole
“business” diminishes the quality of a democracy. In acknowledging this reality, this blog has
argued that one of the advantages of a federated system is that it affords a
multitude of governmental access points.
If one cannot play or pay at the national level, there is the state or
local levels where the price for consideration can be significantly more
reasonable.
Sandel points out:
We often associate corruption with
ill-gotten gains. But corruption refers
to more than bribes and illicit payments.
To corrupt a good or a social practice is to degrade it, to treat it
according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it. Charging admission to congressional hearings
[for example] is a form of corruption in this sense. It treats Congress as if it were a business
rather than an institution of representative government.[4]
This posting is not an argument for dismissing markets and
pricing options in general. Many
advantages are derived from applying that approach to most products. Chief among them, as pointed out above, is efficiency. And one can readily identify how many (most)
aspects of life are better with markets than without. But as with most things, there are limits and
one should be able to acknowledge where and when markets fall short.
[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Being Efficient and/or
Moral?” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, December 15, 2017,
accessed September 12, 2019, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2017/12/being-efficient-andor-moral.html .
[2] Michael J. Sandel, What
Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of
Markets (New York, NY: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 2012).
[3] Ibid., 29.
[4] Ibid., 34.
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