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The Morality of Commercial Life

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Submitted By thomasmeurs
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Paper lecture 1: Lindblom: What is this market system?

A market system exists only when markets proliferate and link with each other in a particular way. A market system is a system of society-wide coordination of human activities not by central command but by mutual interactions in the form of transactions.

Three kinds of markets are the most familiar: The labor markets, the agricultural markets, and markets for services and goods that industry provides to customers. Two less obvious kinds of markets are no less necessary for a market system. One is markets for intermediate services and goods produced for other producers. The other is market for capital.

In market systems people do not go their own way; they are tied together and turned this way or that through market interactions. In our time it is a governed market system, heavily burdened or ornamented with what old-fashioned free marketers decry as ‘interferences’.

Although buying and selling may be natural to human-kind, market systems are not. The market system that lies closest to our span of attention is the capitalist market system.

In ostensibly democratic societies, market skeptics sometimes fear that the market system may bring an end to democracy. One of their fears is that big corporations already exercise powers inconsistent with democracy; and that multinational corporations overwhelm small nation-states.

Despite the growing consensus in favor of the market system, it is of course possible that the millions of people who now endorse it are on the wrong track.

A market system can coordinate human behavior or activity with a range and a precision beyond that of any other system, institution, or social process. It is both an ally and enemy of personal freedom.

Paper lecture 1: Dubbink: Market Description I: ‘The non-mainstream approach’ and ‘Market Description II: Neo-classical

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