Being a proponent of free markets I would love to see them as not just necessary and useful for some purposes but also as "ethically perfect".
But I can not.
Free markets, based exclusively on voluntary agreements, lack a crucial element to be fair: Equal opportunity.
Extreme inequality of wealth causes extreme inequality of opportunity. This is the core dilemma of free market liberalism.
There is no plausible definition of meritocracy that has a place for inherited wealth. Place of birth isn't very meritocratic either.
We will also have to account for the possibility that luck may play a much bigger role in success than we like to think.
If we want to keep the good parts of free markets and voluntary agreements, we will have to do better than declaring every form of redistribution of wealth to be coercion at gunpoint.
Any alternative to voluntary agreements would inject noise in the feedback that the humans involved can use to improve themselves and, ultimately, the species. You can't have equal opportunity. It's an impossible goal. It can't possibly exist. What should be possible is to have some kind of Fair Opportunity by optimizing it somehow but never equal. You need that constraint loose in the system so it can create wealth. Pursuing equality is only pre-authorize coercion and will converge in totalitarianism (because victimists will always bug you ad-infinitum to achieve their claims of lack of equality).
>You can't have equal opportunity. It's an impossible goal.
I never said we could have completely equal opportunity. But by implication, the outcomes of our voluntary agreements are never perfectly ethical or completely justified.
Redistribution of wealth makes up for the fact that the playing field is never completely level. Rejecting all social processes that lead to peaceful redistribution of wealth or to more equal opportunity is both unpragmatic and unethical.
Also, extreme inequality distorts markets massively. It's much more than just noise. Markets break down completely if too many participants are forced to sell or buy at any price just to survive.
Voluntary agreements are ethical by definition and because they are voluntary.
Curious that you call unethical to voluntary agreements and simultaneously imply that peaceful redistribution of wealth is ethical when you can't do it without coercion which is exactly unethical. Explain how this peaceful redistribution of wealth is any good? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOjvJAfIMSI
Being a proponent of free markets I would love to see them as not just necessary and useful for some purposes but also as "ethically perfect".
But I can not.
Free markets, based exclusively on voluntary agreements, lack a crucial element to be fair: Equal opportunity.
Extreme inequality of wealth causes extreme inequality of opportunity. This is the core dilemma of free market liberalism.
There is no plausible definition of meritocracy that has a place for inherited wealth. Place of birth isn't very meritocratic either.
We will also have to account for the possibility that luck may play a much bigger role in success than we like to think.
If we want to keep the good parts of free markets and voluntary agreements, we will have to do better than declaring every form of redistribution of wealth to be coercion at gunpoint.