Silhouette, I lean towards seeing morality as something that flows from reason, so I’m tempted to say that rational choices cannot be unethical. However, that invites a lot of post-hoc rationalizing about how anything that look immoral is really irrational on some other level.
Another way to say what may amount to the same thing is that whenever the market creates outcomes that seem immoral in a utilitarian sense, it’s a market failure, almost by definition. If market transactions are voluntary, the parties are going to be made better off or unaffected – the choice is the evidence. Third-parties can be hurt by transactions, and that is one type of market failure.
But I see the market as primarily about information: it aggregates and disseminates information about peoples wants and the ability to meet them, and that enables the production of significant value. As such, we can learn some things we might not like, for example that people don’t actually value privacy, or that the market for porn is bottomless. In that sense, I take what you call the “pro-Capitalist” attitude: if our ethics are utilitarian, we’re revealing our utility through the market, and we should hesitate to label the outcomes unethical in the absence of evidence that the information is being distorted. And, by the same token, we should hesitate to intentionally distort the information.
That said, we know a lot about certain market failures, certain areas where the market doesn’t accurately aggregate information, e.g. because the people affected don’t get a say on the price, or because the individuals who do affect price are behaving in strictly irrational ways (i.e., their preferences aren’t self-consistent).
To me, the cooperative effort is structuring the market toward the end on minimizing those failures, and maximizing the information processing power of the market. I think this is not quite capitalism, though it often aligns with it. There’s space for things like redistribution, which can improve information by pricing in the common good of a well structured market, and by shifting some buying power from low marginal utility spenders to high marginal utility spenders.
I think making work more voluntary is good, but I don’t think the minimum is survival; I would support a very low UBI. If we can afford that, and we can maintain productivity through automation, all the better, but that isn’t a given. I think it should be about giving people a real dividend of the positive spillovers of a well-functioning economy, and pricing in the value of that cooperative effort.
Well, your boy Daly was a tax protester. Socialism bleeds into anarchism at certain extremes. Given horseshoe theory, I would not be surprised to see a similar sentiment expressed by extreme socialists (though maybe you would not call them socialists).
But in any case, I don’t get the impression that most capitalists make that argument. Capitalism requires a certain amount of market regulation and enforcement of contracts and private property rights, it has to accept some mechanism for funding those things.
And my point is that the question doesn’t really do that. If it’s unreasonable for both the company and the employee to ask for the equivalent information, it tells us more about what’s reasonable for any party to a market transaction to expect, rather than about any inequalities in bargaining power between parties.
Come now, you don’t care about shareholders!
But I mostly disagree. The value produced by management and executives is hard to quantify, but that cuts both ways. I would argue, and the market certainly indicates, that managers are valuable. However, it does seem likely that top executives are overpaid, ironically due in part to a discontinuity in information availability: the salaries of CEOs of publicly traded companies is public, which tends to drive up the price of CEOs! I strongly support making everyone’s income public, though that would need to follow implementation of a better social safety net.
Sure, but the things they buy don’t exist without someone taking the risk. If consumers want things to buy, they also want the people who take the risks to take the risks. They want someone to be the driving force on bringing a product to market, and someone to direct the whole operation to make it run. And so, because those activities result in the things that the consumers buy, the consumers do care, they just don’t know that they care.
There’s a bit of survivorship bias in your argument here. Lost of companies go under, because consumers don’t want what they offer. But what consumers want is an unknown until they are offered things to buy and either choose to buy them or not. You can’t choose to only propose true hypotheses, you can’t only run experiments that will vindicate your hypotheses, and you can’t only create products that are exactly what consumers want. You need the failures to have the successes, and you need people to take the risk to provide both.
This is a weird argument. Workers are literally paid in money.
EDIT: words