What Money Can't Buy? (BOOK REVIEW)
What Money Can’t Buy
The Moral Limits of Markets
by Michael J. Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Paperback, $15.00
254 pages
ISBN: 978-0-374-53365-6
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“We
live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold... Over the past
three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never
before… As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled
prestige.
And
yet, even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market
mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market
values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life…
Today,
the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but
increasingly governs the whole of life. It is time to ask whether we want to
live this way.”
--
Excerpted from the Introduction (pages 5-6)
Economists
have been referred to by cynics as emotional cripples who know the price of
everything but appreciate the value of nothing. Increasingly, the same might be
said of people in general as we’ve come to embrace the commodification of
virtually every aspect of human existence.
For
example, nowadays, you can pay an East Indian woman to serve as a surrogate mom
for $6,250. Or you can shoot a rhinoceros on the endangered species list for
$150,0000; or rent out the space on your forehead as corporate ad space for
$777.
In Europe,
the cost to pollute is $18 per metric ton. In California, you can upgrade your prison cell
for $82 a night. And a mercenary soldier of fortune collects $1,000 a day to
fight in Afghanistan.
Do you find
this state of affairs unsettling, or are you so jaded that you accept the notion
that everything has a price. If that is the case, where does it end? Will we
soon not only be hiring strangers as friends and lovers, but even to be our
spouses?
This is the
dire dystopia contemplated by Michael J. Sandel in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral
Limits of Markets, a thoughtful opus examining a cornucopia of ethical
questions touching areas ranging from medicine to law education to personal
relations. Should society intervene and, for instance, prevent a fertile female
from renting out her womb to another who is barren? Or does everything have its
price as suggested by Red Foxx ages ago in an off-color skit on a Laff Record
lp.
How we
answer that question collectively will determine whether there’s any hope of
reversing capitalism’s runaway exploitation of the human condition.
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