The Injustice of the Marketplace

It is not fair that Wilt Chamberlain became the greatest basketball player of his generation and I didn’t. He made millions having fun and dated a different woman after every game. On my student's budget, I couldn’t afford watching him from behind the home team’s basket. I could have practiced as hard as Wilt, but all of the effort in the world would not have compensated for the advantages of his seven foot stature and the disadvantages of my flat feet.

Robert Nozick, the libertarian philosopher, found justice in a marketplace that allowed Wilt to charge people to watch him play basketball. Nozick claims that the market is fair simply because every paying spectator purchased his ticket voluntarily. For Nozick, the giving of limited choices to otherwise disadvantaged people creates justice. For Nozick, the voluntary nature of choosing among limited choices makes wretchedness just.

How can Wilt’s market be just? He made it to the hall of fame and I never even got a good seat at courtside. The market might give people the liberty to pursue the best options available to them, but different people have available different options and the richness of their options is never based upon justice. It is not justice that a poor man has the liberty to choose between eating bread and oatmeal while a rich man has the liberty to choose between filet mignon and caviar. It is not justice that a man without basketball talent must enjoy the game from the bleachers rather than the free-throw line. The marketplace is not a place of justice; its liberty has never given people fairness or any other form of entitlement.

Nozick is wrong, the marketplace with all of its individual liberties may have rules but they are not the rules of fairness or justice. The market is run by the rules of consistency and predictability; it offers no entitlement of justice to the untalented. Among its consistencies is its consistent evasion of justice; the advantaged are consistently advantaged and the disadvantaged are consistently disadvantaged.

People like Wilt have monopolies of their unique talent and for that monopoly they can demand whatever the market will bear; they do not have to be bound by anyone’s idea of fairness. Once promised, Wilt must keep his promise, a contract is a contract and a contract stands on its consistency and predictability. Wilt has to follow the rules, but those rules do not deny the injustice of a gifted person’s selling for money what he received freely by an accident of birth.

The best the marketplace can offer is the opportunity for each person to minimize the injustices that his birth, his family, and his society have arbitrarily bestowed upon him. The liberty of the marketplace gives us the chance to enrich our lives, regardless of whether we are entitled to that enrichment or not. When Wilt offered his talents for money, not only did he grow richer, but each person that purchased a ticket became enriched by the talents that he offered. The fact that the participants had acted freely may not have created a presumption of fairness as Nozick claimed but it did create a reasonable presumption that all participants were enriched by receiving more than they had sacrificed.

Everyone gets richer in Wilt’s market. Wilt’s pocketbook swells while the fans experience the drama and grace of a demanding sport. It may not be fair, but, if we are talking about human welfare, the economy of Wilt’s market is good for everyone. To a small degree, even the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the larger economy is increased by talented people like Wilt and his fans all pursuing their greatest happiness at the least sacrifice to themselves. Wilt’s game is productive even if it is not just.

Justice is not about enriching people’s lives; it is about the use of force to make all men comply with the imaginations of others. Justice is an unverifiable superstition that is paid for by constraining the talented and denying their talents to the ordinary. The fairness of a graduated income tax is just an incentive for the best and brightest to limit their contributions to the quality of our lives. Fairness is standing in line on a freezing Muscovite street waiting for your fair turn to receive a roll of toilet paper. Justice is an Englishman waiting seven years for his fair turn to have his burned face reconstructed. It is a demagogue promising to make Germany Judenfrei or a Mayan priest making a blood sacrifice.

Justice makes wars between those who return from Plato’s ideal forms with different visions. I would prefer the avarice of the marketplace to the coercion and violence of justice. The only place Voltaire found Jews, Muslims, and Christians all working together and meeting their minds was in the London Stock Exchange. He found peace there even though he perhaps found justice wanting.

Free markets, like that of Wilt and his fans, work where justice fails because they allow the less talented to take advantage of the talented. The marketplace gives us ordinary folk the opportunity to experience Beethoven’s music, Michelangelo’s ceilings, and Spielberg’s imagination. In a fair market, as opposed to a free market, I would be both a basketball star and a cinema director but my audiences would impoverished by my skills.

The economists use the term “comparative advantage” to describe this exploitation of the skilled by the unskilled. For example, try making a lead pencil by hand to experience the “comparative disadvantages” of self reliance. If you have good manual skills you will fit the wood, mine and process the graphite, and create the necessary paint, metals, and rubber in the course of a year. You can accomplish the same thing by offering a half-dollar to someone who has real pencil-making skills, however unjustly he may have come by those skills. This “Wilt” of pencils, in turn, will rely on woodworking Wilts or graphite mining Wilts. A great chain of unfairness lies behind our world of cars, colleges, and Ipods.

Comparative advantage renders real culture to us of limited skills and it creates civilizations where people would otherwise create fire by rubbing two sticks together. The economists might call it comparative advantage, but I like to think of it as “cooperating with each other to make the best of an inherently unjust world.”