George Soros suggests:
“Markets are designed to allow individuals to look after their private needs and to pursue profit. It’s really a great invention and I wouldn’t under-estimate the value of that, but they’re not designed to take care of social needs.”
Are markets “designed”? Why or why not?
Do markets allow individuals to look after their private needs and/or pursue profit?
Taking design out of the picture, do markets meet social needs?
IMHO, markets are not designed but just a process. Design implies a planner. This assumes that markets are free. If it were an interventionist market, then it may be akin to design, but the design does not necessarily go according to plan.
Yes, assuming it’s a free market.
By meeting individual needs, markets also meet social needs.
Not the good ones, the true and best markets are those which are emergent, any look through AE makes this evident
Yes, how the hell couldn’t it?
Although I don’t understand exactly what you mean by this term, yes, otherwise such services couldn’t exist in a democracy in the first place. Furthermore the market is just voluntary assosiation, this simply usually takes the form of monetary/product transactions. If you want to voluntarily associate with a group that performs social needs (seriously what are those?) then go for it. Finally the biggest mistake that people make about the state is not seeing the reality of it, seeing as the government working on another field of existence (even Voluntaryists), the will do to somthing will still be there, the trucks, workers, and so on will still be there, the only thing that is different with the market is that it recieves funds through coersion.
Soros is now part of a political group. Dont try to understand his arguments from a economical point of view because they are not economical comentaries. Its a political stament. Thats all.
Markets are not designed nor can they be. They are spontaneous. Like the movement of a flock of birds or the creation of a path. By human action not human design. That said the rules on which we can grow the market order can be ‘designed’. Whether that is a good idea or not is another thing.
‘2) Do markets allow individuals to look after their private needs and/or pursue profit?’ Yes
Soros thinks that social needs are different from private needs they are the same thing. That is what a market does it turns peoples private needs and desires and turns them into social good. Social good is emergent out of the market.
What is a “social need”? Are not societies composed of individuals? The concept is nonsensical and is intentionally used by people for its vagueness and impossibility to measure or define it.
If I am forced at gun point to make sense out of this sentence, then I would say that Soros is suggesting the same old anti-capitalist fallacy that markets can indeed satisfy the individual, but only at the expense of another individual. Dog eat dog society, zero-sum game, etc…
Of course, the truth is exactly backwards.
The process of the market may be designed, but the pattern is emergent.
I think Mises said something to the tune that the reason for exchange is that both parties seek satisfaction and benefit from the exchange, otherwise the parties would not exchange.
The market process is certainly not designed. However, the legal system in which the market process functions can and will divert market outcomes. So it all comes down to whether or not legal systems are designed or are subject to the same evolutionary process as do markets. Hume and Hayek argue yes, and I agree with them.
How is the process designed? Examples?
To play devil’s advocate, a “social need” is a need that helps all of society, clean air, clean water, food, etc…
It is set up by conscious acts, of people exchanging goods under certain terms under the authority of certain laws that are known.
How the millions and billions of such acts influence each other to order the economy, that part is emergent.