A review of Enrico Colombatto, "Markets, Morals and Policy-Making. A new defence of free-market economics"

摘要

A review of Enrico Colombatto, Morals and Policy-Making. A new defence of free-market economics1 Enrico Colombatto's Markets, Morals and Policy-Making. A new defence of freemarket is rich and dense and invaluable 200-page long book. Obviously, it would not be easy to review honestly its multiple dimensions - methodology, history and ethical foundations of economics, and interactions between and other social sciences - and many important questions - social change and how institutions and ideas combine in functioning of human societies, poverty, growth and economic crises as well as moral principles on which our societies are based - it deals with. I will rather focus on one of its main aspects: book is not just another defence of free-markets and free-market economics. On contrary, I believe and insist that Colombatto weaves around three keywords of title provocative but truly original thesis about free-market and he relates his claims to issue of foundations of economic policy-making. Colombatto starts with idea that, as one can observe, the large majority of population does support substantial government intervention in most areas of economic activities (p. 82). Therefore, to him, relevant attitude towards state intervention through should not consist in examining virtues of specific rules - for instance, asking whether rule A is better than rule B or how to devise even better rules. More fundamentally, question bears on legitimation of government intervention itself. From this perspective, claim Colombatto puts forward is rather negative. He thus argues that the economic of reasoning prevailing today is mostly inadequate for understanding nature and legitimacy of policy-making (p. 3; emphasis added); in which adequate means from free-market perspective. Thus, book is aimed at explaining what is free-market approach and, as corollary, at emphasizing differences with what views developed and promoted by those who claim to be free-market scholars. About latter point, upon which I will come back later, I already stress what one of central and fascinating claims of book: even those who are viewed and view themselves as pro-market scholars are not able to adequately defends their views: a free-market approach built on consequentialism or wishful thinking will falter whenever crisis strikes and necessarily force its advocates to acquiesce to some version of third way (p. 3). Thus, at best, standard and well-known free-market approaches that are used in are only able to defend third between socialism and liberalism. The reason is that there is only one to legitimate from free-market perspective and it in adopting moral principle: the foundations of free-market thinking originate from moral philosophy (p. 3). It is because economists have forgotten this fundamental principle that they are now incapable of envisaging form of that would not imply more state intervention for common good. It seems that free-market supporters and pro-state advocates all tend towards similar - if not exactly same - of founding policy-making. They all share a fairly peculiar notion of (p. 32) which consists of an enlarged version of original Keynesian proposal, according to which technocrat has explicitly replaced politician (p. 28). Colombatto dates origins of its incapacity in evolution of discipline since beginning of 19th - economics went wrong at beginning of nineteenth century (p. 209). It results from slow driftaway from political economy approach of founders of discipline and towards hard science, interested only in modeling mechanical systems, in understanding under which conditions interactions between rational utility functions maximizing robots produce order (peace), stability, efficient allocation of resources and general (or partial) equilibria. …