DON GIOVANNI, FREE-MARKETEER
ANGUS SIBLEY
This article appeared on my site, www.equilibrium-economicum.net, in December 2006
If you are trying to argue against the steamroller of free-market orthodoxy, you have a problem. For the people at the controls of the steamroller claim to have occupied the moral high ground. Their opponents are made to feel guilty. If you don’t agree with the virtuous moralists, your own moral standards must be faulty.
But free-marketeers, after all, are simply advocates of a particular economic theory. How does this permit them to claim, and to persuade others, that they have God on their side? The answer lies in a simple principle: Any human being, they say, has a basic right to strike a deal with any other human being, provided both parties willingly accept the terms. That is the foundation of free-market economics, and it is presented as a basic human right. You cannot argue against basic human rights!
But is this really a fundamental and inalienable right? Let us try another question. Does a man have the right to sleep with any consenting woman he fancies? Or vice versa? Oh no! cry the moralists, the upright bourgeoisie, the respectable churchgoers, the born-again evangelicals. We can’t have a world in which people feel free to behave like Don Giovanni, hero of Mozart’s great opera, who – according to the meticulous catalogue kept by his servant Leporello – seduced a total of 2,065 women:
in Italy 640
in Germany 231
in France 100
in Turkey 91
but, in Spain, already 1,003
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grand total 2,065
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Free-marketeers demand deregulated commerce; Don Giovanni demands deregulated sex.
Why, in fact, does one not have the moral right to unrestricted copulation? Consider just three of the various reasons. First, such behaviour frequently involves infidelity or...