Rick Lowe

I picked up the Winter 2011 copy of the The Cato Journal recently and as usual, it's just packed with 170 pages of thought provoking stuff.

The Cato Journal is a publication of The Cato Institute if you didn't make the connection. Click here for a link to the latest Issue.

The opening article, Markets and Morality, by J.R. Clark and Dwight R. Lee is just brilliant.

Here's a snippet from the section on Social Harmony:

"A noble, though illusive, ideal that is universally praised is harmonious and peaceable relations among people. The difficulty is that people have different goals and aspirations that are always in conflict to some degree. So it is commonly suggested that we subordinate our personal objectives to common objectives upon which we should all agree. But achieving such unity of purpose is possible only in small homogenous groups or temporarily in response to serious crises. So as a supplement to common goals, we also hear that it is important to celebrate our diversity as a way of promoting social harmony. Unfortunately, when our differences are politicized there is a real risk that the celebration will involve some high-octane fi reworks, as illustrated by recent events in the Middle East and other global hot spots. The setting most conducive to social harmony is one in which we can each pursue our particular objectives in ways that help others pursue theirs, no matter how different those objectives may be. This is exactly what the impersonal exchanges of markets facilitate, which explains why markets do far more to promote harmony among diverse people than attempts to reach agreement on common objectives (Lee 1994). For example, a Baptist looking for lumber to add a wing to his church is not likely to be concentrating on the lifestyle of those selling lumber, so if an atheist playboy in the lumber business offers the best deal he will probably get the Baptist’s business. The result is that the Baptist facilitates a lifestyle that he abhors and the atheist facilitates a religious practice that he considers absurd, and they do so in a completely harmonious way. Trying to achieve the same harmonious cooperation by encouraging the two to have more personal contact to celebrate their diversity is more likely to create conflict than promote harmony."

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