Nigel Meek provides a fascinating, scholarly, and insightful review of Maurice Glasman's Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia. I cannot oppose such fantastic analysis, but I hope I can add something.
http://libertarianalliance.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/nigel-meek-on-maurice-glasman-a-new-labour-peer/
First, a quick review. Glasman seeks to find a 'third way' between state control and unfettered free markets. His basic strategy is to accept private property and market competition while rejecting unlimited managerial prerogative, the commodification of labor, and profit maximization as the primary driver of economic decision making. He seeks something called democracy in the workplace. The supposed problem with the free market is the 'compulsion' in the form of the labor contract. The labor contract is supposedly compulsory (a common theme amongst the rabble) because the boss holds the means of subsistence for the employee.
Meek's objections to categorizing this activity as compulsion are valid of course: voluntary exit is possible, lower forms of employment are always available, and one employer cannot compel another to refrain from hiring a fired employee. I would add my own:
It is the individual's moral duty to ensure that they are worthy of being hired and/or retained. If an individual makes herself indispensable by means of hard work, creativity, leadership, or special skills, then firing is not a sentence of starvation...not in a modern dynamic capitalist economy. Not by a long shot. If an individual fails in her personal responsibility to herself i.e. fails to wholeheartedly pursue success in her chosen field of work, then she has earned the fate she receives. Why should those who have lived up to their personal moral actualization be forced by gunpoint to support a morally deficient person? If productive individuals choose, they can of course provide support for whomever they like, but the morally successful should not be subjected by threat of imprisonment to surrender property to the morally deficient.
In response to Glasman's claim that private charity cannot meet modern need, Meek argues that the state has crowded out private charity, which explains the reason modern charity is not sufficient to cure all of society's ills. This is undoubtedly part of the problem. Another, perhaps larger reason for insufficient charity is the welfare system's habit of rewarding idleness. If large swaths of the population are content on the welfare rolls two things happen: First, those on welfare are not properly incentivized to maximize their potential as contributors to society, the economy, and their own happiness. Second, others who are not happy in their current jobs are drawn toward the lifestyle of the idle instead of retraining, moving to a more promising economy, or even seeking promotion and reassignment within their own corporation. In a world that incentivizes such behavior, there will never be sufficient voluntary charity to cover all of those on welfare. Nor should there be. Only in a world of coercion will the productive subsidize the unproductive to such an unhealthy extent.
Glasman would replace the socialist nation with a collection of “vocational organisations, public libraries, universities, artisan institutions and municipal government.” He suggests that this is his 'third way', his middle ground between socialism and pure capitalism. After all, it does not result in a top-down dictation of economic activity and also does not emphasize the individual as the primary actor in the economy. Meek is absolutely correct when he says that there are only two types of relationships, coercive and voluntary. The free market is the only way to ensure that all relationships are voluntary (and of course many similar institutions to those that Glasman reveres would exist under a voluntary association scheme). As Meek notes, all of these social organizations proposed by Glasman would have the implicit backing and funding of the state and would have their rules take the force of law. Thus, membership will be coercive rather than voluntary.
Meek also points out Glasman's strawman attack against 'market utopianism' which describes a society " in which self-interest is the only acceptable form of rationality." Meek points out that a surprisingly large amount of time is spent in capitalist societies working for something other than economic self-interest. I would argue that this is neither surprising nor revolutionary. Economic self-interest is but one aspect of something far more fulfilling, something I prefer to call enlightened self-interest. You can look at other posts on my blog for more details, but enlightened self-interest is the pursuit of happiness...something that includes love, family, health, wealth, intelligence, and knowledge. Under a true free market, people would be free to pursue all aspects of happiness without the tax burden that forces many of us to work an undue amount in pursuit of only one aspect of happiness (wealth).
Meek's overarching point is one about the wisdom of the U.K joining the EU. He argues that the EU is founded by Roman Catholics who are motivated by thinking similar to Glassman's, while the UK's Protestant leanings are much more individualist. While I agree with the general proposition that the EU represents an outgrowth of Roman Catholic thinking, I disagree that all member states of the EU can be categorized as a monolith. Some are overtly statist, some were former Soviet states where statism and Catholicism are unpopular, and none of the EU states have unanimity of opinion. Neither for that matter, does Britain. There are plenty of genuine socialists and even Catholics in Britain, who are quite distinct from Meek's broad characterization of the Anglo-American individualist sympathizers who supposedly come from a more protestant tradition than the EU.
That said, I loved Meek's analysis, and I will be seeking him out in the future.
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