Social Cooperation: Why Thieves Hate Free Markets
Many believe that market economies create a dog eat dog environment full of human conflict and struggle. To Prof. Aeon Skoble, the competition in markets does not create conflict, but rather, encourages people to cooperate with one another for mutual benefit.
Social Cooperation: Why Thieves Hate Free Markets
I know how to get a free suit. All I have to do is go to Macy’s, get a suit, charge it, and then when the bill comes, rip it up. Ethical issues aside, you see the main problem with this approach is that I can only do it once. The next time I go to Macy’s, they’ll know, because they made a note of it last time, that I rob suits and they won’t give me another one. But I have a clever idea. I’ll go to Penney’s and get a free suit there. Hang on, when I try to get my free suit from Penny’s they won’t give me one either. Macy’s has told them that I’m a suit thief. That’s odd. One view of the marketplace is that it’s a dog eat dog world of hostile competitors. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw the whole world that way.
Since Macy’s and Penney’s are competitors, you might expect that Macy’s would hope that I would rob Penny’s next. That would even things out. But they don’t. In fact, they share information about thieves. They have figured out that in the long run it’s in their mutual best interests to help each other crack down on theft. That’s more important to them than short-term getting even. If they didn’t share what they know, they would be cut off from a tremendous information network about theft. So helping the other guy isn’t contrary to their self interest at all. Despite their being competitors, they have a strong incentive to be cooperative.
Even more interesting is that they came up with this system on their own. It wasn’t a grand design by enlightened rulers, a top-down plan. Rather it was a bottom-up system that evolved organically by the merchants as they figured out how to manage their affairs.
Long before the advent of the department store, merchants realized that cooperation among competitors was an absolute necessity. So many mechanisms in their world depend on trust and reputation issues. Not just in their world though, in mine and yours. When I first told you my plan for getting a free suit, you might have objected that I ought to be afraid of being jailed. And that seems to require a government with a top-down plan.
But even if the fear of jail were taken out of equation, I would still have good reason to pay my bill. The same networks of trust and reputation that the merchants depend on are things that I depend on as well, to have a job, a home, a car; to be able to buy plane tickets or go to a restaurant. In an important way, we are all merchants. We all trade with each other. Not only are we capable of cooperating, we generally do.
Society is full of these organic or spontaneous orders. Everything from language to fashion. From Internet memes to prices in a market. The basic concepts of Anglo-American common law, as well as the international merchant law, evolved in a similar fashion, the result of people’s attempts to work out the most mutually beneficial ways of living and working together. So when people tell you that society can’t solve its problems without force applied from the top down, you’re right to be skeptical. Mechanisms that facilitate and are based on social cooperation are all around us.
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Comments
Ok if thieves hate free markets wouldn't they also hate non-free markets as well? Thieves don't like anybody, but themselves.
Cooperation with one another is a valuable aspect for any market to have, It delivers the energy to competitiveness and network availability. These crimes such as theft are now being hesitated by crime doers because of numerous laws that might put them in sentence of jail . Social cooperation makes the market alive and sustaining the demands of the changing modes of innovation.
The point of this video is not necessarily to show that such behavior is bad (since it violates our natural rights as individuals), but to illustrate just how the free market (absent government intervention) can effectively deal with such issues. We do not need a one-size-fits-all government that uses coercion and inefficiency to drag down the human species. This is a great video! Keep it up, LearnLiberty!
While I fully understand the premise of this video there is something very relevant to today's reality that is missing. Allow me to elaborate.
Say you bought the suit with every intention of paying the bill when it came due but between time of purchase and the bill arriving you loose your job and you can not find another for some time..... The "Market" STILL treats you in the same manner as if it were always your intention to STEAL the suit. Even worst the longer your out of a job and with "bad credit" the market reduces your opportunities to remedy the situation by relying upon credit reports to determine if they will offer you a job that would, in turn, allow you to fix your credit standing and eventually pay the bill owed.
In this reality the Market may be cooperating with itself but its is definitely NOT cooperating with Society.
That's a matter of personal responsibility, and personal choice. You shouldn't buy a suit on credit if you don't have the means to pay for it. Also, losing your job is not an excuse to not pay your bills, regardless of how unforeseen the circumstances might have been. If you owe someone money, and you refuse to sell your belongings, eat Ramen noodles, and cancel your cable and internet, and default on your bill, then the market has every reason to consider you a thief.
I agree with ZJForsytheIL.
We can also frame the said situation in terms of property rights and contracts. The violation is clear both to the credit card company and the store no matter why you can't pay (excluding extreme hypotheticals).