ABSTRACT
In what follows I want to ask: when markets do harm, what distinctive harms do they do? And, similarly, when states do harm, what distinctive harms do they do? In asking these questions, I am not interested in market or state failure, but in the harms which, when they occur, are consequent upon their success. That is, I will not be concerned with what economists call market failure and political scientists call weak or failed states, but rather with what harms can be attributed to markets and states when they function as their advocates recommend – when they function well in the ways that they are supposed to function. So I shall have little to say about the well-known virtues of market exchange and state planning, but focus instead on the evils or undesirable or unacceptable consequences that have been held to result from the successful functioning of these twin and often contrasted modes of coordination and allocation. Quite often, these are not only contrasted but also seen as alternatives. The strongest version of this thought is that they are to be seen as mutually exclusive and even jointly exhaustive modes. Fundamentalists on either side of the debate claim that the one is the panacea for all the ills caused by the other. In recent times, market fundamentalists have been in the ascendant, advocating the encroachment of the market in successive and hitherto market-free spheres of social activity. In previous times, advocates of state planning sought severely to restrict, or even eventually to abolish, market exchange. Those less extreme advocate various forms of mixed economy, differently configured combinations of market exchange and state planning. I shall conclude by questioning two assumptions very commonly made: that the defects of each are genuinely distinctive of markets and states respectively; and consequently that each is best
thought of as always the appropriate remedy for the defects of the other.
