His moral thoughts in fact are two only, and thin versions even of these: that equality is good; and that the sacred can be corrupted by the profane. "The fairness objection [to what money should buy] asks about the inequality that market choices may reflect; the corruption objection asks about the attitude and norms that market relations may damage" (p. 110). That, philosophically speaking, is it.
About the first, fairness objection, Sandel repeatedly declares without a lot of further argument that "part of what's troubling about" whatever scheme to market something he doesn't want marketed "is the unfairness of such a system under conditions of inequality" (p. 71 and throughout). Such a "first objection" he says (or in this particular case the Sacramento Bee newspaper says), is "about fairness" (p. 36).
andel's analysis of equality as a moral principle does not get much beyond the school-yard taunt that such-and-such is "not fair." He uses for example the truncated logic that "scalping [of, say, tickets to Shakespeare in the Park or to campsites at Yosemite] is unfair to people of modest means, who can't afford to pay $150" (p. 36, italics supplied). The magic word here, uneconomic and unphilosophical, is "afford." Sandel tells a charming story of his old college teacher of economics praising his writings but then urging him not to reveal his [the teacher's] name to other economists. Perhaps the teacher was embarrassed by the uneconomic usage "afford."
quot;Afford" suggests literally that the person of modest means cannot pay for an item. I cannot "afford" to buy Oprah Winfrey's luxury house in Chicago, now up for sale at $2.8 million, even though it's a bargain pared with its earlier asking price of $6 million. That is to say, if I cashed in all my assets, and got the largest mortgage that I could persuade a bank to give me, and robbed a few convenience stores on the side, the $2.8 million would be literally unaffordable, beyond my means. It is, as the economists put it, outside my budget line.
ut even a person of very modest means—say at the poverty line for his family of four, $23,050 annual ine—can afford an expenditure of $150. The sum is far, far inside his budget line. After all, he affords an occasional harmless indulgence of a quart of ice cream for the kids or a movie for him and his wife, which add up in a year to a good deal more than $150.
What Sandel probably means, though he never says it, is that at such a poverty line the man of modest means would be pinched, whereas Oprah would scarcely notice the $150 (or for that matter the $2.8 million). To be sure. But there is no easy argument here, no three-second philosophical meal to be whipped up by merely mentioning the word. The man of modest means can afford to buy his daily bread, or even afford scalped tickets to Shakespeare (modest as may be his taste for the Bard: a point Sandel also slides by). To use the poverty of the man of modest means as a philosophical tool against markets you have to have a deeper argument than unanalyzed afford.
It's not entirely unanalyzed—though Sandel's analysis would perhaps further embarrass his teacher of economics. Sandel makes a supporting argument much heard on the left that "market choices are not free choices if some people are desperately poor or lack the ability to bargain on fair terms" (p. 112). "The law, in its majestic equality," noted Anatole France, "forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." Yet an economist could tell Sandel, and France, that "bargaining on fair terms" has little to do with how ines arise, that is, how people get into or out of poverty. True, many well-intentioned and bien-pensant folk believe it does. Because they do, most of them accept for example that going down and joining the union made workers better off, by giving them better bargaining power against the bosses, even though the historical evidence is crushing that unionization did not make workers better off (rising productivity did).
Having desperately poor people is a moral problem in itself, regardless of the alleged lack of "bargaining power." The moral problem has been partly solved in many countries from 1800 to the present by merce and innovation, previously blocked. If power, and not the supply of their labor relative to demand, were actually the problem the poor faced, the bosses with their superior bargaining power would drive down their wages to nil. Even $23,050 a year is not nil.
y international standards the US poverty line of $23,050 corrected for exchange rates is around the average of world ine, and is deemed a fortably middle-class ine in India. Why does the fact matter？ Because Sandel does not answer why we Americans should ignore the desperation of people earning $1 a day in Chad, and attend instead to the "unfairness" of charging for Shakespeare tickets in Central Park. It is a moral failure of munitarianism that it weighs our fellow New Yorkers or Anglinos, our ommunity, so much more above other poor people in the world, ignoring the good for Chadians or Bangladeshis that a mercial and innovative society would do. Sandel does not note that the introduction of free markets in Sahil-grown cotton (as against European and American protection for "our" farmers) or the reception of the First World's garbage (as Lawrence Summers once suggested in vulgar but sound reasoning) would ameliorate a most terrible lack of affordability. That is, Sandel does not face the actual, moral problem—which is poverty, real poverty, the depths. Instead he remends that we fiddle with prices and create queues for Shakespeare in the Park.
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