Regulating the ‘Invisible Hand’

Regulating the "Invisible Hand'

The ‘invisible hand’ has come to imply the idea that the pursuit of narrow self interest by individuals results in the best social outcome.  Adam Smith, who first used the expression, more narrowly applied it to the concept of markets: “specifically that it is competition between buyers and sellers that channels the profit motive of individuals on both sides of the transaction such that improved products are produced and at lower costs.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

The generalized idea is not valid.

In general, action by the members of a society must not only be self seeking, it must promote the well being and goals of that society. To put it in economic terms: Society must profit, and the action of individuals must, in that respect at least, be virtuous. Indeed, every prosperous and stable society has elevated the idea of virtue among its citizens, and devised means to encourage it.  Those most esteemed were those who contributed the most to society.  They were those who were held to be the most virtuous, and received the greatest rewards.  Those who were merely self serving were held in contempt, what ever their material income.

While an individual person may or may not be inclined to virtue, a corporation, however, cannot be virtuous, unless forced by law and circumstance of competition.  Only the pressures of competition make a productive corporation stay productive, that and the force of law required to make the corporation internalize its costs. 

For instance, we hear about banks, and other corporations, ‘socializing costs while privatizing profits.'  When this happens, it is no longer certain that the activities of the corporation are actually of benefit to the economy.   These activities may actually harm society, that is make society poorer, and everyone, on average, worse off.  (Though the owners and some of the employees of the corporation may, of course, be better off.)  Indeed, it is always the case that society is the poorer when the externalized costs are greater than the profits the corporation makes.

For the act of production requires the internalization of cost. The very act of production requires the benefits of production outweigh the costs, and if many of those costs are externalized, their weight is no longer determined by the market.  Thus, while the corporation may reap a profit, the costs to society may outweigh the benefits society receives.

This can be seen from the fact that, when all costs are internalized, the net benefit a company makes to society is equal to that company’s profit. That is, society comes out ahead by the profits of the company. If, when all costs are internalized, the company breaks even, then society breaks even.  But if costs are externalized and the company breaks even, then society pays these costs, and loses.

The profits a company makes are what society is willing to pay the company above the company’s costs.  (Note that in a situation with perfect competition, where there are no profits, there is no growth.)  If society is not willing to pay the company above its costs, its activity is only of use to society to maintain society, and the company itself, in their current state of economic activity. The company makes no profits, and does not grow, and society does not grow. 

If costs are internalized, and the costs are greater than society is willing to pay, then society will cut back on that activity.  That is the company is operating at a loss, and it will contract. 

If there are any externalized costs, and these are less than the total profit, then society will grow at a rate less than the company. 

If externalized costs are greater than the profit, then the company will grow, but society will contract. 

Now  the officers of a corporation can only pursue that corporation’s narrow profit.  In a free but limited market, this may yet be beneficial to society.   However, producing corporations are at a competitive disadvantage to corporations which do not produce, but manipulate the economy to enhance their collection of rents from that economy.  Corporations which do not produce need have no real costs, except those they inflict on society for profit. 

Given the opportunity, then, the officers of a corporation must externalize, or socialize, costs, where it increases profits, no matter the harm inflicted on the larger society.  Thus there is always the pressure on a corporation to change into something which is non-productive, a rent collecting corporation, and a parasite on society.    

And while the producer, constrained by competition, might be virtuous naturally, the monopolist and the rent seeker will not be.  The monopolist, unconstrained, will provide a service, perhaps essential to that society, at a cost that society may ill afford, a cost possibly greater than the benefit that service provides.  The rent seeking corporation will extract resources from society without net benefit to that society.

Regulation is necessary, and should be designed to force corporations to internalize costs, which would otherwise be externalized, and discourage the collection of rents, or excess profits. (And one might argue that that is all regulation should be designed to do.  One might also argue that the conservation of stocks of resources is a separate reason for regulation, although this might be under the cover of internalizing all costs.)

Where these costs cannot be directly internalized, they should be countered by government activity, supported by corporate tax. 

Since regulated industries are less competitive, they should be protected against unregulated, and subsidized, competition, especially foreign competition, by tariff, if needed. Indeed, failure to do so results in an economic race to the bottom.  Domestic producers are forced to externalize costs onto their society, or go out of business. This process is essentially the taking of resources out of the market, destroying it. It is the exportation of demand.

A nation should in any case be more concerned with securing its domestic market for its own industry than securing foreign markets.  All countries cannot be net exporters, but all countries can balance their trade. 

Virtue is corrupted where virtue has become a measure of success at self-serving.  A society requires its members to include social costs in the calculation of their profit in order to survive, (since society as a whole must also make a profit) and corporate society, a la Milton Friedman, cannot do this. See:  http://anamecon.blogspot.com/2012/06/milton-friedman-social-responsibility.html

The expansion of the idea of markets to other activities of society is destructive to those activities. And those activities are essential to the function, and even the identity, of society.

Indeed, the idea of the self-serving ‘invisible hand’ is inadequate to explain the stability and persistence of societies. Virtuous behavior, in particular on the part of a society’s leaders, is required for that society to maintain itself and prosper.   Since it may be impossible for the law, even where not co-opted, to restrain corporate behavior, in particular the indiscriminate externalization of costs, the corporate state may be unstable, and incapable of sustaining itself in the long, or even the medium run. The structure of corporations, and their place in society, far from encouraging virtue, may even exert a corrupting influence on their officers, who are also many of society’s leaders.  This is especially true as society’s competitive structure is increasingly replaced by oligopolistic and monopolistic structures.  These structures naturally seek rent and externalize costs.

Unlike people, corporate persons, except as they are constrained by law, cannot be good citizens.  Thus, if the law is inadequate to constrain them, 'Corporate Society' may only exist as a transition state to a decapitalized future.

Regulation may be inadequate to secure the future, but it is nonetheless necessary.

On the Economics of Evil

Elsewhere, http://www.truthabouttheone.com/2010.07.01_arch.html we have talked about how evil arises in the mind, and a little of how it is made manifest in the world.

One may wonder how one talks about evil in an economics blog. It is almost impolite. After all, evil is, in the end, irrational, and ignorance part of its nature. And economics is the domain of the all knowing, rational agent. One might say, economics is the study of the behavior of God, or gods, at least, anyway, under some of its more implicit assumptions. Perhaps this is one of the profession’s problems, then, when trying to explain the behavior of men.

Evil is as evil does. So what is as evil does? What is the economics of evil?

Evil sacrifices the greater good for its immediate gain. Since its own welfare is ultimately dependent upon the greater good, it thus consumes the foundation of its own wealth, and must look ever farther to feed its hungers, until it can no longer support itself, and collapses. But before it collapses, it may have consumed the substance of many. Those incapable, those inattentive, or those ineffectual in opposing it.

Eventually, good always triumphs. Good may triumph through might. But the reason, though, good always triumphs is because in the end, evil always fails. But it may succeed for a time, and the damage it may have inflicted be awful.

And when the good turns evil, it fails. Signs of turning evil are signs of failure. But not all signs of failure are signs of an internal evil. Failure may be imposed from above, inflicted.


It first seems as if we can talk about evil in terms of what are called discount rates. An individual with the lower discount rate is a person who ‘values the future more.’ He is a person more prepared to reduce consumption today so that he has more to consume tomorrow, and is held as somehow more virtuous, ‘more good,’ than someone who consumes more today, with perhaps less thought of tomorrow.

But we are living through a period where this virtue turns into exploitation, and destructive of the foundations of all wealth. An individual with a lower discount rate, exchanging with a person with a higher discount rate, will eventually come to possess all the other has, no matter how small the difference in discount rate. Even if the person with the larger discount rate is a person of relative virtue, he is not virtuous enough to retain his wealth. Is the gradual confiscation of the wealth of the less virtuous, then, itself a sign of virtue, or a sign of a lack of restraint, and of evil?

Or is instead the failure of the person with the higher discount rate a sign of his ‘evilness?’ For failure is what will result. He will lose his capital. Should he now be condemned to labor as a slave on behalf of the person with the lower discount rate, who now may consume the fruits of the labor of both, in perpetuity? Who is evil? The slave, who has become so because of his inadequate virtue, or the slaver?

The slaver, having consumed the wealth of his slave, is reduced to consuming the slave’s surplus, which it is in the slave’s interest to minimize. Having reduced the slave to subsistence, the slaver must then compel him to produce more.

So we see that commission of a lesser evil, what can be just a tiny difference in discount rates, by one, becomes, if not countered, the making of a greater evil, by the other.

Where is the happy median?

The accumulation of capital by a society is a great virtue. But so is its proper allocation. And this proper allocation is necessary, for when the wealth of a society becomes excessively concentrated, it can no longer maintain itself without the consumption of the capital of the rest of that society. Virtue pursued to excess has become Evil.

It justifies itself by its earlier successes still, yet its ends have changed. No longer is virtue seen as the pursuit of the common good. For the common man has proven himself to be without virtue, and dross, unworthy of the considerations of the powerful. What was Virtue turns to the fulfilling of its own now insatiable needs, and, at first just incidentally, the impoverishment of others. It goes too far, first blighting the lives and hopes of those less endowed, or less lucky, and then becoming corrupt and turning on itself, feeding on itself.


Evil is seldom pure. How do we recognize when virtue has turned evil, and harnessed to evil ends? How do we recognize the deterioration of our society, our nation, and our world? How do we recognize the infliction of evil, and the imposition of failure?

After all, Evil will cloak itself in virtue. Its agents may even, at first, imagine themselves virtuous. And what it imposes will not be called failure. It will be called something else. Evil deceives, doing one thing while saying it does another. And where it does what it says, its motives and goals are not what it says they are. But because Evil’s ends are irrational, as these become clear, irrational too become its justifications. Its speaking, and its actions, become increasingly detached from reality, and from each other. And its speaking and its actions become increasingly incoherent

Evil inflicts misery, whether or not it profits. And its profit is always less than the misery it inflicts. Evil provides no nourishment. What it seems to provide is never worth the price.

Evil does not create, except implements of destruction. It only manipulates, and takes. Indeed, creation is anathema to Evil, which opposes creation at every turn. It destroys what it cannot have, and pollutes, both what it does not possess, and what it does.
Evil cannot control its appetite. No amount of wealth is sufficient to its needs. And what to others are wants, mere desires, to Evil are needs, and needs that can never be satisfied.

Evil’s end is not what power can do, to the benefit of others, but power itself, and what it can do to gratify its needs. Evil considers itself to be justified in its extravagance.
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We coddle the wealthy. We are told that they are the creators of jobs. Yet, there were more jobs when they were not so coddled. There was more wealth, and more creation of wealth, when the wealthy did not have so much. And now, we are told, we must give them even more. We, the people, must tighten our belts, and sacrifice of our own wealth, to feed the needs of the wealthy, the wealthy creditors who hold our debt, the debt of the people.

But ask the wealthy. Are they not virtuous? Do they not deserve the rents they extract from the people? Have the people, the debtors, through their inferior virtue, not embonded themselves to their creditors, the wealthy?

We will always have the wealthy. They will always extract their rents and fees from the people. But when are they too much? When are they more of a burden, than any benefits which the people might gain from them? Or are the rents and fees extracted from the people put to good use? Who, or what do they feed? If the wealthy would be the masters of the people, are they good to the people, or are they not? Are the extractions returned to the people, as the virtuous master would do? (But why should they be? Are not the people of inferior virtue to the wealthy, and undeserving?) Or are they not instead turned on self consumption, and the feeding of the worms of competing corruption which are now at the economic processes at the heart of the nation, and perhaps the world?

With the growth of the global economy, the reach of Evil is the ends of the earth, and, unless effectively opposed and contained, it will consume the sustenance of all else before it consumes itself.

But- perhaps we should look at the latest corruption in high places as- justice. Tolerating Evil, even perhaps, as some claim, inflicting it on others, Evil comes to us.

There are those who believe that, or say that, having achieved wealth and prominence, that this is evidence of moral superiority; that they are morally superior to those of us who have not. (Have we ourselves not said this? Have we not used our nation’s wealth and power to justify our- ‘Exceptionalism?’) Do the wealthy use this to justify their stewardship, or their extravagance? Is it become an instrument to do good, or wealth to conspicuously consume, resources denied to others, and wantonly destroyed. Do they nourish others, or deprive them of things they value, of the resources needed for the enjoyment of such liberty as they have?

The moral justification of those in high places can be rephrased: They rule for the benefit of the people, to shower them with the blessings of their making. Or, instead, they rule to inflict punishments on the people, who by their inferior virtue, come to deserve them.

The powerful cannot be merely indifferent. Then they are only self-serving, and there is no basis to their claims on wealth, and no reason for society to grant them.

Are the poor and undeserving supposed to accept these hardships, laid upon them by the demands of the wealthy, as justice served?

And what do we see, but the enforcement of this process, the reduction of debtor to slave, by our government. Are we surprised then, by reaction against the government, since it has become an instrument of compulsion, for the extraction of rent from the people, to the vast enrichment of a few. The protector of the people, having become enslaved by the wealthy, is despised by the people. Do the people, rather than seeking their government’s freedom, despair of their government, and turn on it, and seek its destruction?

Do those who tolerate evil deserve evil things to happen to them? Is it a form of justice that those who tolerate evil, though they do no evil themselves, should be punished? Is tolerating evil itself evil? Is being a bystander to a crime itself a crime? Is to allow evil to consent to evil?

Justification for government and regulation is seen by the behavior of the wealthy. Without a strong and free government, the wealthy cannot do other than they do, and that is to wreak great harm on the society that supports them, and their wealth. And we, the members of that society, may react one of two ways: We may accept the punishment, allow the destruction of our society and our wealth, and consider it just reward for our failures, or we may oppose the evil.

Finally, though man is limited in knowledge and rationality, the shape of the future is becoming increasingly clear. The earth is limited. The ends of the earth have been found, and been found to be not so very far. Consideration of and action to counter overpopulation, global warming, the depletion of resources and increasing toxicity of the environment, are all becoming more imperative. Will man pursue the course of evil, with evil consequences, or will he seek the course of rationality, and act accordingly?