The Market is flawed, or not...

Fundamentally we are looking here at an issue or more accurately described as a "battle between Civil and Political Society".
 
The rest is a matter of degree (or weighting) attached to the forces influencing these battle lines.
 
What I mean is this:
 
Civil society values stem from classical liberal and now more accurately libertarian philosophy, which advocates:
 
1.  Minimal government
2.  Private property ownership
3.  The rule of law
4.  Minimal taxation
5.  Personal responsibility
 
Political society has a different approach and view of the world, with at its core a desire to achieve 'social engineered' outcomes, via increased government mechanisms and interference in free or 'free-ish' markets and its focus on behavioural aspects of human (and market) interactions.
 
It is this tug of war between the two groupings that then creates opportunity and opportunism (which for good ends or bad) gets exploited by unscrupulous market participants as they know that the reach of the 'rule of law' falls well and truely short of creating a guiding 'moral compass' or what I refer to as 'The Market Soul' © 1999 – 2009.
 
The Market Soul is in essence an inner guiding principle which springs forth from the well of higher levels or awareness of our own Spiritual and Emotional Intelligences.
 
A new book to be published soon by Dr Lieselotte Badenhorst entitled "Loony Intelligence" explores some aspects of these cognitive intelligences better.
 
To return to the issue at hand, which is that the Free Market is flawed, I would argue that in the opening gambit the argument is flawed; that the Free Market is not flawed but does require an injection of a moral and spiritual guiding compass, something referred to in the original article as: "for companies to start[ing] to embrace corporate ethics is their leader 'getting religion'."
 
The system is not perfect, but the degrees to which political society and civil society shape and draw the battle lines between how and when governments interfere, how to regulate effectively, how to encourage personal responsibility, either by 'socially engineering it' or 'farming it out to the market', how to pay for this system (fair and equitable taxation) and the framework within which we operate, 'the rule of law', is what will shape and inform the agenda in the near to medium term future.
 
The outlines of the debate and agenda is only now beginning to take shape, but in the meantime the unscrupulous agents in the market are making hay, whilst the attention is distracted or incorrectly focused on the wrong areas of trying to deal with the fall out from the crisis and the way in which we will deal with the mountain of debt still coming at us like an ever increasing
avalanche….
 
Idea Merchant at theMarketSoul © 1999 - 2009
 
Original article referred to in the above posting:
 
http://www.cimaglobal.com/cps/rde/xchg/live/root.xsl/Insight057153_7260.htm

------------------