LINING UP OR PAYING
Experience seems to indicate that most people tend to think of business as simply business and they give its effects on other cultural realms short shrift. But how a people do business – or act economically – reflects and affects the whole cultural landscape in which it operates. It definitely affects a people’s sense of what is right and wrong. This posting approaches this relationship from a recurring aspect in life everyone confronts, standing in line.
This blog has visited this concern before. A general description of it can be found in the posting entitled, “Being Efficient and/or Moral?”[1] The reader is invited to look it up. It mainly claims that efficiency is served by introducing a pricing system to the inevitability of having to stand or otherwise wait on a line – TSA, fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, etc. – but despite efficient outcomes, it can and does pose moral questions or challenges. This posting attempts, while sticking to the issue of line-waiting, to broaden the concern that the earlier posting posed.
Generally, the question of lines can be narrowed to a choice: abiding by the “first come, first-served” principle or custom or allowing those who really want the product or service to pay for an earlier access to it. This paying can take various forms – it can even include paying others to stand in line for an ultimate buyer or buying a “scalped” ticket from someone who bought the ticket for the purpose of reselling it.
The goal is two-fold: attain the good or service and avoid the discomfort of waiting and/or standing. The standing option can be referred to as the ethic of the queue and the second as the pricing option. Overall, with the adoption of capitalist thinking, natural rights dispositions, and a shifting toward secular thinking, pricing has taken over from relying on nonmarket norms. Michael Sandel[2] shares his thoughts over this distinction. Here, this posting begins with two arguments he points out regarding the pricing option, its advantages.
The first one reflects the natural rights view; that is, “[i]t maintains that people should be free to buy and sell whatever they please, as long as they don’t violate anyone’s rights.”[3] So, this libertarian notion sees laws hindering or outlawing people being able to scalp tickets to sporting events or concerts as unjustified intrusions on people’s rights. As long as one is considering the actions of consenting adults, governments or possibly corporation policies should not get involved.
If this sounds a bit short-sighted or overly simple, there is another argument. The second argument has a more utilitarian standard. Assuming no one is coerced to sell or lease a good or service, each party is getting what he/she wants. Enough of that happens, and voila, people in general are better off than they would have been if such activities were prohibited. While some might still think this is too simple, at least there is a concern for the common good.
What are some complications? Well, and admittedly a lot of this is presented on a theoretical plane, by allowing scalping there are negative consequences; that is, they really counter the common good. How? By using up or abstracting scalped tickets from the market, this lowers the supply of non-scalped tickets – and decreases the available supply of the product. This, in turn, pushes the price of the product higher and takes it out of the reach for some – usually lower income people.
One response to this critique is that by upping the price, the supply is better reserved for those who want the product most – they are the ones who are willing to pay the higher prices. But again, this is not necessarily true. One can have someone who values it more but cannot purchase it because of a lack of money to afford the item.
Therefore, pricing, at best, can be considered an imperfect measure of who values the good or service the most. Further, if one believes goods and services should go to those who want them most – who are willing to sacrifice the most for them – standing in line might be a better measure. And besides, are utilitarian standards the best bases by which to determine the distribution of all goods and services?
And here is where things can become more general, beyond standing in lines or not. How about access to politicians – like members of Congress? Should the government charge a special tax to provide that access to people? Some might argue that meaningful access is already up for sale not in the form of taxes, but in the form of campaign contributions. Be that as it is, many consider the role of contributions – what the courts have ruled as a form of speech – as an unfair advantage for those who can pay. Or is it, “pay to play?”
Bottom line, ordinary citizens are to varying degrees deprived equal access and the interests of those groups are more easily dismissed in the tumble of Congressional deal-making. One can justifiably claim, this whole “business” diminishes the quality of a democracy. In acknowledging this reality, this blog has argued that one of the advantages of a federated system is that it affords a multitude of governmental access points. If one cannot play or pay at the national level, there is the state or local levels where the price for consideration can be significantly more reasonable.
Sandel points out:
We often associate corruption with ill-gotten gains. But corruption refers to more than bribes and illicit payments. To corrupt a good or a social practice is to degrade it, to treat it according to a lower mode of valuation than is appropriate to it. Charging admission to congressional hearings [for example] is a form of corruption in this sense. It treats Congress as if it were a business rather than an institution of representative government.[4]
This posting is not an argument for dismissing markets and pricing options in general. Many advantages are derived from applying that approach to most products. Chief among them, as pointed out above, is efficiency. And one can readily identify how many (most) aspects of life are better with markets than without. But as with most things, there are limits and one should be able to acknowledge where and when markets fall short.
[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Being Efficient and/or Moral?” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, December 15, 2017, accessed September 12, 2019, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2017/12/being-efficient-andor-moral.html .
[2] Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012).
[3] Ibid., 29.
[4] Ibid., 34.
