The Grammar of Market Dogma

John McMurtry

As I explained in "The Invisible Hand: Magical Thinking in Market Theory" (ER, June 2002), market doctrine presupposes the moral infallibility of the order it studies. The market not only cannot err. Unlike laws of physics, its regulating order is good be-yond any other economic order-necessarily promoting efficiency of resource allocation, supply-demand equilibrium, the wealth of nations and - in more recent revelation - individual and democratic freedom. Now even "the conquest of poverty" is promised as inevitable by the market's magic. What-ever the mass misery which may in fact follow from the self-regulating government of its invisible hand, the market's design of economic organization necessitates benevolent outcomes.

Such presupposition of the omniscient benevolence of the market God seems undeniably theological in nature. Yet it is revealingly never challenged by those cleaving to the doctrine, even when "science" is all along asserted as the overriding concern. The reason for this certitude is that perception and understanding themselves are organized by an underlying religio-moral value set. Thus neo-classical theory never interrogates, disconfirms or even tests its assumptions of the market's superiority and benevolence of wealth-and-freedom-creating effects. Rather it formally elaborates the in-visible hand's millennial promise of "the wealth of nations" first revealed by Adam Smith.

The doctrine proceeds through "efficiency," "order," and "development" as en-tailed general properties of the market's perfection of design, and caps the apotheosis of the Market by a salvational property never imagined by Smith and Ricardo - the this-worldly transfiguration of society every-where into a promised land of "freedom and democracy" by global market rule.

Neo-Classical Science or the New Market Theology?

This is the climaxing market theology we now confront today. Indeed it goes further than any millenarianism before it by asserting all of its redeeming properties to be not only certain for societies hewing to the faith as emergent "market miracles," but the sole basis for any of them to occur at all. Thus even if another kind of social order ranks demonstrably higher than all its market neighbours in nutrition, literacy, healthcare, infant mortality, longevity and other life indices, it is known a priori that it must undergo "market reforms" to serve its people. The Market God is thus a jealous God as well as an infallible one. No other economic order may be put before it.

In this way, the market God comes to surpass the classical predicates of the traditional God. Omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence are outwardly at work in this very world. Yet different descriptors befit market theology's status as a universal modern "science" no longer burdened with biblical lexicon. "Optimums" of objective out-comes replace the certainty of God's love. "Rationality" of self-seeking necessitates the certain outcome of the public interest. The here-and-now guidance of the invisible hand replaces the conditionality of faith in the divine plan. All is now scientific. The terminology of liquid and machine physics is incanted rather than traditional mantras, prayers and hymns. Economic scientists re-place priests as the knowers of the mysteries that no others can access. Mathematical symbols replace classical Latin as the language of privileged knowledge of the signs the divine design. For popular belief, market miracles and sacrifices demonstrate the Market's higher powers to all.

Nonetheless an internal tension between the pretence of scientific method and the appeal of fundamentalist religion is inherent in the doctrine. Scientific method is such by its general claims being confirmable or disconfirmable by empirical evidence, by the falsifiability of its assertions. Yet the presuppositions and axioms market theory are not open to disconfirmation or falsification. The presupposed value system and moral foundations of the system have, indeed, not only no independent test of their success or failure as a form of economic organization, but no permitted alternative to the market form of economic organization with which to compare performance at providing and distributing life goods to a society. Private property and money demand as the basis of all effective right are assumed as given, and non-satiable consumers and monetized growth are the axiomatic macro-teleology of the system. No factual state of the world is recognized which can show any one of these presuppositions and laws to be mistaken. No empirical test can show their absolutist assumptions as wrong whatever negative global effects in fact follow their universalization.

Even when whole societies and continental regions are admitted to have, in fact, suffered "meltdown" after programs of "market restructuring," the connection between antecedent changes by imposition of this prescribed program and the systemically disastrous civil and economic effects following it is not raised as an issue. On the level of high theory, the issue is ruled out in principle by the paradigm's selectors of problematic. Most