"You know what I’d like to be? I mean if I had my goddam choice?... You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’... Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all."
– The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
When we say that the market should be restrained by ethical norms we don’t by default mean that the state should carry that responsibility. Critics typically take as axiomatic that the market is the root of all evil that any instance of irregularity, deficiency or oppressive practices that occur in commercial contexts is taken to warrant immediate outside intervention; and by that is often meant the state. Such an assumption about the market seriously underestimates the possibility of the market itself in restraining its own excesses. The misplaced emphasis on developing measures external to the market to rectify the latter’s shortcomings has only the result of treating the symptom rather than the real disease.
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