Do Markets Make Us Worse?

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0:00:08.1 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:10.1 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.4 Aaron Powell: Our guest today is Ginny Choi, she’s a Program Director of Academic and Student Programs, a Senior Fellow with the F A Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She’s the co-​author with Virgil Storr of Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals. Welcome to the show, Ginny.

0:00:31.4 Ginny Choi: Thank you for inviting me. I’m excited for our conversation today.

0:00:35.1 Aaron Powell: I guess I’ll just start with, well, do they?

0:00:38.7 Ginny Choi: I think the short answer to that is no, they don’t, and in fact we believe that the markets are morally enriching.

0:00:48.4 Trevor Burrus: Is this a… I mean, there’s a lot of philosophical points that could be made about the connections that are brought, you can make them about governmental actors and say, democracy makes us care about each other, which some people argue, and you could just make a philosophical point, but are you making an empirical point too?

0:01:07.6 Ginny Choi: Yes, and our book is… We were inspired to write the book because we were particularly dissatisfied with the apparent consensus among even the defenders and critics of markets that markets seemed to be morally corrupting, and we wrote the book directly responding to that. And one of the things that we also noted as we were going through the literature was that the question, do markets corrupt our morals, is not just a deontological point, it’s also a question that we could explore looking at existing empirical literature, so that’s what we did here.

0:01:55.6 Aaron Powell: Before we dive into that, because there is… Your book is dense with empirical literature, let me just clarify, this is a book about the impact of markets and a market society on us. So what do you mean by a market society?

0:02:10.3 Ginny Choi: Yeah, so generally speaking, when we talk about market societies, the definition that we’ve been working with are those societies that have… That don’t embrace the markets and don’t have a lot of interventions and other things in place that prohibit the free operation of a market within that society. So I get that that definition might seem a little vague for some people, especially when we’re trying to… When they’re thinking about sort of finding empirical traction using that particular definition, but it is effectively looking at the free operation of markets within society.

0:03:03.1 Trevor Burrus: So in many Western countries, you have some pretty harsh non-​market forces, some of what people might call welfare states, generous welfare states in particular, to be non-​market-​oriented, so would we make a distinction between, say, Denmark and America or maybe Denmark and Hong Kong in 1985, in terms of how market-​based they are?

0:03:28.9 Ginny Choi: Yeah, so in order to determine whether a country is what we in the book define as a market society or not, we use five different indices to determine that. And what we see is that, at least according to these indices, that places like Denmark that have high… A large welfare state, and places like the United States that have less of a welfare state, they’re both considered to be the embracing of markets and we embrace that too. We think there’s different flavors of market societies, I think it’s important that whichever version of the market that a particular society has needs to really work with the country that it feels natural to the citizens of that country.

0:04:32.1 Ginny Choi: So according to our initial look at the indices as were categorized in different countries into markets versus non-​market, we found that both Denmark and the United States and similar countries are all considered to be market societies.

0:04:52.7 Aaron Powell: You have this quote for an author named McNally in the book that I rather like that’s about the way that markets or market agents get portrayed in our society, and it is a really striking thing. So Nally writes: “Tales of body snatching, vampirism, organ theft and zombie economics all comprise multiple imagining of the risk to bodily integrity that inhere in a society in which individual survival requires selling our life energies to people on the market.” And this is… It’s hyperbolic, but it’s common, I suppose, and it does seem to be the case that in so many of our movies and our novels and shows and so on, like the market agents, the businessman or the merchant or the boss are just these absolutely vile, evil people who embody everything that we should try to escape from in our moral character, which is odd in a society that’s so dominated by markets. Why is this, why do we have this complicated and negative view of market actors?

0:06:02.8 Ginny Choi: I think it has a lot to do with experiences that we have, and I think it’s… For instance, in recent years, we’ve seen a lot of bad happening that I think are associated with markets, right. For instance, in the last 20 years alone, we had Enron happen, and we saw Bernie Madoff make the headlines, find out that his hedge fund was a Ponzi scheme. The same year the Great Recession happened, and then we also saw the Occupy Wall Street movement, and then more recently, we now have the the anti-​work movement, where during the pandemic, people spent a lot of their energy, dedicated a lot of their time to work to make sure that their businesses, their companies are saying, are making it through the pandemic.

0:07:10.7 Ginny Choi: During that time, they put in more time, they put in more energy to their work, with some of the bosses saying like, look, I know it’s a really hard time right now, but once we go back to normal, there will be a reward for all the effort that you put in right now, there will be promotions or there will be bonuses or something, those kinds of rewards for the efforts that they put in. And once things started returning back to normal that, then it seemed to be a case, at least across the board, so you see a lot of workers now either looking for new jobs, they’ve left, they felt betrayed, they felt let down by their companies and they’re leaving to find others. And over the pandemic, some of them have found that this wasn’t the type of career that they wanted, so they’re now looking to switch and find careers in other industries and all of that.

0:08:09.7 Ginny Choi: So I think a lot of the negative publicity that market gets is arising from our personal experiences, and while I certainly don’t mean to say let’s downplay that, the sense of betrayal that employees feel from their employers, I think that’s real, and I never want to say that’s something that we should downplay, but those are punctuated moments, I think, where there’s a very high level of negative sentiment towards workplaces towards the market. And in those times we forget about all the really awesome things that happen on a daily basis, right.

0:08:57.2 Ginny Choi: For instance, during the pandemic, a lot of communities tried to help out their local businesses, there was, at least in the area that I live in, there was a lot of push for like, oh, my goodness, this wonderful restaurant or this wonderful mom and pop store is really struggling over the pandemic, and it’s really important to us that this particular restaurant, this particular business remains with us within the community, let’s go and spend our money there, let’s not go to Starbucks, let’s not go to Dunkin Donuts, let’s go to our local coffee shop, so that we have that… So that they too can also survive with us through these very difficult times.

0:09:44.7 Ginny Choi: And those are really great moments, I think those are really… I wish those kinds of events actually make the news more often, but I also do understand that the wave of current events and incentives behind what type of events and news get picked up, I totally get all of that, but it’s those everyday experiences that I think that people tend to brush aside, and I think we need to keep that in mind.

0:10:17.6 Trevor Burrus: There’s something to this critique, though, because one of the things that you hear from, at least anti-​capitalists, is the idea that what value are you to your employer fundamentally, like why are you there, when will you be fired? Like you’ll be fired when your contribution value, which is different than our value as a human being, and equating those two things together, it seems like one of the things capitalism is prone to doing, that you say, We… This person earned a million dollars last year because of what they did, and this person earned $20,000, and so there seems to be something about equating that value, but either way, your employers only has you there, they may be friendly to you, they may ask about your family, but they only have you there as long as you’re worth it to them, so isn’t that dehumanizing in and of itself?

0:11:05.1 Ginny Choi: Yeah, and again, that’s not something we want to dismiss, right, like I think it is an unfortunate dynamic, I think, as a company or a particular organization grows too big. And I think we all experience this in our own social lives as our network grows and the group of people that we interact with on a regular basis grows. I think the unfortunate part that happens there are some people who are at the periphery become… We don’t treat them the way we would have treated them had they been closer to us, closer to our core network when the network… Our social networks were smaller.

0:11:55.4 Ginny Choi: So I think that’s just the unfortunate reality in as particular organizations grows, that would happen. And I think there’s sort of waves of things that happen, and by that, what I mean is… It might just be my impression, but I feel like there have been more large corporations in the past. Again, it might just be my impression, right, this is an empirical question, it’s something probably that we would need to look into more carefully, but I think people are actually responding to, I don’t want to be another sort of cog or another tool in the entire machinery, I want to be regarded as a person, I want be regarded, I want to know the value that I’m bringing to the company and that the company understands that.

0:13:01.5 Ginny Choi: And I think that what began as an undercurrent, I think it’s beginning to rise to the top. And I think especially with the younger generation, I think that’s the reason why we see a lot of emphasis on who they’re working for. It’s one of the things I’ve noticed, and I think this is really great, is that the generation that’s now graduating from college and now entering the workplace, they’re very, very conscious about the employers that they’re working for, so it’s not just their name, it’s not just the importance, they’re not looking at the name and saying, oh, it’s Goldman Sachs, they’re looking at the company to be like, okay, so what type of company are you, what do you believe in? How do you treat your employees?

0:13:50.0 Ginny Choi: Those are really important factors for them, and if they feel that they’re not being treated right, they go, alright, okay, thanks for all the experiences, but you and I are not a good fit, so I’m going to look for a different position to work for now at a different company. And I think that… Again, I think that’s a really great thing. I think it’s a response to the particular dissatisfaction that you, Trevor, just brought up, and we’re now moving, we’re kind of swinging back towards sort of that world where employers are beginning to treat their workers better, beginning to treat their workers as valued human beings who bring really valuable things to the company.

0:14:41.0 Aaron Powell: That’s an interesting point, because it gets to something that I think a lot of people overlook when in their general perspective of the morality of markets, which is that employers are market participants too. They’re not just… And corporations are market participants, they’re not just the people providing us with this stuff that then we’re competing with each other to buy or get more of or whatever, but they are subject to it, and so if we decide that we are going to hold employers to a stronger moral standard, they need us as much as we need them, and so we can start to push them in this more other-​regarding, respectful direction. And of course, there are lots of good employers, but the bad ones will be subject to this market force too.

0:15:30.8 Ginny Choi: Yeah, no, absolutely, I agree with that. And I think… Again, I’m might be wrong on this, but like the… What is it, the corporate social responsibility is now a thing, right. And when I was working at Saint Vincent College in the business school, I remember picking up a textbook and seeing that there’s a section on social, corporate social responsibility, and how that all is an integral part of what makes a successful firm now. And I think it is the case that it feels that employers and companies are these… In the moments of powerful forces that seem to be felt as immovable, and that one person or a group of employees can’t actually change them, or even customers, but I think… But you’re absolutely right, Aaron, these are organizations made up of people who respond to others’ needs within the market, and if they’re no longer serving the needs of others in society any more in the market sufficiently, then they will sort of [0:17:00.2] ____ of existence.

0:17:03.3 Ginny Choi: And if they don’t know how to adapt to changing circumstances, changing desires and changing… The entire atmosphere changing, if they just can’t respond to it, then they won’t survive.

0:17:16.7 Trevor Burrus: It seems that an important point here, before getting into in the empirical parts of how we’re going to measure morality and things like this, it seems that an important point here is compared to what. If there are, if you object to hierarchies that objectify you and turn your labor into the sum total of your value as a person, does alternative methods of government and economic systems do a better job of not objectifying you? And I think we can safely say that those who lived in the Soviet Union and or in communist China are kind of being objectified in an interesting way, as nations like that tend to objectify people as inputs into a large national output device.

0:18:05.0 Trevor Burrus: So you get North Korea, everyone’s got to do calisthenics at like 10 and 2 every day because your life is not your own, you’re part of a machine. So when we talk about, yes, different hierarchies when someone has power over you, it sucks, but it kind of… You have to weigh one against the other and say, well, do these governing institutions make people more moral? Do you get into that in the book, in the sense… I mean, the one that is in the philosophical literature, at least, is the deliberative democracy people, the people who very much believe that if we all got together like a homeowners’ association or something and talked about everything, that we would be… We become actually better people in the process of deliberating and things like that.

0:18:47.3 Trevor Burrus: So do you do any of that weighing, that if markets… Maybe there are bad sides to markets… Not maybe, there are definitely bad sides to markets, but there are really bad sides to government that need to be weighed against that?

0:19:00.5 Ginny Choi: Yeah, so the book is narrowly a response to the criticism that markets are morally corrupt. So when we were thinking about how to respond to that, we narrowly thought about just a market. In other words, we didn’t look at, for instance, democracy more specifically or anything like that, but nothing that we say in the book says anything about democracy or any other political institution. The response we have is simply on the basis of whether or not a particular society is more embracing or less embracing of markets. And the important… Sometimes I wish we made a stronger point on this in the book, and it is that it is incredibly important for whichever economic institution is in place, whether it’s markets or whether it’s something else, that it needs to be integrated and supporting and supported by the political institution and the social institutions.

0:20:20.5 Ginny Choi: So if those… If the polity, society and economy, the institutions that are in place are not meshing well with one another, if they have core values that are… And start competition with one another, and I don’t know whether that society, or rather that country works, right. It’s… While we don’t say… Nothing in the book says anything about the types of social institutions, the type of political institutions of a particular country, I think it’s really important to also note that whichever political institution is in place, for markets to be operating at its best, needs to also be an institution that embraces liberty.

0:21:15.1 Ginny Choi: And if it’s an institution that doesn’t embrace liberty, I don’t know how a market… That a market, an economic institution that embraces… Sorry, liberty at the core, I don’t know what that market looks like if the political institution is about, say, coercion.

0:21:36.7 Aaron Powell: I want to turn now to some of the common objections to markets, so the common senses that we have about the way that they might corrupt us or make us worse. And we’ll start with this one, we’re recording this a week before Thanksgiving, which means a week and a day before Black Friday, which has now also come to be known as Buy-​Nothing Day according to the Internet, and this ties into one of the concerns I think a lot of people have about markets, which is… I mean, your book is very good at pointing out the ways that markets make us wealthier and people in markets have longer lifespans and more access to stuff and so on, all of that’s good. But that the very nature of a market or of companies in a market is convincing us we want what they are providing and that we’re willing to pay for it, and that means convincing us that we never have enough, that we should always have more, and that we should want more than the people next to us, or that status is bound up in how much we have relative.

0:22:38.3 Aaron Powell: And so all of this turns us into materialistic consumers who are buying lots of things, worrying about what things we are going to buy next or aren’t able to buy, working long hours in jobs we don’t like in order to buy those things, and none of this is making us happy and that all of this is kind of encouraging us to be vicious, or at least not wise about our own well-​being. Is there any truth to any of that?

0:23:08.3 Ginny Choi: I think it is incredibly hard as human beings to achieve… As a species achieve a state where we’re not envious of one another, and I don’t mean it to be sort of pessimistic or anything, but… When I was younger, I’m an only child. I have no siblings that I’m competing with for anything, and even then I would… I displayed a lot of envy and jealousy about what other kids, my friends were getting from their parents, and in some sense, that’s weird, right, like my parents are able to respond to a lot of my needs. In fact, they… It is my opinion that they spoilt me pretty badly, so I got everything that I wanted, and yet I still have that, and so I think it’s the keeping up with the Joneses, it’s kind…

0:24:22.3 Ginny Choi: It’s just something that happens because we live amongst a group of people, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a… I might be wrong on this, it’s just… And I just don’t have the evidence for it, but my guess is, even if you had a community that had little contact with the market or the market was not operating in that community, my guess is a type of envy for others will still be in existence. So yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if… I get that there’s a sense of that, that gets really sort of heightened at times, like thanks to Black Friday in the United States, on Boxing Day in the United Kingdom and all that. And I totally get that happens, but it’s not clear to me that kind of… The phenomenon that underlies consumerism is a fact, is a characteristic that is specific to markets alone.

0:25:39.8 Aaron Powell: One of the ways that we can think about what it means to be a moral person is in generally how we treat others, and you know, what we do or don’t do for them. And one of the really striking things reading your book is you’re mustering this wealth of empirical data, is that when we think about, especially like kind of anti-​market people or people on the far left who are like, if we just, if we got rid of markets and we got rid of competition, and we all took care of each other, these are the things that that would mean. And it would mean like everyone would get a good education and everyone would have enough to eat and everyone would have autonomy and the ability to do what matters to them, and we wouldn’t hurt each other.

0:26:27.8 Aaron Powell: And then your book is just like… Whole sections of it are just, here are the instances like in a market, people have better educations or higher literacy or more healthy, so it’s like we are… Whether we’re intending to or not, we’re treating each other in a more moral way. Could you run through some of that evidence for the ways that we kind of are… Our lives are better and we’re better at providing in markets?

0:26:58.5 Ginny Choi: Yeah, so generally, when we were thinking about how to organize the vast amount of empirical information that we looked at, the way we thought about it was to sort of split them up into two different chapters. And so the chapters I’m referring to is chapter 4 and 5, and originally that chapter was just meant to be one. So it was something that as we were writing, we were like, oh, there’s a lot of things going on here and we need to… There’s a better way to organize this.

0:27:43.6 Ginny Choi: And generally speaking, it turns out when we look at… We went to the data, when we went to the empirical literature, people are not only living better lives because of the market, they are also improving their own lives through the market as well, so as you said, Aaron, there’s… People in market societies have better education, they live longer lives. In addition, they are able to better take care of themselves. We found that, for instance, they are able to, and they’re spending… The health expenditures in market societies for larger [0:28:33.9] ____ and non-​market societies, and it’s not just expenditure, I think the… My sense is, part of the reason why they’re able to spend more, is because there’s more facilities and more options available to actually address a lot of the health issues that citizens have.

0:28:55.9 Ginny Choi: In addition, there’s all this basic infrastructure that allows citizens in market societies to live better lives. So they have more access to clean water, they have more access to internet, they have more access to telephone, and they have much more well-​developed railways, and these are simply just looking at the data that was made available to us, because of how the nature of data collection goes and all of that. I know that’s not a perfect thing, and nowadays, at least for for many of us in the US, railways are less of a transportation option than it is for others, like in Europe and all of that, and I know that some of these data could seem a little outdated, but I think it’s an indicator that people are able to live and have better facilities available to them to live better lives.

0:30:13.2 Ginny Choi: And yeah, like when… Some of the other things that we found is that on a daily basis, people in non-​market societies have higher caloric intake, and yeah, so… And generally speaking, we just are healthier and we’re happier and we’re able to live better lives through markets.

0:30:37.8 Trevor Burrus: But are we more moral? It seems like there are some natural experiments that could be run to test morality. I mean, there’s some of these studies like dropping a wallet and seeing if people return it kind of thing, but there have been some natural experiments in recent years, for example, perhaps pre-​Soviet Poland and post-​Soviet Poland, or North Korea and South Korea are relatively recently split. It might be hard to go gather empirical data in North Korea. There are a lot of North Koreans, though, actually, who defected who are in South Korea, so do we have data where we could actually say, does this person, aside from being a caloric intake and being able to travel more and have a better life, are they better people? Or if not better, worse, not worse, at least.

0:31:28.5 Ginny Choi: Yeah, so there are some… A couple of things that I could say to that. First, we looked at a couple of survey measures that are able to… That got at satisfaction in life of the particular people in different countries, and in terms of the proportion of people who reported to have, to be satisfied with their lives and the number of people who indicated that on a scale of 1 to 10 that they are quite satisfied with their lives, a lot more people, for both measures in market societies that they are more satisfied with life than others.

0:32:17.2 Ginny Choi: Now, the difficulty with using data, as all… Anyone who works with data can say is, we were able to take a look at virtue-​like behaviors and behaviors that suggest things about people’s inner sort of dispositions and all of that. It’s incredibly hard for data to genuinely get at virtue, which is why we took a really wide and broad approach when it came to the empirical sections in our book. We knew that from the… We knew that looking at the data, especially when it came to looking at virtue and vices that they weren’t… There’s not going to be one measure that would solve everything. It would have certainly made our lives so much easier, if there was just one data that did everything, but it doesn’t.

0:33:28.5 Ginny Choi: And so we get that some of the variables that we look at is not going to be satisfactory, but when we look at all of the data across the board together, granted, one of them is not going to be satisfactory, it’s certainly not going to be getting at the thrust of our argument, but when you look at the data as a whole, it suggests something about people in market societies that critics of markets completely suggest shouldn’t be happening. And if the critics were, we should be seeing a lot of other things happening on a daily basis, for instance, when we go to coffee shops and all, we shouldn’t see people and just standing in line.

0:34:30.9 Ginny Choi: Actually, a funny thing happened over the pandemic, so one of my local Starbucks, actually, the one on campus, has a set of ropes that helps manage the really long queues that can happen between breaks and all of that, and over the pandemic they got rid of it, but the sticker on the floor remained. Hilariously, I was the only person who visited, who was in that Starbucks that day, but I noticed myself following the stickers, there’s no ropes or anything, but here I am just following the sticker. And the reason why I noticed this because when I saw another student come in, one sole student, I also saw that student still following the lines.

0:35:13.0 Ginny Choi: And I think that those are sort of incredible daily experiences that says something about the people that live in societies, and we just need to also think of that as we’re looking at everything. And I don’t mean to say like let’s… I’m not suggesting that we be biased or I’m not suggesting that we look at, cherry-​pick our data as we think about the narrative, and when we look at, again, the entire data across the board together, it suggests something about the people who live in those societies.

0:36:02.2 Aaron Powell: One of the things we think of, rightfully, as a virtue is charity, and you do talk about the difference in charity between market and non-​market societies. What does the data show there?

0:36:15.1 Ginny Choi: Yeah, the data that we looked at, we… And there is… To my recollection, there’s a couple of variables that are associated with donations, but the two that we looked at was the proportion of people who reported saying that they had donated or volunteered in the last month. And we looked at, if I remember correctly, the amount of donation that they provided, and in both cases, the member, those who live in market societies donated or volunteered more frequently, at least in the last month, and also donated more money in the last month than those who lived in non-​market societies.

0:37:16.2 Ginny Choi: One of the things that I think is really, really great about it is, yes, it’s true that one of the things that you could say is, people in market societies just have more money, so therefore they’re allowed to give more, like that seems like an unfair thing to put against people of other countries who have less to spare and all of that. But I think that material, material improvement has moral consequences, and one of the things that we’re able to do as a result of being wealthier, being more prosperous, is that we can actually take care of other people, and we seem to have more interest in taking care of others as well, according to one of the measures that we looked at.

0:38:03.8 Trevor Burrus: Do we know anything about the difference between the quote-​unquote rich, putting that in a big quote, relatively rich, because especially now, in recent years, we’ve been having a lot of discussion of the 1%, and these people who sometimes are presumed to be little more than like Scrooge McDuck or the Monopoly man, just think the classic image of the rapacious capitalist, and there is a story that you get told a lot by Hollywood movies about the very, very happy poor man and the very, very miserable rich man. Is there any reason to believe that there’s a difference between the morality of those people, between relatively poor and relatively rich people?

0:38:53.4 Ginny Choi: I think… So I certainly can’t speak to the morality of different people, but there’s one thing that I think I could mention, which is that I think bad apples exist everywhere, and I think regardless of what type of institution that we’re living in, there’s always going to be bad apples. The benefit of living in a market society is that we get to know about the bad apples, whereas in places like the Soviet Union, in the USSR in the past, when bad apples did rise to the top, they are able to take control and secure their status and secure their reputation and just remain on top and keep others down.

0:39:55.3 Ginny Choi: So I think the important thing that I want to highlight here is that while bad apples can rise to the top, once they rise to the top in market societies, we have more ways of punishing them, if you will, if they own companies, if we don’t agree with the way the CEO is behaving or the way the CEO has spoken about certain groups of people in the past, recently and things like that, a lot of consumers punish them by boycotting their company, by buying less of their products.

0:40:38.2 Ginny Choi: Those types of feedback mechanism, types of punishing behavior that provides feedback for the rich to change their behavior, moderate their behavior, those forces don’t exist in non-​market societies, or rather, or not… I mean non-​market here, not in the sense of they’re less embracing or anything like that. I mean it as in countries that have very strict institutions that don’t allow those kinds of feedback, don’t allow those kinds of information to be easily shared.

0:41:27.3 Aaron Powell: In the book, you talk about markets, not just… So you’re not just pushing back on the markets make us worse, that’s part of the book, but you also make the positive case, so you move away from this minimalist defense of markets, as you refer to it, and instead say that markets are moral spaces or moral training grounds. What do you mean by that, and how does that impact the way that we should think about being market participants, or the way that we should think about potentially limiting or regulating markets?

0:42:06.6 Ginny Choi: One of the things that I think is really unfortunate about the way we talk about markets, and certainly the way we teach market… Teach what a market is in economics is that we don’t view market actors as human beings who are interacting with one another within a particular space, negotiating their different intensity of desires and trying to get the things that they want in that space. And when we say that markets are moral spaces and are moralizing spaces, we are precisely referring to all those social interactions that happen in the market.

0:42:54.4 Ginny Choi: So for instance, when you encounter somebody who’s really awesome, who seems to be an honest person, who seems to be trustworthy, reliable, a promise-​keeper, willing to help one out when they are in a struggle, we want to be friends with them, we want to keep going back to them, we want to continue to interact with them. That’s true in a social space, so why wouldn’t it be true in a market space as well? And we see that happening, right, like when there’s a… There might be a company that charges a little bit more, like, for instance, I was on the market recently for an HVAC company, and the HVAC company that I eventually settled with, it’s not the cheapest, but a lot of their reviews that I’ve seen of past deals is that they will work with you, they will spend a lot of time explaining to what’s going on, they’ll do their best to sort of explain to you what the different options are.

0:44:06.9 Ginny Choi: And I think… And people say this is the type of… The reason why I chose this company and I’m continuing to work with this HVAC company is because they were great, they were human beings who knew that I had constraints, and they worked with my constraints, and we worked it out, and that’s so important in the market space as well. We don’t always just go for the cheapest things, I’m not, again, sort of dismissing that there are times when we go for the cheapest thing, and and that will happen. But if we’re thinking about who to… A business partner that we want to enter a contract with, or if we’re thinking about signing a contract with a landlord or something like that, we want to be working with people who are… Who are enjoyable to work with, who are reliable, and that’s what we mean when we talk about the market being a moralizing space.

0:45:12.0 Ginny Choi: Those are the particular things that are happening, and if you encounter a bad apple, again, if you encounter a person who cheats their business partners left and right, and they have this particular reputation, we know that they’re not… They’re not going to have… And they might be able to get new business partners that they’re able to sort of deceive into working with them, maybe, but for those who have already had experiences with them, it’s unlikely that they will return back to that business partner, and as a result that dishonest market actor is going to have to change their behavior, in order to survive in that environment.

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0:46:08.0 Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.