Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests

by Jason Brennan, Peter Jaworski

May you sell your vote? May you sell your kidney? May gay men pay surrogates to bear them children? May spouses pay each other to watch the kids, do the dishes, or have sex? Should we allow the rich to genetically engineer gifted, beautiful children? Should we allow betting markets on terrorist attacks and natural disasters?

Most people shudder at the thought. To put some goods and services for sale offends human dignity. If everything is commodified, then nothing is sacred. The market corrodes our character. Or so most people say.

In Markets without Limits, Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski give markets a fair hearing. The market does not introduce wrongness where there was not any previously. Thus, the authors claim, the question of what rightfully may be bought and sold has a simple answer: if you may do it for free, you may do it for money. Contrary to the conservative consensus, they claim there are no inherent limits to what can be bought and sold, but only restrictions on how we buy and sell.

Genres: Philosophy, Economics, Nonfiction, Politics

248 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2015

About the author

Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His books include Against Democracy and The Ethics of Voting.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Markets Without Limits is a clear philosophical defense of the claim that there are no inherent limits to markets. What the authors Brennan and Jaworski (B&J) mean by this is that “if you may do it for free, then you may do it for money” (10). So, if you may possess water for free, you may also sell it. If you may have sex without paying for it, you may also buy it. Additionally, since you may not possess child pornography, you may not sell or buy it either. Since you may not murder for free, you may not murder for a price. These are not limits on the markets per se. They are limits on human behavior irrespective of markets.

The book is clear in two important ways. First, stylistically, it is written in a straightforward way. The chapters are relatively short: making them more focused and to the point. There is little in the way of jargon – and they make an effort to define carefully unavoidable technical verbiage.

Second, they make great effort to make sure that the arguments they are criticizing or advancing are presented as clearly and as logically as possible. I found myself frequently raising a concern or possible objection in the margins only to have that concern or objection discussed in the next paragraph or section. It got a little eerie at times—as if they were reading my mind!

They do a great job of presenting the anti-commodification arguments clearly and fairly. In fact, I think they do a better job of making the anti-commodification case than most of the anti-commodification theorists themselves. Their broad topology of the different criticisms helps to clarify and focus the arguments for these points and their criticisms.

B&J explicitly take a non-foundationalist approach; that is, they do not tie or base their arguments on prior moral or political commitments. They want their argument to work with whatever commitments with which the reader might start. There is rhetorical value in this method: you don’t get bogged down in questions of ethical theory, etc. You get to start by accepting (at least hypothetically) the commitments of your theoretical opponent and claim that you still get to your conclusions. The downside is that you can sometimes seem to accept too much; or that your theory becomes too detached from its foundations. Indeed, it can distract you from actually making the case from its foundations. B&J get close to these dangers at times, but seem to skate by without cross over.

They make an important – and in retrospect obvious – distinction between anti-commodification and business ethics. Anti-commodification, they argue, is the view that there are goods, services, etc., that people may rightly possess or use in some manner outside of a market, but for which it would be wrong to sell or buy. That is, there are things that you may do for free, but you may not do for money. This view is, broadly, that the market takes something that was permissible but then in virtue of being put in a market turns it into something impermissible. This is the view B&J are challenging.

They differentiate this view from business ethics. Business ethics is about the right and wrong ways to engage in markets. They accept that there are right and wrong ways to sell things; that there very well could be and often are legitimate time, place, and manner restrictions on individual markets. These are not inherent limits to markets per se; they are only limitations on a specific manner that something is being sold. The essence of B&J’s argument is that anti-commodification theorists have to show that there is no time, place, or manner to sell or buy the good or service, not just that there is a time, place or manner in which it would be wrong to sell or buy the good or service.

Often in discussions of the legitimacy of markets, this difference between commodification and business ethics gets confused and anti-commodification theorists make a business ethics point (X shouldn’t be sold in this way) but take themselves for having made an anti-commodification point (X shouldn’t be sold, period.). B&J show that these are different points: they require different arguments and different evidence. In some ways, if they are right about this difference (and I think they are), then anti-commodification arguments start to look pretty superficial. The real (and interesting) ethical issues are in the business ethics domain.

I do wonder, though, how effective this book and its arguments will be against the anti-commodificationists. I can easily see them saying, ok fine. So there are no inherent limits to markets, but there are lots and lots of incidental limits. So many, they might argue, that the practical difference between inherent and incidental gets lost. I think B&J would respond by saying; so what? The argument here is just that there are no inherent limits. If that point is won, then we can move on to the different incidental limits (and into Business Ethics). But they will have shown (and the anti-commodification theorists will have to have acknowledged) that markets in themselves are not corrupting, evil, toxic, or what not. And if B&J’s book does that, then it is will indeed be a monumentally important book.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had an extremely polarized reaction to this book. Its central question - how exactly does money relate to morality? - is incredibly important, and its answer - if you may do something for free, then you may do it for money - is elucidated in a clear, convincing manner I've never seen anywhere else. I can't say that I fully agree with all of Brennan and Jaworski's arguments, but the main idea itself, that it's not immoral to buy or sell something for money unless it's also immoral to get or give it away for free, is worthy of a long ponder. Indeed, even though this book is clearly written from a libertarian perspective, you often encounter its central argument coming from "the left" in a surprising number of areas, even from those who don't subscribe to the infamous label "neoliberal", so it probably isn't all wrong. The notion that commodification introduces ethical problems is nearly universal, but lots of things are or were universal without being correct, and I think the logic here is strong enough that it's worthy of being promoted to the default view, in a John Stuart Mill sense, where the burden of proof should generally be on the side of market opposition and that we shouldn't restrict markets unless they can be shown to cause harm. However, the authors fail to convince in several specific areas where they don't engage with empirical evidence, such as when they try to argue that it should be legal to buy and sell votes, and their disengagement with many obvious real-world counter-examples means that even though I find the basic idea extremely compelling, much of the book falls into "nice in theory but maybe not in practice" territory.

One of the best running gags in Philip K Dick's Ubik, one of my favorite science fiction novels, is how awful a completely commodified future could be. Point of sale transactions are everywhere, and there's a great scene where the main character has to pay the door in his apartment to pass through it; without enough change to pay the door, he grabs a knife to start unscrewing it while the door threatens to sue him. Ever since I read it I agreed with the unspoken anti-capitalist logic: some things can be monetized out of great necessity, but by default market transactions are alienating and impersonal, and to pass through a door without paying is the very nexus of free and freedom. Yet after reading this book, I think there's a different lesson to be had: it's not that paying for doors is somehow wrong (after all, it costs money to make a door, thousands if not tens of thousands of people pay for door installation without a second thought every single day, and essentially all of us have paid for doors directly or indirectly via rent or mortgage payments), it's just that the micropayments model is inappropriate for doors for exactly the same reasons that Clay Shirky explained made it inappropriate for websites way back in 2000: transaction costs make many small payments far more inconvenient than a single simple door purchase. That's not the same thing as saying that doors shouldn't cost money, still less that buying and selling doors is immoral, and the authors expand on this basic idea and run with it for 200 pages. They outline 7 dimensions of market manner, and argue that many objections to markets are really objections to particular combinations of market manners, when other combinations would be perfectly fine. Those 7 dimensions are:

1. Participants (buyer, seller, middleman, broker, etc.)
2. Means of exchange (money, barter, local currency, bitcoins, gift cards, etc.)
3. Price (high, low, moderate, etc.)
4. Proportion / Distribution (how much each party gets)
5. Mode of exchange (auction, lottery, bazaar, co-op, etc.)
6. Mode of payment (salary, scholarship, tip, charitable contribution, etc.)
7. Motive of exchange (for-profit, public benefit, cost-recovery, non-profit, charitable, etc.)

A socialist would immediately respond that even the mundane door market you find at Home Depot is still inherently immoral for the same reason that all markets are immoral: the exploitation and alienation of worker labor is wrong, full stop. I'm not a socialist and I disagree with that analysis, so a more interesting debate to have in my opinion is how the decision to buy or sell something affects our understanding of its "inherent" worth, given the failure of alternative models like the labor theory of value (as they astutely point out, "Marx thought that the value of the product was determined by the value of the labor that went into the product. On the contrary, it’s closer to the truth that the value of the labor that goes into the product is determined by the value of the product").

Libertarianism is hardly a less controversial framework than socialism for analyzing value, of course, but one benefit of neoclassical economics, or whatever you want to call the logic behind capitalism, is that it gives us perhaps the closest thing to a true utilitarian methodology we've yet discovered to compare the worth of things to different people, and the more you go looking for examples of seemingly "purely moral" situations where markets have not only not corrupted morality but improved people's lives the more you find. Karl Polanyi's fascinating The Great Transformation argued that markets have social contexts, and that even though the gradual introduction of markets irrevocably transformed the communal peasant societies of Europe into the liberal capitalist societies we see today, that there is no such thing as true laissez faire because you cannot truly separate a marketplace from the people in it, who act to protect themselves from its negative aspects. But are the downsides of markets inherent to markets as a whole, or only particular marketplaces where the 7 dimensions have been combined inappropriately? The Ubik door scene shows that it's possible to make door shopping into a completely normal and mundane part of life rather than a nightmarish dystopia, but there are plenty of other examples of where creating markets in things that were previously off-limits is not only normal but good.

One of Brennan and Jaworski's go-to examples is life insurance, particularly for children. In a world where life insurance doesn't exist, putting a price on the life of a child by means of paying a monthly premium to a company that will cut you a big check if the child dies sounds incredibly immoral and outrageous, if not like a perverse incentive for infanticide. However, in a world where life insurance is normal, it's opting out of life insurance that seems, at best, like a personal idiosyncrasy, whereas insuring your child is the adult and responsible thing to do. Furthermore, proposals to make the payouts of the gigantic life insurance system called Social Security stronger, and to bring more people into the gigantic health insurance system called Medicare, are not only perfectly orthodox left-wing ideas, they're supported even by socialists! So it's tough to argue that putting a price on human life is wrong in all contexts (note that paying for Medicare via payroll taxes instead of monthly premiums does not change the logic here), and it's easy to show that pricing human life can actually make us more careful and aware of each other. Remember that the idea is that markets don't introduce immorality where there was none before, so while it's still possible to have callous individuals and even murderers in a universally insured population, if they would have committed their murders anyway then it's hard to argue that insurance made them do it. And while murders for insurance money do of course happen, I think most people correctly see that scenario as an extremely rare perversion of an otherwise well-functioning system, and would hardly welcome the abolition of life insurance to "solve" that problem.

In that spirit, the authors group moral objections to commodification into 7 types, with the seventh having three forms:

1. Exploitation: Markets in some good or service - such as organ sales - might encourage the strong to exploit (to take unjust advantage of) the vulnerable.
2. Misallocation: Markets in certain goods and services - such as Ivy League admissions - might cause those goods to be allocated unjustly.
3. Rights Violations: Markets in some good - such as slaves - might violate people's rights.
4. Paternalism: Markets in some good or service - such as crystal meth or cigarettes - might cause people to make self-destructive choices.
5. Harm to Others: Markets in some good or service - such as pit bulls or handguns - might lead to greater violence.
6. Corruption: Participating in certain markets - such as buying luxury goods for oneself or Disney Princesses for one's daughters - will tend to cause us to develop defective preferences or character traits.
7. Semiotics: Independently of objections 1-6, to allow a market in some good or service X is a form of communication that expresses the wrong attitude toward X or expresses an attitude that is incompatible with the intrinsic dignity of X, or would show disrespect or irreverence for some practice, custom, belief, or relationship with which X is associated. Three form of this:
- The Mere Commodity Objection: Claims that buying and selling certain goods or services shows that one regards them as having merely instrumental value.
- The Wrong Signal Objection: Claims that buying and selling certain goods and services communicates, independently of one's attitudes, disrespect for the objects in question.
- The Wrong Currency Objection: Claims that inserting markets and money into certain kinds of relationships communicates estrangement and distance, and is objectionably impersonal.

In many cases, it seems like the fundamental objection is not the exchange of money, but the thing itself, and the most classic example of the intersection of money and morality where the typically "left" position is to support commodification is prostitution. Again, a perfectly consistent socialist position is that sex work, like all work, is fundamentally exploitative, but in practice, support for the legalization of exchanging money for sex is hardly a right-wing or exclusively libertarian idea in America today, and there are many impeccably leftist organizations attempting to alter prostitution regulations to protect workers or to organize them into unions to increase their bargaining power (i.e. to increase their wages, among other things). It's hard to see how legalizing prostitution harms sex workers relative to the status quo, and likewise, if a government were to suddenly criminalize a previously legal prostitution market, I don't think we would see that as helping or empowering them either.

Any use of those 7 moral objections about worker safety, consumer protection, power imbalances, or even sexual morality against a market for sex work has to grapple with the fact that most of them apply equally to the current absence of a market for sex work. The argument of "if you may do it for free, you may do it for money" is that there is no moral dividing line between a consensual one-night stand and a consensual visit to a prostitute, and that the addition of money doesn't in and of itself turn something that was okay into something that's not okay or vice versa. That seems correct to me, and it tracks with a similar argument about money in sports: at one point Olympic athletes were lauded as the same kind of "noble amateurs" that NCAA athletes are today; now no one blinks at Olympic athletes being firmly embedded in commerce, and it seems inevitable that college athletes will someday be paid as well, since it's the lack of payments to players which is the exploitation there. Brennan and Jaworski have many similar examples.

I don't want to sound unabashedly positive about the book, because I'm not. They insist correctly that empirical evidence should be the standard, but evidence is mighty scanty in the book itself, and their attempts to sum up vast fields of research in just a few "some studies say" paragraphs in order to argue for more markets are often spectacularly unconvincing. There's a bit on how paying for college admissions is just fine that feels particularly ill-timed in light of the "Operation Varsity Blues" admissions scandal, and at various points they weigh in on such weighty topics as whether markets necessarily "solve" racism or sexism, or whether school choice/vouchers have reduced costs without sacrificing quality, or whether it's a good idea to introduce tiered pricing for adopted babies based on their race and market demand, etc, in a manner that's anything but empirical. Does private industry or the government build better roads? A smart person could think of all sorts of philosophical rationales for one or the other, or even a combination of the two, but the fact that there is not a single obvious answer in the real world should make you skeptical of claims to be able to produce definitive public policy guidelines based on pure logic alone. These digressions are especially frustrating because strictly speaking they have nothing to do with the book's core thesis whatsoever. A government department building a road via tax revenue is in practice not much different than a private contractor building a road via bonds backed by expected future toll revenue, and though I agree that things like congestion pricing, which is a market for space on the highway during rush hour, would be helpful, it's not like you don't have underpaid women/minorities, failing charter schools, or discriminatory restaurants in the real world.

The nadir of their style of argumentation is in chapter 19, which is about vote-selling. Specifically, Brennan and Jaworski hope to show that, using the same "if you may do it for free, then you may do it for money" theorem which has served them so well so far, since it's totally fine for us to attempt to persuade each other to vote a particular way using words, that it is therefore perfectly kosher to take the next step and simply allow paying people to change their vote or stay home. Politicians already compete for votes in a market-like manner, voters in safe states already sometimes "trade" votes with voters in swing states, and spending money on campaigns is already often enough to make the difference in close elections, so let's just go ahead and legalize the outright purchase of votes. A lot of the heavy lifting in this chapter is done offscreen, by way of references to The Ethics of Voting, another of Brennan's books (he thinks that since most people are fairly uninformed, they shouldn't vote), and since it's boring to dive too deeply into artificial theories of voting on Justified True Beliefs wherein I the rational actor attempt to translate my ethical convictions into policy outcomes via the ballot box based on mechanistic cost-benefit incentives, I'll refrain.

Instead I'll just say that their thought experiment involving Ignorant Ignacio, Careless Carla, and Lackadaisical Loren to "prove" that buying votes is fine given the existence of stupid or lazy voters is wholly unsatisfying, and the complete absence of engagement with literally any political science literature is so brazen as to be almost comical, and in fact when I read this chapter I was in danger of throwing out the whole book in a rage despite agreeing with so much of it. I don't care if you think Citizens United was a good or bad decision, or if you think George Soros is better or worse than the Koch brothers, or how much public choice literature you have or haven't read, or if you do or don't generally trust politicians - anyone can set up a trolley problem where the moneyed elite being able to buy elections is good, actually, but reading about literally any corruption or election fraud scandal in history should be reason enough to pause when someone says that abandoning the democratic franchise in favor of giving powerful interests even more power will work out just great, trust me. Imagine using and trusting this system for even something as trivial as American Idol winners and it's laughable. Not even the Libertarian Party would choose to run its party primaries in this manner, allowing anyone with enough money (gold bars?) to simply purchase the nomination. It's like they read libertarian pundit PJ O'Rourke's quip that "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators", and thought "yes, more of this".

Now, Brennan and Jaworski are perfectly aware of reactions like mine, and the final section of the book is devoted to why I'm wrong to have strong negative emotional reactions to insane proposals to legalize vote-fixing. Once again, in the most abstract terms their analysis makes perfect sense: time and again in history, people have said that markets are bad, and yet after markets were introduced, they turned out to be just fine and indeed irreplaceable. Douglas Irwin's excellent book Against the Tide recounts how weak arguments against the concept of free trade have been unkillable for thousands of years no matter how many times they're refuted, and Brennan and Jaworski are going for the same sort of thing here with respect to introducing markets in general. Disgust is a strong but unreliable guide to morality, and organ sales are a good example of how deadly emotion-based thinking can be - we laud an individual who donates a kidney to help out a stranger, but a real market in kidneys and other organs would be vastly more efficient, and we shouldn't let urban legends or sci-fi dystopias scare us out of saving many lives via market mechanisms in the same way as we shouldn't eliminate insurance systems because of lurid but extremely rare tabloid murders. So they are correct, in a sense, that my occasionally incredulous reactions fit into a general reactionary pattern, and that since I and many other liberals happily donate money to political campaigns to get our desired outcomes achieved via electoral success, it could theoretically be cheaper for us all to just cut out the campaign middlemen and simply pay our fellow citizens directly to vote our way.

Well, maybe. I feel bad concluding that "the authors are correct in a general sense yet incorrect in specific examples for reasons that I won't explain", so I will instead say that they include enough great examples of how markets not only don't corrupt virtues but enhance them to earn them a place in my mental toolbox regardless of the CITATIONS NEEDED sections, particularly with their taxonomies of market dimensions and moral objections to markets. They're absolutely right that we shouldn't think that store-bought flowers for a loved one are worse than garden-grown flowers, or that pet owners who have bought their pets from a store love them any less than owners who were given their pets by friends, or that managing demand by charging higher prices is less moral than creating giant queues (the BBQ joint Franklin in my city of Austin is infamous for forcing people to waste their time in 4-hour lines because Aaron Franklin refuses to either raise his brisket prices or expand his capacity beyond his personal control). In fact, one of the examples that they used in their own book, where they sold various levels of acknowledgements in a tiered pricing model, was disarmingly funny enough that it also seemed profound: if the concept of meaningful, heartfelt acknowledgements isn't ruined for everyone by a few authors deciding to auction off inclusion instead of following the typical spouse/children/parents pattern, what else could safely accommodate this model? Quite a lot, it seems, because one of the major advantages of capitalism is that it can transform zero-sum conflicts into positive-sum transactions. Just perhaps not quite as many transactions as they claim.

[Joshua Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book a while ago, but forgot to write a review of it at the time; so I'm revisiting it. For disclosure, I received an honorable mention from the Institute for Liberal Studies for an essay written in part on the contents of this book; I did not receive any money from them, and that has not influenced by opinion of the work.

The central thesis of Brennan and Jaworski's book is that "if you can do something for free, you can do it for money," and this informs the broad scope of libertarianism. Of course, their more particular point is that if you can't do something for free, then it doesn't magically become alright when it is part of an exchange. The exploration of this maxim yields some interesting results, especially around sex, voting, and adoption rights. While I wound up unconvinced by the argument, it does illuminate some of the interesting features of prospective markets.

My ultimate conclusion on reading the book is that Brennan and Jaworski have made a number of serious conceptual mistakes, especially about conditions for permissibility, that are buried deep beneath the surface of the book and require a good deal of intellectual labor to work out. However, that doesn't make the book uninteresting; quite the contrary, I think the areas in which Brennan and Jaworski have the most serious conceptual issues (for example, on the relationship between counterfactuals and exchange, or on the role of pricing in motivating the seller) are some of the most interesting to explore.

This book is a sandbox; it covers a lot of territory in applied ethics and will likely frustrate those who spend their time diving into a particular area, but it is incredibly useful as a survey of some approaches to those issues, even if one ends up rejecting Brennan and Jaworski's approach. As an undergraduate book on political philosophy, this is an interesting dive into the libertarian perspective, and much more readable for a modern audience just getting started in philosophy than, say, Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

I suspect that most readers who do not identify as libertarians or "classical liberals" will wind up disagreeing strongly with Brennan and Jaworski, but disagreement isn't reason to ignore a text. The book is worth a read for those interested in the subject matter, at a minimum because it presents one of the most engaged libertarian accounts of ethics and covers such a broad range of subjects.

[Nick Geiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book will hopefully be a turning point in the commodification literature. Critics have accused anti-commodification writers like Sandel of sloppiness before, but this is the first really serious and systematic response to the anti-commodification view. Their discussion of "semiotic objections" to markets is particularly devastating--in a nutshell, the meaning of commodification is culturally relative, so there's no moral fact of the matter about what it means to buy and sell most things. The anti-commodification theorist might have some replies about things that are /essentially/ not for sale, or certain agent-relative reasons not to buy and sell things, but those need elaboration.

[Ayan Sayani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really solid logical reasoning for why it is not inherently adding a market that corrodes the morals of a society, but this seemed to be one sad sack attempt at dissing everything Sandel had wrote in What Money Can’t Buy. The arguments against crowding out morals were brilliant, in that altruistic tendency is not always crowded out by a financial incentive, and that some crowding out of it may be necessary for more effect. This book gives you evidence for logical holes in moral arguments about the market, which both break apart the anti-commodification theorists arguments, but seem to lie primarily in the theoretical world. Though this book may have helped my intro-level philosophical logic greatly, its applications lie in Ben Shapiros fantasy basement where he plays with his blue hairs that only seem to give him wet dreams at best. They are not real for the most part.

[Jerrod · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anti-commodification theorists (like Michael Sandel) claim that there are certain things that should not be for sale, that should not be on the market. These theorists list the various reasons of exploitation, corruption of preferences and character, inequality, etc., noting that these necessarily follow from having a market in good X (whatever X the theorist has chosen to focus on, be it sex, bodily organs, etc.). Brennan and Jaworski do an excellent job of showing that these objections, rather than being necessary outcomes of market exchanges, are actually contingent either on the market structure or on cultural meanings. Put another way, whenever the anti-commodification theorists claim a certain good cannot be placed on the market for exchange, the objection rests either on the meaning of the exchange being socially contingent or the market having a design that could have been different (i.e. if we're concerned about poor not being able to afford a kidney for transplant, then the government could just subsidize the poor).

So Brennan and Jaworski provide an excellent rebuttal to the objection that markets (any market) are necessarily moral unacceptable for good X. I found the book on the whole not quite satisfying mainly because I think this position of the anti-commodification theorists is pretty weak. So someone says any market in sex is necessarily moral unacceptable. To knock that argument down just requires that there is *in principle* a market design and cultural foundation in which a market for sex is not corrupting, exploitative, unequal, etc. This often comes down to Brennan and Jaworski claiming the possibility of various regulations or social meanings that would negate those specific objections.

But the real interesting question is this: what feasible (rather than *in principle*) market design and cultural foundations allow for various transactions? I happen to think that markets (with common sense regulation) in organs, sex, and parental rights could be quite effective in ameliorating real world suffering, but Brennan and Jaworski don't go into depth on these topics (though they do provide a sketch for an acceptable market in parental rights). I highly recommend James Stacey Taylor's "Stakes and Kidneys" for an in depth look at the question of organ markets.

This is a short, well written work, but if you are short on time, just read the chapters in the introductory section where they sketch their argument and the chapters that address the corruption objection, where they discuss some anthropological findings from Herb Gintis, among others, that show market economies actually reinforce good preferences rather than leading to corrupt preferences.

[Managing my virtual footprint · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminds me a lot of other works by Brennan. It is thought-provoking, has water-tight arguments, is a bit messy at times, and never misses a chance to be irreverent. Although not as pretty and solemn as Sandel's book on commodification, this one is just right on every point.

Other than some personal issues with sections I found repetitious or poorly organized, there are two points I would love to see addressed eventually:

The first is probably beyond the scope of the book and even the general work of the authors. Although much is said about the contingency of the badness of certaint market arrangements, it may still be possible that most arrangements for particular markets lead to bad outcomes. I get that this is not the point of the book, which is a work of ethics looking to show that there is no problem in principle, but it would be nice to be presented with more information on disgusting markets (e.g., prostitution, kidney markets, recreational drugs, buying plasma) and how those are faring in the real world.

The second point is more of a critique of how they address one particular argument usually associated with Sandel. Sandel hints to a fear that expanding the range of commodities will create more incentives to get rich. This could lead to monied interests hijacking the political apparatus to accumulate more wealth (since that wealth is now even more useful). Esentially, this would lead to those worse off giving more away (i.e., labor PLUS a kidney) for the same compensation. As philosophers well-versed in public choice theory, I believe that both Brennan and Jaworski are very aware of the dangers of having public institutions working for private interests, and how simply saying "they shouldn't" will not solve this inherent tension between expanding markets and expanding government capture. Again, I know this is an ideal-theory book trying to deal with ideal-theory arguments against markets, but some of the more interesting anti-commodification arguments are probably found somewhere closer to non-ideal theory, and it's not like if Brennan and Jaworski don't have mountains of data and case studies to shut down these concerns.

[Infra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brennan and Jaworski admit from the start that their arguments rely on a definition of "markets" so broad that it's useless. They definite a "market" as any conceivable system of exchange, including an infinite combination of hypothetical systems that do not exist in the real world.

It's this infinite swamp of meaninglessness that B&J drag their critics into. You can point to any Actually Existing Market, describe its mechanics, and show the moral consequences of it, and B&J will smugly shake their heads because you haven't disproven the infinity of exchange systems (not markets) which they believe exist.

Worse still, they repeatedly claim that the social relations in which goods are produced, allocated, and consumed has no bearing on their content/value. They refuse to acknowledge that markets, and other systems of exchange, *transform* goods. What we value in a good exchanged through gift-giving doesn't necessarily exist when that good is exchanged through markets (and real-world markets, not B&J's imaginary ones).

Their inability to acknowledge the social nature of goods is acknowledged very briefly in this reprint, in a one-off mention of David Rondel's essay, 'Semiotic Limits to Markets Defended'. Then they move on. Just like with their not-definition of markets, the issue is raised and swiftly dropped because otherwise there are no "Markets without Limits".

[Leonardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good and fun book to read through without nay complications some of the counter arguments against the anti-comoditifcation crowd are a bit weak IMO. But overall fun good book that helped me have a wider and more in depth look in the need and capacities of integrating market dynamics into more scenarios.

[Tom Nowak · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors show the arguments for creating markets in areas that were previously considered off-limits. My complaint about this book is that the authors argue the ideas using basically a utilitarian or subjective framework, and rarely make the principled argument for property rights, full stop.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well thought out and articulated book. The authors go out of their way to engage with the best counter arguments to their position. The result is an intellectually honest and thought provoking text.

[Mills College Library]

174.4 M3458 2016

[Bruh__-_- · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got into an argument with the author of this book at one point in college because he came to talk about how we should more freely be able to sell organs. Fuck this book