Ethics in the Market and How They "Regulate Themselves"

I found the article depicting various markets “regulating themselves” to be very eye-opening to the fact that “morality isn’t built into markets.” It is very true, and here are some examples from this article that relate to this.

As it starts out, 85 people - the top 0.00000001% - own as much as the poorest 3.5 BILLION people. That’s astonishing! Then on top of that, to note that these high levels of inequality corrode the democratic process because these people use their wealth to influence the political process to create laws and regulations that benefit them, the rich over everyone else, those who are not in the top 0.00000001% and especially not the poorest.  For example, when running for president, or any government elected official position, one must campaign to be elected. However, those campaigns are expensive. Thus, those who support these campaigns financially essentially just bought themselves influence in the government through that campaigning and potentially elected official. This is something that it seems most people who vote and have a partial awareness around of the government and how it works, seems aware of, but don’t know what to do about it, or can’t do anything about it. This problem then gets brushed under the rug, because those who pay for it gain them influence, or else the system must be changed.

Another incident that most of the American population became aware of is the Bangladesh garment factory collapse. The majority of Americans are aware that goods sold in the United States, are often not produced or manufactured here, thus the low prices. However when this incident happened, it was all over the news, creating awareness in American citizens of the conditions that these workers are in. When it’s not our workers (American citizens) who are in danger, how apt are American consumers going to change the conditions in which goods are produced and manufactured?

Today’s society also seems to have an abundance of waste type disasters, such as oil spills, radiation exposure and toxic waste. All of these have extremely harsh impacts on the environment, something humans seem incapable of truly preserving. Oil spills destroy oceanic life in an unnatural way and are spread across the globe due to currents. Not only do these have major impacts on the environment and humans, but also costs an astronomical amount of money to “contain” or fix. In addition, although there are regulations that revolve around these types of disasters, not all of them are full proof as shown in this article. The containment of radiation is sometime not enough, or as well done as it should be. The link below shows an innovative way in which nuclear waste could be stored. It makes one think, why aren’t more innovations such as this being implemented to solve these various market place and regulation problems?

Overall, this article well depicted the lack of knowledge that the general public has about various markets and regulations. Not only does it inform the reader via text, but the images add a very compelling component to addressing this problem.

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/making-nuclear-power-safer/handling-nuclear-waste/infographic-dry-cask-cooling-pool-nuclear-waste.html#share