Does the Free Market Facilitate Moral Corruption? Responses and Criticisms

Abstract

The free market is often subject to scrutiny from both politicians and the press, and because the free market promotes self-interested behavior, recent dialogues have asked if the free market also promotes moral corruption. While the market process cannot prevent all occurrences of moral corruption, we argue that the market system does operate as a corrective mechanism in many instances. In the cases where market responses fail to curb moral corruption, we argue that tolerating some moral corruption is a second best solution that might be necessary to prevent further bad outcomes from occurring (e.g., mass poverty).