Warren Buffet, also known as the World’s Richest Man, wrote a guest op-ed in the New York Times, yesterday. His argument contains the fundamental and implicit assumption that the free-market has triumphantly absorbed all aspects of society:
In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497
This absorption is not surprising. Once the absolute value of all things has become displaced by the fluctuating values of the neo-liberal model of advanced capitalism there can no longer be a society that is separate from the economy. The things which Buffet points to as examples of ineffectual societal blows to the market (WWII, Nixon’s resignation, the flu) had no adverse effect because, in a free-market economy, the evaluative impact of these sorts of events are determined by the market itself, not the event. It is the market which decides what the substance of everything is, its value, and no longer the thing itself. It is as if humans gained the ability to choose what the symptoms and prognosis of every disease should be. But we do not choose; we suffer while the market swells.