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in the additional cost of their internal documents being leaked and their getting unwanted negative publicity. So their CBA should have taken this into account, and used different numbers, which might have produced a different decision. Yet, I think most people would feel that's not the right answer. (As an aside, it can be very difficult to even make a court case when a product has a very slow effect on health, such as tobacco does.)

2 - Libertarianism leads to a concentration of economic and political power into fewer and fewer hands, producing a kind of oligarchic system that some have called "corporate mercantilism", as opposed to the free market capitalism libertarians originally intended. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith had disparaged multi-national corporations, like the British East India Company, for doing just what multi-national corporations do today - restraining trade. Modern defenders of libertarian economics don't seem to have noticed that corporations try to reduce competition, not increase it. And, as Smith noted about the British East India Company, they pursue profit in the nearly complete absence of any ethics. Critics of libertarianism claim that the old saying: "He who has the gold, makes the rules" is true.

3 - The free market has no provision for resolving problems that society has to face as a whole. That's why libertarian economists make an exception for national defense - it wouldn't make sense for everyone to arrange his own defense. Libertarian economists probably should also make a similar exception for ecological damage. But, instead, the thinking seems to go something like this: given that the free market can solve any problem, and there is no free market solution for global warming, ergo, global warming must not be a problem.

Sidebar: neoclassical economics is very much related to neoliberal politics. That phrase is used more outside the US than in, but it's a useful phrase. It's related to "classical liberalism" and to libertarianism, but whereas libertarian economics inadvertently degrades into corporate mercantilism, neoliberals welcome corporate mercantilism as a good thing. They approve of multi-national corporations, and even the neoconservative policy of the government aiding MNCs. Inequality is good. Greed is good. Many neoliberals derive much of their income from investments, as opposed to wages, so it's not hard to see where they're coming from.

If you opt for for a social contract in which people understand they must compromise with each other in order to live together, and decisions should be made on what's fairest for everyone, then a trade model that puts people out of work, allows dangerous products into the country, allows foreign manufacturers to make more money the more unethical they are... Well, that can't possibly be a good idea.

Learn more about this author, Eric Balkan.
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