WHY CONSERVATIVES SHOULD FEAR THE MARKET

Conservatives have a touching faith in the magic of the market to bring a new Eden to our troubled land, that applying the market to the ills that afflict us will increase our choices, improve individual liberty, and reduce the role of government in our daily lives - a pretty concise summation of the *primum mobile* of the conservative creed.

But what, exactly, does a market do? Adam Smith, one of conservatism's patriarchs, described how the "invisible hand" of the market turns thousands of seemingly unconnected individual economic decisions into a system that, over time, balances supply and demand through the mechanism of price. Smith described a kind of ecology, where largely unseen forces, working in subterranean ways, provide people with information so that they can, in the language of the economists, "maximize their utilities."

Wrenching the feudal command economy into the dynamic capitalist market economy did exactly what Smith said it would do: it created the vast "wealth of nations." However, Smith also saw something that darkened his enthusiasm: markets are vicious places. Instead of the rich matrix of social and religious obligations that marked feudal society and, to some extent, provided a cushion against the exercise of raw power, markets reduced everything to what Marx called "the cash nexus": nothing had value unless it had a price, including people. Competition became the reigning metaphor, meaning that the market needed the blood sacrifice of losers to feed its winners, and profit became the only test for usefulness. Smith was not pleased with this situation, but he felt it could not be opposed without interfering with the efficiency of the market to allocate goods and labor.

If the nature and logic of markets, then, reduces everything to a price and makes people fight tooth and nail to survive, why would conservatives, who express deep affection for loving families and intact communities and traditional values like hard work, ever give their allegiance to such a system? It defeats the very values they profess to love. Instead of embracing markets, conservatives should work to mitigate them at every possible turn so that the acidic power of money does not eventually corrode everything they hold dear.

That they don't puzzles me. Take families, for instance. Conservatives may believe that the dissolution of modern families comes from the wicked fruit grown in the 1960s or the

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