12 hours ago, Eiuol said:
Most of what you said is fine to the extent that there are rational reasons to increase the price of something when demand skyrockets for any reason at all.
But it doesn’t follow that voluntary exchange is always positive value-added to you as an individual. Any person can provoke irrational reasons to seek out a product, including the active promotion of being second-handed. For example, the reason diamonds cost so much is because De Beers essentially wanted to create a situation where people only want the diamonds for the status symbol, and not for any other reason. Of course people may voluntarily seek this out, and some people in the world really do seek things out merely because somebody else has the same thing. So anyone who buys diamonds for second-handed reasons, and you as a business person want to promote those second-handed reasons, you would be doing business for the wrong reasons. You briefly mention this sort of thing, but the question posed by LER focused on whether the people in this case were acting morally.
In this situation, I don’t see any reason to say that anyone acted wrongly or did business for the wrong reasons. We just wouldn’t want to justify it for the wrong reasons, or make it seem that all business transactions that are voluntary are unimpeachable.
To the extent irrationality might be exploited, there is point lurking somewhere in here.
I hesitate to stand as judge of third party transactions, and to scrutinize them from my external point of view into the niceties of “subjective value” versus “objective value”. In cases such as art, fashion, and even so called “culture” (as I disparaged previously), perhaps these things are contextually, objectively a value to a person who is not me, however “irrational” they might appear from my perspective.
I might think for the life of me "There can be no way such things actually lead to flourishing… " but I do not have the context or personality of the other person, I cannot know whether the social status chasing diamond ring purchaser, is actually driven to greater wealth, better shelter, health and happiness, through the pursuit and achievement of things like those rings… a person is a whole and its not so simple a question, and judge the entirety of a person based on a single “guilty pleasure” absent a full understanding of the whole would be misguided.
As for allowing such transactions, as Leonard Peikoff pointed out, you cannot force someone else to make “good choices”, the fact of force makes it bad.
On the other hand we have things which we all like to think we can easily identify as clearly “objective disvalues” even if they appear to be subjective values, or at least voluntary pursued. Substance abuse or other clearly self-destructive indulgences top the list… [there have been some interesting discussions about the choice to indulge in pornography and its effects on sexual attraction in marriages and hence have very large repercussions to the individual’s happiness.]
So how do we reconcile what appear to be disvalues made possible from non-interference (porn being legal and drugs or sex trade should be legal) with our justification of non-interference being that force is the greater wrong? Are there not some “transactions” such that it would be “right” (in the final balance) for someone on the outside to interfere?
Again, I think this comes down to the complexity of being human. OF course, when someone is incapacitated and/or clinically addicted in the context of substance abuse, the person might lack the true agency in order to call the transaction voluntary… this is a very special case and it is not simple either. But in other cases, less extreme self-destructive behavior might be the way that a person works through something in life… and our intervention with force might be counterproductive in addition to being wrong. No matter how odd it seems from the outside, a person who does not seem to do what is right for themselves… might be the only one who is aware (even if only intuitively or subconsciously) how to get to the “other side”. Of course with others… it might simply lead to suicide…
In the end, people are complex and should be free, so the principles of unfettered capitalism are sacrosanct. As the maxim regarding criminal law sates (paraphrased) “better to let ten criminals to go free than to falsely imprison one innocent person”, so too we must grant people freedom to pursue their own lives.
What people can do if they wish to, is to fund voluntary organizations to persuade people against what they see as disvalues, and to support organizations and charities which encourage and fund people to get counseling.
All the above said, my use of “anything” when referring to “value” (implicitly whenever an Objectivist uses the term value in an unqualified manner they mean “objective value”) was a bit overbroad. I stand by the following amended statement:
“In voluntary exchanges of values, value is always added as between the parties, and when one capitalizes on misfortune, one IS adding value… that is how voluntary exchange occurs.”