In Memoriam: Iqbal Masih, 1983-1995

In Memoriam: Iqbal Masih, 1983-1995.

Would you tell me
Who was it who murdered me?

Yes ... that is a fine carpet.
They chained me to a parapet
Moving constantly to make it.
Of course, my hands were free
To stitch and weave and knot it
Twelve hours daily for a rupee.
All us children’s hands were free
Though shackles shook incessantly.

No I never went to school in Chicago
Where markets must be free.
They said business was free;
Industry was free;
Merchants were free;
Carpet buyers and sellers
And baggers were free.
International trade was free.
Then, too, my boss was free
To shackle me.

No I never went to school in Chicago
Where markets must be free
To guarantee the liberty
Of men and women and children like me;
Where markets must be free
To weave invisibly and referee
So liberally, comparatively.
Oh say can you see?

No I never went to school in Chicago
Where consumers must be free
To find utility, buying satisfactorily,
Perhaps fondly remembering me
With equilibrious eleemosynarity.
Weeping charity,
Doling liberally
In memory of me.

Before you set your wallet free
To make of me fond memory,
What is the possibility
The man who murdered me
Was made in Chicago
Where markets may be free?
Before you wrap your apogee,
Was it you who murdered me?

                                                                      W. Larry Motuz, April 20th, 1995

 I wrote the above memorial poem days after the assassination of Iqbal Masih.

 I did so with the long view of changing how we thought about economics and the creed of ‘free markets’—the former a subject not yet  a science; the latter an ideology not about what economics is about {Markets are merely one coordinating  mechanism for organizing exchange/trade in goods and services. And, in this regard, monetary markets with prices denominated in currency units are a relative newcomer to our economic activity.] .

I call this blog Conscientious Economics because human beings have a need for equity (or ‘fairness’) in their dealings with others. Markets exist in fact within a framework that we design to provide for fairness. We may not always agree what fairness is, but we generally know when it is absent.

 Broadly speaking, economics is about how we use what we have, including our ingenuity, to provide mostly tangible benefits for ourselves, individually and together. To consume is to use something to obtain a benefit from it. Sometimes, that use exhausts what is being used: you can’t have your cake and eat it too. But, often it does not: You can use a shovel without using it up.

Some benefits from use are critical for survival; some are merely ‘nice-to-have’. Sometimes what was once a ‘nice-to-have’ becomes an essential ‘need-to-have’. Electricity delivered to homes, for instance, was once a ‘nice-to-have’, but is today a cultural and socio-economic necessity we depend upon to maintain our quality of lives if not life itself. 

 A benefit is a service—a use-value--attached to a specific use of a good. A use-value is not a subjective preference. It is an outcome from a specific use.

 In this broad sense :: that of the use of things to obtain benefits from that use :: all economic activity is ‘consumption ‘ activity.  Though Alfred Marshall (and many before him) divided economic activity into two sets, namely, ‘production’ and ‘consumption’, with two actors, producers and consumers, the fact is that we, as economic agents, are ‘producers-who-consume’.

Whether the benefit aimed at is a profit from the ‘use’ of a good or service or a calorie from ‘use’ of a good, the central fact of all economic activity is simply that there are competing uses for virtually all goods.  Goods that have no use of any kind :: something that can alter with our ingenuity and innovation :: have no ‘economic’ identity as commodities, for a commodity is something that services a human need or want.

The agent in all economic activity is ourselves. Because of this, economic activity exists within a framework of what is acceptable to us. To the extent that there are ‘laws’ within economics, those ‘laws’ themselves are subject to what  we permit socially and culturally. Economic ‘laws’ are not like those of physics, operating independently of our presence {albeit, at a quantum level, what happens appears to depend sometimes upon whether or not we are observing}.

That modern economics has been constructed without human beings in it points to a flaw within our thinking about economics. That is a serious flaw, for it points to a reality that what might be acceptable to automatons as economic actors is not necessarily acceptable to human beings.