PERSPECTIVES: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: SOME REASONABLE RESPONSES; FREE MARKET ISN'T NEUTRAL, REQUIRES POSITIVE INTERVENTION

I have just finished reading excerpts from John Cozad's speech delivered to the First Friday breakfast meeting. While Cozad makes many interesting observations -- especially regarding the correlation of age and education to unemployment and poverty -- his subsequent development of these (and other statements) were, in my opinion, not always well reasoned or placed within an adequate historical context.

The major claim Cozad sets forth -- at least if repetition counts for anything -- is his frequent assertion (I say assertion because little empirical support was ever adduced) that the "free market does not discriminate." While I do support the concept of a free market (at least in a qualified sense), I have some difficulty with his claim of market neutrality. I don't believe the free market is free from discrimination. The truth is, nothing in this world is completely neutral, and that would include the free market. And, contrary to popular wisdom, it is possible for things, such as markets, as well as for individuals, to discriminate. But apparently Cozad doesn't believe this to be the case. He seems to have fallen into the old trap of thinking that social structures cannot be racist or discriminatory, as individuals sometimes are. But a moment's reflection will show otherwise.

Anyone who has ever been to a track meet and seen a race, such as the old 22-yard dash, being run on a curved track will immediately grasp the point i am attempting to make. Even if composed of the most sportsmanship-minded athletes, honest timers and objective officials, a race run on a curved track will be blatantly unfair as long as the competitive are assigned equal starting positions. The problem doesn't reside with the individual participants themselves, with the timers or the officials. It isn't an individual or character problem in any sense. Rather, the race is unfair precisely because of structural factors inherent in the track itself. A curved track isn't neutral. It favors the runners with the inside lanes. And this cannot be corrected merely by demanding that each competitor run a fair race, that times not cheat or that officials remain objective. If the race is ever to be fair, some intervention will be required. A restructuring will have to occur. Staggered (unequal) starting positions will have to be assigned. It isn't simply a matter of the integrity of individual participants. The track itself is at issue. It isn't a neutral entity. Unless this is recognized, the integrity of the entire race will be jeopardized.

Likewise, Cozad fails to consider the structural problems peculiar to the so-called free market. He unabashedly proclaims that these don't exist, and that the market rewards people on the basis of merit and nothing else. However, the hard fact of the matter is that the free market (and he really should have defined the word "free" in this statement) isn't neutral, any more than the curved track in the above illustration was. The free market is no more neutral than free speech is neutral and able to guarantee that only the best quality speech and entertainment will rise to the top. But Cozad seems to assume that the free market is a neutral entity. Furthermore, he appears to assume this to be a self-evident truth! Well, that truth would certainly require demonstration for me, and it doesn't appear that I am alone. Periodically, even. Cozad himself appears unconvinced by his own argument. Over and over again, he repeats "the free market does not discriminate" apparently fearful that his listeners might soon forget this self-evident fact. One wonders just how self-evident he actually regards this truth to be? If it is as self-evident as he claims, why mention it at all?

Had the free market been divinely handed down by the gods and had it remained forever in that pristine state, perhaps we might take Cozad's claims with a bit more seriousness. But the truth is that the free market didn't descend from heaven. In truth it is a historically conditioned phenomenon, a part of an ongoing process. It is not a neutral thing, independent from the particular self-interests of those who conceived it and set is in motion. Furthermore, history, not pure and abstract reason, will bear out that this process has affected different peoples very differently over the years. It hasn't been neutral unless by neutral one has in mind the sort of neutrality that has given the world orphan drugs (drugs that would cure diseases too few people suffer from to make production profitable) while in the same free market pet rocks were busy making their creator a millionaire many times over. is this the kind of neutrality we wish? This is what we sometimes get with the free market. Again, we cannot just use words like "neutral" and "free" with no further explanation as to what we intend by them. At least we shouldn't do this if our stated goal is to "reason together" as Cozad invites us to do. The truth is that concepts such as free market and neutrality (along with a lot of other words, if you will, which when left undefined in the way he has done degenerate into the very kind of sound bites Cozad professes to detest. They, too, can become words which function by bypassing the reasoning process altogether and going straight to the listener's emotions. So much for reasoning together. Speaking of which, it should be pointed out that the concept of "a free market which does not discriminate" (Plato and Aristotle aside) isn't a mater for reason alone to decide. It is also a matter for historical investigation, something Cozad appears to eschew in all but the most superficial manner. Cozad's approach is clearly ideological, not historical. His ahistorical approach to the subject seeks to keep us in the Disneyland of pure reason and abstract ideas (which is the only land in which his "free market-does-not-discriminate" philosophy will work). Unfortunately, this isn't the land in which we live and work.

Cozad is very much in touch with his own feelings and reasons regarding the issue he is discussing. However, he is much less in touch with the people suffering the most in the free market system. Like the government Cozad criticizes for thinking it knows what is best for us, he believes he knows what is best for them: Basically, they should stop blaming the free market and start working on their character. His quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is both telling and exploitive. Cozad makes much of King's statement about wishing his children to be judged by the "content of their character" and not by the "color of their skin." He enlists this statement to decry racial quotas and affirmative action programs, both of which he considers immoral and destructive. But if he thinks that Martin King was advocating a color-blind society, he has neither reasoned through is speeches nor considered them in their historical context. While King did wish his children to be judged by their character, not their color, in no way did he mean that he wanted the color of his children's skin to be irrelevant to the discussion of justice in America. Whatever the case might be in the world pure reason and abstract ideas, historically speaking the color of one's skin hasn't been an irrelevant or neutral factor in either the social structure or the free market system; and it was not people of color who made it an issue. It is because of this history, past and present, that color cannot be allowed to become irrelevant today. Color could be irrelevant only in a society in which discrimination was not tied to race. And that is not the situation in our society. Cozad can argue to the contrary only because he conducts the discussion wholly within the realm of pure reason and abstract ideas. But this isn't the world in which either we or the free market actually exist.

J. Michael Heston is the coordinator of the Court Appointed Special Advocates organization in Cape Girardeau. He is a former probation officer and has served as director of the Civic Center.