The market is intrinsically incapable of pricing extinction and other social/shared costs of global production and consumption. As I often note, the last wild tuna will fetch a handsome price when it’s auctioned off in the Tokyo Fish Market. Was the value of a wild species calculated by the market? No. the “market” has no mechanism for pricing in the “value” of a species, or of the social costs of poisoned air and water—the Commons we all depend on.
It also is intrinsically incapable of pricing control of resources or assets; the free market presumes that an unfilled demand will be met by someone, somewhere. That ignores the potential for political control of assets and resources which are immune to market pricing.
Risk, future value, control—all of these critical elements are reduced to a “futures bid” which has no inputs for the value of a wild species, the “value” of clean air, the costs of polluted air borne by the tax-paying citizenry, the difficult-to-assess cost of a floating “island” of plastic garbage in the Pacific 2,000 kilometers in diameter, etc.
These crises of Neoliberal Global State (predatory) Capitalism overlap and reinforce each other; none are tractable or easily resolved without structural changes at the most profound levels.
Charles Hugh Smith, “The Overlapping Crises of Neoliberal Global Capitalism,” September 7, 2010