When people think "free markets", they think "competition". And competition is one important ingredient. But it misses the fact that 99% of what goes on in a market is not competition, but cooperation.
Too many supporters of free markets put forward a caricature of independence. The whole reason markets work so well is that we're all so dependent on each other -- if we were all self-reliant little islands we wouldn't need markets, or we wouldn't have the incentives to play well within them.
And too many detractors of free markets deny their cooperative nature entirely, and assume that only non-commercial activity can truly be cooperative, morally pure, or beneficial to society as a whole.
This is incredibly obvious today when you can rent as much world-class computing machinery as you want at a moment's notice just by using your credit card, and when you have libraries and languages that took hundreds of man-years to create available for free. But the same is true all the way down to the point where we are running around in the jungle, naked, picking berries and nuts and attempting not to get eaten by lions. Computers, electricity, plumbing, roads, debt, currency, money transfers, automated farming, artificial fertilizers, remote communications technology, materials technology, engineering and physics, chemistry, mathematics, written language and spoken language.
It's all a giant pyramid of human accomplishment that allows us to produce wealth/do useful and interesting things so much cheaper and simpler than before that it is simply ridiculous.
But what I don't understand is, what moral obligation does this create? Who is obligated to who, and why? Specifically, what transactions create a moral obligation beyond fulfilling the terms of the transaction?
[1] The bottom of the pyramid is comprised primarily of non-workers. The $50k support staff are solidly in the middle.
Thus, it is not the transaction that creates the moral obligation. It is the imposition of the legal framework without which transactions would be merely interactions. That legal framework requires everyone to give up the only thing that can be called a "natural right"--the right to kill and eat whatever cross's one's path. The whole collectively sacrifices it's natural liberty in order to construct a structured society that enables wealth creation. It is that collective sacrifice that creates the collective moral obligation.
I'll give you a very concrete example. We make "conversion" a crime. That is basically using property for your own benefit that is in your possession by the voluntary action of another, but does not "belong" to you. Of course, "ownership" in any sense beyond physical possession is the product of a set of legal contrivances. Activity like embezzlement, etc, didn't actually used to be illegal until relatively recently. "Theft" was defined narrowly to taking from someone's physical possession. But we can't really have a modern economy without lower-level people taking physical possession of property that "belongs" to someone else. The truck driver, the parking garage attendant, the cashier, etc. So we alter the legal system to prohibit this certain activity presumably to increase the output of the economic engine. So when you leave your car with a parking garage attendant, you enter into a "transaction" for him to take care of your car, but that "transaction" is obviously meaningless without reference to the legal framework that's in place. And that legal framework involves people giving up the ability to do things they used to be able to do. And that creates the moral obligation.
Approaching the situation from another angle: your reverence for the "transaction" blinds you to the fact that they are nothing more than arbitrary accounting mechanisms within our arbitrary legal framework. At the physical level, the output of the economic engine of a city is the product of everyone's effort. Like a real engine, nothing goes if the fuel pump doesn't pump the gas, the cylinders don't compress the gas, the spark plug doesn't ignite the gas, the valves don't flush out waste products, etc. The fuel pump may consider itself the most important contributor, because after all there is one fuel pump and perhaps half a dozen spark plugs and a dozen or more valves, but the engine does zero work without all its elements. To the extent that anyone benefits from the output of the economic engine of a modern industrial city, they have a moral obligation to all the other elements without which that output wouldn't be possible. The fact that you use accounting mechanisms you call "transactions" to divvy up the output doesn't mean that those "transactions" are the things with real meaning at the physical level.
Specifically:
- What is the obligation? What we deem most beneficial, what society deems most beneficial, what society deems most monetarily valuable, what prolongs the most lives?
- To whom is the obligation due? Those living under the same legal framework as us (at the local, state, or federal level), those living in nations with compatible frameworks, or all of humanity? Do people from the future count, and if so, is improving a life 50 years from now equal to improving a life today?
- Who, specifically, has this obligation? Is it only those who have benefited the most from society, or those who have benefited more than they have given up, or every member of society? Is the obligation limited to able-bodied adults, or does it include children and the handicapped?
- How far does this obligation go? Is there a way to fulfill it and be released from future obligation (say, through adequate military service or charitable giving)? Does the obligation to one society remain even if one moves to a different society?
If the existence of collective sacrifice via legal frameworks is what creates obligation to society, the answers to the above questions should follow from there. I'm having a hard time seeing how you think they do.
Another thing I don't quite understand is this - you implicitly seem to treat the right to kill and eat whatever you like as the only "natural right". Is resisting those who might kill/eat you not a "natural right"? I.e., am I obligated to surrender to the cannibals? If not, then it's hard to see how modern society is anything other than a different strategy of resistance, in which case no moral obligation is owed to anyone.
I'm also confused by your change of topic. Previously you were contrasting the subsistence farmer to modern life. Now you seem to be contrasting hunter/gatherer/cannibal life to modern life. Can you explain?
Trains, water, and electricity being down in New Work had a staggering economic cost. We're talking about billions of dollars per day. As people couldn't get to work, it became painfully apparent how much the top of the pyramid depends on the bottom. Bankers making $5m a year couldn't get work done because support staff making $50k a year weren't there. The city is an organism. It's a machine. It's an engine for creating wealth, and like any structured thing it has differentiable pieces that are ultimately completely interdependent.
When I was younger, I used to have a moral and political framework based on the economic model of the farmer. A farmer who farms for his own subsistence has little moral obligation to society. He plants his seeds, he tends them, he reaps them. Society loosely protects him from other societies, but that's about his only link to his fellow man.
Yet, we're not a nation of farmers. Division of labor has allowed us to create tremendous wealth, but has also made it so nobody is useful without thousands of other people to do everything else. The subsistance farmer's productivity doesn't change at all if all the farms around him are flooded. A New York businessman's productivity goes to zero if the homes of his workers and customers are flooded. He is no more valuable, disconnected from the powerful economic engine that is New York City, than a peasant farmer in Bangladesh.
As I have gotten older, I have grappled with a moral philosophy that accepts our position as elements of these tremendous economic engines. I don't think such a moral philosophy requires eschewing individual liberty. Indeed, individual liberty becomes more important in the context of an industrial economy where everyone is forced to interact with each other. Yet I've become convinced that there is no moral philosophy that eschews an obligation to the other elements of the economic engine that is compatible with the realities of that economic structure. I think it's foolish to apply philosophies rooted in the idea of independent subsistence farmers to a world that looks nothing like that.