Can Markets Secure Human Rights?

Resumo / Abstract:

In recent years, State inefficiency in delivering some public goods to everybody has constituted the main argument set forth by those who sustain that markets should play a more active role in providing goods and services as human rights. In result, in many parts of the world, we have been witnessing extensive privatization of social security and water distribution, for example. This paper will argue that markets are not fully equipped to play the role of a supplier of goods and services as human rights, and more specifically of the right to social security and the right to water. The main reason for this is that markets and human rights have trouble in communicating, the latter speaking the rights language and the former the wants language. Within the wants language, capability to pay is the key question whereas within the rights language, entitlement is. If in the first case exclusion and inequality are acceptable in the second case the only acceptable situation is the one characterized by inclusion and equality. In other words goods and services can be unequally distributed, rights cannot. This means that liberal economics is intrinsically conflicting with human rights promotion. Secondly a provider of goods and services as human rights must be a democratically accountable institution, whereas markets are anonymous, and therefore, unaccountable by definition. Finally, markets are also inefficient in providing goods and services as human rights, either because human rights “markets” are not competitive or because market incentives for private provision of human rights are notoriously weak. Markets have always been unable to provide unemployment insurance, for example, and have shown an evident inability to bring water to everyone, namely in Latin America. In conclusion a human-rights-based political economy rather than the withdrawal of the State from the economy, demands the strengthening of the role of the State and of the democratic control of the market in contrast with the neo-liberal recipes.

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