Many of us might have an experience of waiting in a queue for public service, such as waiting for your turn to use the badminton courts provided by the government. There are people who would pay extra, such as hiring line stander or buying tickets from scalpers, to jump the queue such that you would have to wait longer for your turn unless you are willing to pay extra to jump the queue too. You might feel upset when someone jumps your queue and makes you wait longer, but as long as the queue-jumper paid extra for that, on what grounds could we claim that the practice of queue-jumping is wrong? In his book “What Money Can’t Buy”, Michael Sandel argues that the growth of line-jumping business is an instance of the growing reach of market reasoning into the sphere of life once governed by nonmarket ethical norms. In the case of line-jumping, the norm of the queue –“first-come, first-served” – is being displaced by the norm of the market – “you get what you pay for”.

In this book, Michael Sandel examines various policies and practices under the banner of free market upheld by economists. These policies and practices try to settle various social issues with money and markets, such as schools paying students and teachers for getting a good grade, public health care agencies paying people to quit unhealthy habits and selling naming rights to public institutions for raising operational funds. Economists might praise the change as the solutions provided by market and money seems to give the greatest welfare and utility to the stakeholders. For example, in the case of line-jumping mentioned above, a long queue for a session of using public badminton courts might indicate the underprice of the public service, and scalping is a way of price adjustment and reallocation of quota by the free market to those who value the service most.

However, Michael Sandel argues that these market-oriented policies or practices would probably corrupt the value of the service in question: by replacing all other kinds of values with market value. Let’s take the public badminton courts as an example. As a public service, the badminton courts aim at providing service to all members of the public so that anyone could enjoy it no matter rich or poor. However, letting the scalpers intervene would result in an increase of the actual price for using the courts and consequent to the loss of the social value of “accessing to all” as the admission to the courts would become a privilege for those who are affordable. Same as those educational or health programs which involve paying for improvement, the intrinsic value of studying hard or staying healthy would be displaced by the value of the money being paid under these programs. Last but not least, as Michael Sandel stated at the end of his book, we need to ask ourselves do we want to live in a society where everything is up for sale? Is this a satisfying way to live together?