Addiction in Free Markets

1.write a critique of three to four paragraphs A description of the context of the essay ● An introduction to the author ● A statement of the essay’s thesis ● The thesis for your critique ● A summary of the essay’s main points ● A statement of the points with which you agree and disagree ● A statement with reasons and evidence for your agreement and disagreement ● Quotations, summary, paraphrase, and citations as appropriate ● A conclusion

Addiction in Free Mark
by Bruce K. Alexander and Stefa Shaler
1 though any person in any society can become addicted, free market societies universally dislocate their members, leading to mass addiction. This simple proposition can profoundly change the way that we deal with addictions in ourselves and others. Although often overlooked by addiction professionals, the evidence for this proposition fdls our history and our everyday life.
In order for a "free market" to be "free," the exchange of labour, land, currency and consumer goods must be controlled by the laws of supply and demand, and must not be "distorted" by personal loyalties, village or
neighbourhood responsibilities, guild or union rights, charity, family obligations, ethnic tastes and aversions, social roles, or religious values....
Disastrously, todays free market fundamentalists ignore all previously understood limits, including Adam Smiths1 warning that national governments must resist the power of manufacturers to "become formidable to the government and . . . intimidate the legislature." Smith also feared excessive profits and considered "private luxury and extravagance" to be "ruinous taxes." We've gone too far toward the free market extreme, and one of those consequences is mass dislocation and, in its train, mass addiction.
At the beginning of the 21st century, for rich and poor alike, jobs disappear on short notice, communities are weak and unstable, people routinely change lovers, families, occupations, co-workers, technical skills, languages, nationalities, therapists, spiritual beliefs and ideologies as they navigate the shopping malls, real estate markets, and employment agencies. Prices and incomes are no more stable than social life. Even the continued viability of ecological systems is in uestion. For rich and poor alike, dislocation plays havoc with delicate ties between people and society that comprise psychosocial integration.
What is the relationship between dislocation and addiction? Most 5 people who cannot achieve a reasonable degree of psychosocial integration find that they must develop "substitute" lifestyles in order to endure.
J Substitute lifestyles entail excessive habits intended to fill the painful void of dislocation. These habits include drug use and many other activities that do not center on drug use. They also include social relationships that provide some satisfaction although they are not sufficiently close, stable or socially acceptable to comprise real psychosocial integration. People in this predicament—whether barroom drunks, internet sex surfers or needle-using junkies—cling to their substitute lifestyles with a tenacity that is properly called addiction. ...
Examples of forced dislocation and consequent addiction fill the 6 history of free market society. For example, by a series of increments, England moved to a full-blown free market system between the late 16th and the early 19th centuries. This was achieved in part through massive evictions of the rural poor from their farms, commons, and villages and their absorption into urban slums and a brutal, export oriented manufacturing system. Those who resisted these new realities too strenuously were further dislocated by forced apprenticeship of their children, destruction of their unions and other associations, elimination of local charity to the "undeserving poor/' and by confinement in "houses of correction3 where unruly behaviour was corrected with whips and branding irons.
Forced dislocation spread from England to the rest of the British Isles, 7 e.g., the "clearances" of the clan society of the Scottish Highlands, and spread to English colonies abroad, e.g., the settlement of Australia by "transportation5 of convict labour. Dislocated British emigrants reproduced their own condition by dislocating aboriginal peoples wherever they landed, including Vancouver, with the support and encouragement of the imperial government.