The world needs more of it, not less.

Stephen Miller
Weekly Standard


Commodification has always been deplored in leftist journals, but now attacks are appearing in the mainstream press. Elizabeth Bruenig, a Washington Post columnist, recently called for “decommodifying labor.” In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, Lesley Chamberlain, a British historian and biographer, upped the ante, deploring “the commodification of everything.”

What is commodification? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is “the action or process of treating a person or thing as property which can be traded or whose value is purely monetary; the treatment of a person or thing as a commodity; commercialization.” Marx spoke of “commodity fetishism,” but commodification is a relatively new word; the OED’s first citation is 1975. Its usage (Google says) has soared in the last two decades.

Commodification is the fuel that makes market economies run, so writers who attack commodification are attacking capitalism. Bruenig says “capitalism . . . turns every relationship into a calculable exchange.”

Really? Most people in democratic capitalist countries have many non-commodified relationships. My wife and I take care of two grandchildren after school several days a week. When my young neighbor shoveled the snow off the path to my townhouse this past winter, he did not send me a bill. The wife of a friend of mine volunteers as a lawyer for a shelter for abused women. Another friend delivers meals to the elderly. A dentist I know—the daughter of a friend—works a few days a month at a free clinic for people who cannot afford dental care.

Capitalism makes volunteerism possible. Volunteers generally have the wherewithal to do unpaid work because in the commodified world they get paid well for their skills. Volunteerism doesn’t flourish in socialist countries.

It should go without saying that it would be wrong to commodify certain things, which is why we have laws against child labor, sexual trafficking, and the buying and selling of human organs. But in many parts of the world there is an urgent need for more commodification, not less. The business writer Rachel Botsman notes that “an estimated 5 billion people, mostly in the developing world, have difficulty proving that they own land, businesses, or cars.” Because they lack proof of ownership, they cannot commodify their assets.

Leftists usually wring their hands over the commodification of health care and culture. Health care in the United States has never been a totally commodified service. It is a highly regulated industry. What are arguably the best health care systems—e.g., in Switzerland and the Netherlands—have a mix of market and nonmarket mechanisms.


What about culture? People who lament that poets don’t make as much money as advertising copywriters often clamor for more government support for the arts, but why should Americans underwrite fellowships for writers or painters? Please don’t tell me that we need more “creative people.” If you want to embark on a career in the arts, be prepared to be poor. Samuel Johnson said that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Since he wrote poems and essays—stuff that pays poorly—he too was a blockhead.

Leftists are hazy about how to decommodify labor. Do they want a government agency to assign a financial value to the skills people have? Whatever decisions a government-appointed board made inevitably would be called unfair by many people. Decommodifying labor means politicizing labor. It makes much more sense to let the impersonal market put a price tag on one’s skills and assets.

There will always be disagreements about the extent to which the government should interfere in the market, but attempts to severely curtail market forces have always ended in disaster. Look at Venezuela—a formerly prosperous country that now has severe, life-threatening shortages of food and medicine. Venezuela needs more commodification, not less. As the joke goes, if socialists took over the Sahara, there soon would be a shortage of sand.

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