Free Market, Individual and Relational Goods

The Free Market System has become the most dominant economic system. Although the free market system has provided people with the most significant personal gains, this system still leads to many problems. Alienation, widespread diseases steming from distrust and stress, family-work conflict, extensive gender inequality, income accumulation in the hands of a few people, free market values infiltrating other spheres of life and overcrowding nonmarket values, relations based on force and power politics are some of the problems that the free market order brings out. The purpose of this study is to put forward an alternative understanding of the free market based on values such as altruistic behavior, compassion and empathy in order to solve problems caused by the free market system based on self interest, power, hierarchy, distructive competition and greed. First, in this study the idea of the economic agent of the free market is critically examined. This study suggests that an altrustic economic agent should replace a self interest oriented economic agent. Second, it is argued that relational goods have a substantial role in decreasing some of the problems yielded by the free market sytem