What Money Cant Buy

What Money Can’t Buy

A friend of mine saw me reading one day and asked what book it was. I told him that it was What Money Can’t Buy by Michael Sandel, to which he replied, “that must be the shortest book ever because there is nothing money can’t buy”. Going into reading this book I myself had the presumption that money can’t buy everything, happiness, love, and family, but after hearing what my friend said so quickly and reading through this book I no longer think that is the case at all. In today’s world anything and everything has a price on it, the real question is not whether money can buy something, it’s should that something be for sale. This is the core of what Michael Sandel aims to answer in his book, “we as a people have to decide what values should govern the various domains of social and civic life” (Sandel 9). When we figure out what that is, then they get treated a different way and it is perfectly acceptable to use money to buy and sell such items. Sandel goes into detail about the various ways our society has made a market for things that many thought could not be bought such as waiting in lines, incentives for various jobs, and death. All of these different cases and subjects show that our society has turned into one which the markets have intruded on everything in our daily lives and has widen the gap of classes between rich and poor.

Sandel starts out by talking about something that nearly every person has had to go through in life, waiting in lines for something. This practice of waiting for something can be from waiting for the bathroom to become available, to waiting for a kidney for a transplant, no one likes to wait but everyone has to do it. That has changed recently in that waiting in line is no longer a given for everyone, since you can now pay to jump the line for a price. More and more trying to cheat the system for having to wait has gotten noticed and a market has been created to satisfy the demands of the people. You can now...