It is refreshing to find this article on the Bloomberg website, read by many in the business community.

Noah Smith explains clearly that: (a) policymakers in the Trump era are Gaga about markets; (b) markets aren’t right for every problem.

“My Bloomberg View colleague Tyler Cowen has a running series of blog posts bearing the title “Markets in Everything.” Plenty of other economists and writers have picked up the phrase, and with good reason — it’s evocative of a powerful idea that defined much of Western political economy in the later part of the 20th century. The idea is that markets — systems of property rights with free buying and selling — are the best way to organize a vast array of human interactions.

“Decades after the Beatles sang “Can’t Buy Me Love,” a whole generation of libertarian thinkers were wondering how much better the world would be if people could buy and sell everything. Some, like authors Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski, took this idea to radical extremes, arguing that everything from body parts to school grades should be up for sale. Though few would go that far, the idea certainly seemed to fit with a political era of privatization and deregulation. Economists tended to like the idea for a more prosaic reason — mathematical models with so-called complete markets are a lot easier to solve.

“In the U.S., marketism is still making inroads. The Trump administration is considering a plan to replace many military functions with private contractors in Afghanistan. Donald Trump also canceled an Obama-era proposal for a rule against getting paid for donating bone marrow. On the left, many thinkers support legalizing prostitution. The Internal Revenue Service is experimenting with using private debt collectors. Efforts to reduce the use of corporate prisons have stalled.

“For the most part, this isn’t a good thing. Like every ideology, marketism has its limits, and like every movement it eventually overreached. There are plenty of reasons that a vast array of human interaction should be carried out without money or any kind of quid pro quo. And unsurprisingly, these problems crop up in many of the areas of human life into which people are now trying to push markets…

“Transaction costs can also arise from natural human emotions. Imagine if someone offered you money to be their friend. If you’re a normal human being, the idea of boiling friendship down to a cold, self-interested exchange would probably feel repellent to you. Sex, which often creates an emotional attachment even deeper than friendship, is similar, which may help explain why so many societies frown on prostitution. And letting people sell their organs for money is inherently disgusting to many.

Within companies, people often prize loyalty to coworkers or to an organization. That may explain the surprising yet common finding that direct monetary incentives often reduce work performance rather than increase it. Privatizing the army, tax collectors and prisons is a bad idea, because it ignores the crucial function that loyalty, dedication, idealism and commitment play among combat troops, bureaucrats and prison guards.”

Just substitute or add the words “public schools,” and you can see that this argument is very apropos current education policy debates.