The Apprentice as a moral puzzle

Is it right to try to sell someone something? The Apprentice has in recent weeks done a lot to make people answer , 'yes'. But it isn't always so. We have a great suspicion of sellers. Why else do we want advertisement regulated? Why do we hate estate agents and used car salesmen? And yes, selling is an aggressive attempt by another to bend us to their will. It is more as well. If we step up to it, a sales conversation is a robust two-way encounter in which our understanding of how much we want a good or service negotiates with the seller's knowledge of how much he or she can afford to let it go for. Think of haggling in an Arab souk. In fact, you could argue that the absence of haggling in the West has made us go rather soft on the other side of selling. If we as buyers don't engage, prices don't reach the right level. Consider Adam Smith's famous comment about how we do not need the butcher or the baker to look to the common good but only their own to get meat and bread at a fair price. True enough, but I always think of a quote from Dickens. I think it is in David Copperfield. Dodie's lovely but scatterbrained wife is failing to learn how to keep house and he asks her if she would know how to ask for a leg of lamb or somesuch in the butchers. She giggles and tries to distract him with kisses and says, 'but he would know how to sell it to me, and isn't that enough?'. It isn't enough, because the price will be too high and not in the buyer's interest. You could say a price is always right: if someone chooses to pay it, then they are willing to accept it. But if they choose without the capacity to fully engage in the transaction, they are only half-choosing. This is the problem we have with selling, in the end. We worry that in many circumstances, the seller takes advantage of us. But it seems to me the answer is not to move further and further back: regulating the seller and conceding our lack of autonomous control. Freedom demands that we take on the responssibility to make choices for ourselves. That may mean we should not let sellers target children, but we must allow adults to engage in the game. If only because there is no other way to find a fair price than creating an army of canny consumers. In some ways we are very canny: Which? magazine buyers and so forth. But we need more emphasis on the importance of the buyer's role in any transaction. Caveat emptor is still the rule, and we need to prepare people for that task. After all, this transaction of buying and selling is a training ground for far more important transactions where the power of character is tested. Any human interaction, especially in business and in any area where someone wishes to persuade you into their corner, requires the same skills. Now eristic, combative dialogue which aims to win and persuade may not always be the best way to the truth as it is to the price, but it can do very well, as in law courts. It needs a grounding in the trivium: grammar, the exact use of language, dialectic, the ability to think and reason well, to be able to spot logical flaws, and rhetoric, the capacity to put a true, clear point over to another person. When we manage that we can go far. Where we fail, we are at the mercy of charlatans. And when we turn our back on discussion because we say that every viewpoint is the same, we weaken these abilities, just as our muscles atrophy when we give up on the gym. Engaging as a seller and buyer, of goods and services and also of ideas and values and concepts and projects, is central to the life of a free thinking individual. We retreat from it at our peril.