Among the doctrines the president laid out at Davos this fortnight, one detail deserves more than the passing horror it drew: the plan to govern the devastated territory of Gaza through a board he would chair, with a permanent seat available to any nation willing to pay a billion dollars. The horror is obvious and immediate. But the precise nature of what has gone wrong is worth naming carefully, because it is not merely one grotesque proposal; it is the sharpest possible instance of a confusion that our age commits everywhere, the belief that anything at all can be turned into a market, and that whatever can be priced may therefore be sold.
The philosopher Michael Sandel has spent years arguing against exactly this confusion, and his central distinction is the one the Gaza board obliterates. There are, Sandel insists, things that money can buy and things that money should not buy, and the reason is not that some goods are merely too expensive but that some goods are corrupted, changed into something lesser or something monstrous, by the very act of being put up for sale. A friendship that is purchased is not a friendship; a wedding toast written by a hired stranger and delivered as one's own is degraded by the payment; an honour that can be bought ceases to be an honour. The market, Sandel argues, is not a neutral instrument that can be applied to any good without altering it; for certain goods, pricing them is not a way of allocating them but a way of destroying what made them valuable, and a society that forgets this, that lets market thinking expand into every sphere until it treats all goods as commodities differing only in price, does not merely make some bad trades but loses its grip on the distinction between the things that may be sold and the things whose sale is a corruption. Governance, the authority to rule over human beings, to decide the fate of a people, is the paradigm case of a good that pricing destroys, because its entire legitimacy rests on its being held in trust for the governed, and a seat at the table where a people's fate is decided, sold for a billion dollars to whoever will pay, is not governance allocated by market but governance annihilated by it, converted from a trust into a commodity and thereby into a racket.
Let me put the counterargument that a certain hard-headed realism would press: that governance has always involved money and power, that the pretence of a pure separation between rule and interest is naive, that great powers have always bought influence and sold access, and that the Gaza board merely makes explicit a transactional reality that has always underlain international affairs, so that the horror is really just discomfort at seeing the machinery named. There is a sliver of truth in the realism, as there always is; power and money have never been cleanly separate. But Sandel's distinction survives the realism intact, because the point was never that the corruption never happened before but that it was understood as corruption, named as a violation of a norm that still held, and the Gaza board does something categorically worse than any covert influence-peddling: it openly reconstitutes governance as an explicit commodity, a published price for a seat, and in doing so it does not merely commit the old sin but abolishes the norm against which the old sin was a sin. The covert bribe pays tribute to the principle it violates by hiding; the published price list denies the principle exists.
And that is why the Gaza board is worth pausing on beyond its immediate horror, because it is the reductio of a confusion our whole age is prone to, the market logic that has crept, sphere by sphere, into domains that were once understood to be beyond price, until a civilisation fluent in putting a number on everything arrives, almost logically, at a price for ruling a captive people. Sandel's warning was that once you accept that everything can be a market, you have no principled place to stop, no ground on which to say that this good, unlike that one, is corrupted by sale, and the Gaza board is what the bottom of that slope looks like: governance itself, the fate of two million people, offered by the seat to the highest bidder, presented not with shame but with the confident vocabulary of the deal. The horror everyone felt at the proposal is the right response, and it is worth trusting, because it is the intuition Sandel spent his career defending, the intuition that some things are not for sale, and that a world which has lost the ability to say so has lost something more important than any single transaction: the very idea that there are goods whose value lies precisely in their being beyond the reach of the market. Gaza's governance was offered by the seat this fortnight. The horror is the last trace of the knowledge that it should never have had a price.