These two ideas aren’t actually distinct – markets are ongoing processes of economic activity without a defined “before” and “after”
O’Neill 20 – Lecturer in Moral & Political Philosophy in the Department of Politics at the University of York.
Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 70-71, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.
Firstly, the temporal objection. If read in its literal sense, the talk of before and after with regard to the tax system simply does not stand up. It is not that economic activity somehow takes place within a discrete time period, with the government standing outside the economic domain while these processes take place, only stepping in at the end of each period, so to speak, in order to collect taxes and pay out benefits, so that a new discrete period of economic activity can then take place. Rather, economic activity is an endlessly ongoing process, with the government’s activities as both collector of taxes and payer of benefits a similarly continuous, if periodically modulating, constitutive part of that process. The temporal objection then, is that talk of ‘before’ and ‘after’ with regard to government’s role in economic life, while it has a certain kind of brisk initial plausibility, is on further investigation merely mystifying.21