Shaw's unpleasant plays

deal with 'repugnancy markets' i.e. money derived from immoral, illegal or unfashionable activities. Statute and tort law can provide specific remedies. However, incentive compatible 'mechanism design' is required. That is an ideographic matter beyond or below the scope of nomothetic moral or metaphysical approaches. 

 What of the more general problem that money derived in repugnant ways is diffused through the entire economy? You may be inclined to say, with a Roman Emperor, 'money does not stink'. It has no memory of how it came to be earned. Still, there is a reputational benefit in having 'clean' wealth and, equally, a social penalty for being the beneficiary of tainted cash- e.g. money gained from 'trade' rather than inherited from rapacious ancestors or the bloodless practice of an avaricious profession. 

It is in this context that Shaw's 'unpleasant plays' still have a message for us. 

Widower's houses.

In this play, an aristocratic Doctor falls in love with the well-educated daughter of a self-made man. Initially, the Doctor, who has radical political ideas, welcomes what people of his own caste would regard a mesalliance. Then he discovers that his prospective father-in-law gains his livelihood by renting out his rectum. At that time, rent-boys were considered social pariahs. Sodomy was per se illegal. True, one could argue that Widowers need some place to place their pecker and that it is preferable that they rent rather than buy such accommodation. Since Capitalism only came into existence by swallowing the widow's mite and the orphan's portion and since its appetites have grown enormously since then, it follows that it must now replenish itself by encompassing the exiguous earnings of rent-boys servicing randy widowers and incestuous paedophiles who had previously chopped up and sold for meat any wives or children they may have had. At the end of the play, the aristocratic Doctor discovers that the wealth, power, and hegemonic role of his own Whig ancestors arose out of the fact that the soi disant 'Houses' of Parliament were but the rented out rectums of the lumpenproletariat. 

Mrs Warren's profession

A prostitute turned Madam with a chain of brothels across Europe is shocked to discover that her well-educated daughter prefers to soil herself as an actuarial consultant in the City of London. Shaw does not condemn the girl out of hand. How else is she supposed to make a living? Would Jevons or Wicksteed or Alfred Marshall pay her to use algebraic topology to show that the existence of vaginas artificially skews the market for sexual services such that rent-boys suffer significant wage discrimination? Indeed, the female monopoly on child birth has resulted in the vesting of unearned rents amongst a class so idle it can afford to waste time sitting down to pee. Moreover, Regicide was rendered infructuous, the Guillotine was made mock off, by the officina gentium, the vagina nationum, of Queen Vic, Gorbless'er, under whom Finanzkapital had so burgeoned. Put simply, there is little point cutting the heads of Kings- or even those of the bourgeoisie- if kooches keep popping out babies who might become Kings or Capitalists or Christians or heterosexual males or other such abominations. 

The Philanderer

A couple of men keep putting their dicks in vaginas when they ought to be bumming each other. The women are after only one thing- marriage- and to have more of that commodity are willing to outsource Divorce to South Dakota. Sadly, Bertrand Russell's brother thought such divorces were legal in Britain. They weren't and so the noble Earl was sent to jail for three months for bigamy. I'm not sure what the moral here is other than the usual Shavian one that vaginas are ikky. Stay the fuck away from them.