Black Markets

Black market is a phase attached to a concept that many people predictably just make assumptions about because of emotions or cultural norms.  Conscience and political laws do not make something morally good or evil, only, in the case of the former, subjectively distressing or offensive and, in the case of the latter, criminalized by a specific governmental body.  If moral obligations exist, they do not depend on either of these things.  It logically follows from this alone that the items of a black market are not automatically immoral as possessions or objects of use just because a government legally prohibits them.  All a black market does is involve the buying and selling of illegal goods or services--or the buying and selling of legal items in a way that avoids something like government taxation.

If playing cards, toothbrushes, or video games were to become illegal, selling them would involve a black market, whether it is formal in the sense of an organized meeting place for many people or informal in the sense of a private exchange between two individuals.  Black markets do not at all have to feature things like hard drugs, special weapons, or human slaves.  Literally anything at all that is illegal to buy, own, or sell, no matter how philosophically or morally erroneous the legal classification is, is a black market item.  It does not matter whether the possession in question is something it is evil to use, sell, or buy: anything criminalized rightly or wrongly by a government can thus only be exchanged at black markets.

Many people seem to just stop at the phrase "black market" and make assumptions based on the attitude others tend to have or because of the color referenced in the name, which is associated with death and cruelty.  The association of the word for a certain color with the concept of an illegal or extra-legal market for buying and selling is purely arbitrary, of course.  Either way, the popular idiocy of confusing legality for morality--either there are moral obligations, which makes certain things good or evil regardless of arbitrary human laws, or there are no obligations, making nothing good or evil because a legal code says so--is at the heart of the assumption that black markets are inherently immoral.

Some people might have already realized all of these logical truths about the ramifications of legality not being morality for markets, even without thinking of or while using the common language used to refer to illegal selling that uses a color as an adjective for something that has no specific color at all.  As in all things, only if a political law aligns with a genuine moral obligation that should be a law does it have true authority, and thus that something is sold in a black market does not necessarily mean there is anything morally objectionable about the sale or the item itself.  Even if not everyone will focus on economics enough to discover this particular truth, no rational person will confuse activities that a government does not approve of with activities that are immoral.  Black markets do not deserve their often default "black" reputation.