On how the free market is not the Savior
Many young American would-be intelligentsia have the annoying habit of taking the free market as a substitute for responsibility to act.
An example is one argument seen occasionally in the net neutrality debate. It goes: if people don't want to be penalized in their Internet access for not paying for a higher-priority status, they will choose providers who have no such system. If neutral treatment becomes a market advantage, it will win out; if it does not, that only means few people genuinely want it.
See? By this logic, everyone is happy, and no one has to pass any laws. Laws are so gauche, don't you think?
Well, here's a wakeup call: a buyer does not inherently hold privileged position over the seller, not even in the big picture. Power flows both ways, depending on the situation, and while buyers' power is almost always statistical, manipulation is the province of the seller. With any number of methods, steadily honed, sellers distract, charm, confuse, or coerce their customers into settling. Since the popular revolts of the past mean there are almost no actual monopolies anymore, we are no longer sensitive to the unanswerable power bigness can bring to bear. So as we forget the hard-learned lessons of the past, merger after merger takes away our choices. For it is that power that comes with bigness, not new efficiencies or some such prattle, that is the great incentive for the steady, inexorable corporate combinations of today.
If big Internet providers managed to blind us to our expectation of equal provision of data, to trap us in webs of confusion like the phone and insurance companies already do, most of them would be satisfied with that situation.
In short, those who blithely preach* that business in its natural state cannot help but be responsive to people's needs are either shills or brainwashed by generalities. I suspect some ill influence from the triumph of science: trained in the absolutes of basic physics, some are tricked into believing the ideal operation of the free market is just as constant and absolute -- even though it requires perfect information and a large number of actors to become even mathematically valid.
The free market, in this way of thinking, is nearly a redeemer. Lo, of greed it is made, yet it washeth us clean. In its mercy it beareth our sin for us, and blesseth us with wealth in recompense.**
It is an excuse for inaction and complacency, just as surely as it would be to ascribe everything to the will of God.
We are not, and have never been, a great mass of buyers and sellers! We are a people, and as such we have the inherent right to make collective decisions. Action through economic methods should never be confused with a substitute for political action. The bosses would like to foist it on us, because, being indirect, it means an end to coercion -- of the ability to make them treat us fairly and ethically.
The more we tell each other that the Free Market Risen will come, very soon now, and reward us for our submission, the more they snicker. They know who benefits.
* "In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory." -- Alan Greenspan, 1963
**Libertarians are too simple-minded even for that message. They make the further conclusion that greed itself must be virtuous, and, in keeping with that, cheerfully ridicule any notion of charity or responsibility.
An example is one argument seen occasionally in the net neutrality debate. It goes: if people don't want to be penalized in their Internet access for not paying for a higher-priority status, they will choose providers who have no such system. If neutral treatment becomes a market advantage, it will win out; if it does not, that only means few people genuinely want it.
See? By this logic, everyone is happy, and no one has to pass any laws. Laws are so gauche, don't you think?
Well, here's a wakeup call: a buyer does not inherently hold privileged position over the seller, not even in the big picture. Power flows both ways, depending on the situation, and while buyers' power is almost always statistical, manipulation is the province of the seller. With any number of methods, steadily honed, sellers distract, charm, confuse, or coerce their customers into settling. Since the popular revolts of the past mean there are almost no actual monopolies anymore, we are no longer sensitive to the unanswerable power bigness can bring to bear. So as we forget the hard-learned lessons of the past, merger after merger takes away our choices. For it is that power that comes with bigness, not new efficiencies or some such prattle, that is the great incentive for the steady, inexorable corporate combinations of today.
If big Internet providers managed to blind us to our expectation of equal provision of data, to trap us in webs of confusion like the phone and insurance companies already do, most of them would be satisfied with that situation.
In short, those who blithely preach* that business in its natural state cannot help but be responsive to people's needs are either shills or brainwashed by generalities. I suspect some ill influence from the triumph of science: trained in the absolutes of basic physics, some are tricked into believing the ideal operation of the free market is just as constant and absolute -- even though it requires perfect information and a large number of actors to become even mathematically valid.
The free market, in this way of thinking, is nearly a redeemer. Lo, of greed it is made, yet it washeth us clean. In its mercy it beareth our sin for us, and blesseth us with wealth in recompense.**
It is an excuse for inaction and complacency, just as surely as it would be to ascribe everything to the will of God.
We are not, and have never been, a great mass of buyers and sellers! We are a people, and as such we have the inherent right to make collective decisions. Action through economic methods should never be confused with a substitute for political action. The bosses would like to foist it on us, because, being indirect, it means an end to coercion -- of the ability to make them treat us fairly and ethically.
The more we tell each other that the Free Market Risen will come, very soon now, and reward us for our submission, the more they snicker. They know who benefits.
* "In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory." -- Alan Greenspan, 1963
**Libertarians are too simple-minded even for that message. They make the further conclusion that greed itself must be virtuous, and, in keeping with that, cheerfully ridicule any notion of charity or responsibility.
posted by Minivet at 7:05 PM
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