Market Magic

This has nothing to do with anything that has transpired before. I am curious about one thing. It’s not because of what I am reading of what I have read before – there’s no great philosopher behind it. It’s just my own observations.

A workman who uses tools keeps his tools in good operating condition. If he lets them fall in disrepair, he impairs the cash flow he gets from them. But if he needs a snow plow to clear walks, he’s not going to go out and buy plow that attaches to the front of a pickup. He wants minimum investment and maximum utility.

In the antebellum South, the cheapest way to plant, grow and harvest cotton was human labor using crude tools. In true free-market fashion, an entrepreneur discovered that Negro slaves could be brought in, kept in involuntary servitude, and forced to do the work. It was a dynamic breakthrough, and anyone else who wanted to compete in the cotton market faced the dilemma of investing in labor at prices that free people might demand, or buying slaves. The South became a slave-driven economy, and slave ownership was so common as to be thought normal. Even the finest egalitarian minds of the age, such as Jefferson, owned slaves, whom he also boinked. The market gave him not much choice – if he invested in free labor, his cash reserves would soon be depleted, as the whole of the wealth of the South was based on slave labor.

But slave ownership was not without costs. In order to keep slaves in good working order, they had to be fed and housed. Replacement slaves had to be bred, so that aging ones could be replaced by newer machinery. There had to be a regular flow of machinery through the marketplace to keep it all functioning smoothly.

Laws enacted by the slave owners who controlled government enforced the rules of the slave system. If a slave escaped, local officials would assist in the hunt-down. If a slave had to be killed to teach a lesson, it was not considered a crime. Government was the servant of wealth.

Other maintenance matters were cultural – that is, understood to be necessary but not necessarily requiring cash investment. It was understood that slaves of one plantation should not be free to mingle with slaves of another, as secret alliances might form that might lead to escape plans or revolts. Slaves had to be kept illiterate, as education leads to desire for freedom. Religious indoctrination taught them to expect rewards in some other world. And even though on the surface it appears that a machine necessary for production of wealth was being abused, slaves had to be regularly beaten to demonstrate the futility of rebellion. It served a greater good.

The open market further required that family ties be broken – it was harsh, and there was no cultural or control reason to do so, but for sake of maximization of profits, families had to be broken up, children sold off if their labor was not needed, old men and women whose value had diminished sold at clearance prices too less wealthy or non-landed gentry who could use them for other purposes. (William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, had a slave, York, who accompanied him on the great expedition. York’s mingling with natives encountered on the trip taught him about how free men lived, and created an uppity attitude. Clark wrote of having to beat York on occasion, as his attitude was becoming insolent.)

All in all, it was an efficient marketplace, and as such, would not naturally dislodge itself. It took a great war to undo the system, and the aftermath of the war was devastation of the southern economy. Slavery became illegal in the United States, but investors, manufacturers and landowners adapted to the new economy, and soon followed the Industrial Revolution, where machines could to the work formerly done by slaves.

But market pressures would still exist to minimize the cost of labor, and due to the advance of machines, a surplus labor force was always available. So the same market forces that produced slavery still existed. On the surface it appeared as though free men and women were negotiating for fair wages in an open marketplace. The fact was that cheaper labor was always available, so that wages were eventually reduced to the point where they would provide enough for a worker to have food and crude housing – enough to make him serviceable to employers.

The Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century, which is no longer taught about in schools, fought long and bloody battles for the right of workers to form unions, a forty-hour work week, the end of child labor, and eventually, a minimum wage. Later battles would bring about unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, and workplace safety laws. Still later laws would try to enforce standards to minimize environmental degradation, discrimination based on color or gender, access to buildings for handicapped people … the list goes on.

All of that, from outlawing of slavery to ramps leading into public libraries, was the work of evil government, which a certain commenter here repeatedly tells me does nothing but visit “violence” on people.

Markets are powerful engines for good, as they maximize efficiency for wealth creation and general good. Without them I would not be typing on this computer, which I depend on for my living as well. But markets have negative side effects, among them, slavery, pauper-wages, humans as chattel, and externalities such as environmental degradation. Markets do not provide remedies for these problems, as remedies do not generate immediate and visible profits.

Market pressures also demand that that investors would go elsewhere to avoid U.S. laws protecting workers, the old and disadvantaged, and the environment. So it is that most of our goods are made in other countries like China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, where democratic impulses do not exist, where the environment and workplace are not a huge concern, and where labor is cheap. Very cheap.

In those countries, workers subsist on lousy wages and live in hovels. It’s almost like being a slave, except that workers are free to go starve somewhere if they don’t want to submit to market pressures.

Slavery never left. It’s a natural byproduct of free markets. It still exists in its true form (prostitute slaves are common throughout the world), and in the form of sweatshops. In an article in Scientific American from 2002 (behind a subscription wall), Kevin Bales argued that there were as many as 18 million slaves among us, including in the United States. (Going on memory here.)

Markets work, but without governments, they don’t work as well as some would have us believe. In fact, they can really hurt us. Free markets gave us slavery. Government freed them.