This has been percolating for a while now: A treatise on “free market” economics. If it takes more than 700 words, I have over-thought it.
Having read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, it is hard to dispute the things he says. It is all sensible. He tried to objectively describe the interactions of people in advanced pre-industrial societies where labor was specialized and people produced more goods than they needed. He extrapolated from this his theories on the origins of the wealth. His mind was pure, his reasoning rigorous. He lacked an agenda and was unprejudiced. His work is rightly considered a classic. Reagan and Bush should have read it. All conservatives should read it some time.
Agendas and prejudices are the modern failings of “free market” economics. Its advocates are the financiers and predators, its best proponents the intellectual class – those think-tankers and professors of economics at our finest universities, aka the “bought priesthood.””
The world that Smith described underlies all that we do. We engage in commerce, some more perceptive than others, some more diligent, most of us just plodding along selling our wares while unknowingly making more money for others than for ourselves. The priesthood says that we must allow this system to flourish on its own, that attempts to regulate it always end badly. Attempts to fine-tune the engine usually end up hindering its performance.
They’re wrong. It’s not an engine – it’s a fire. It can be our servant, it can rage out of control, and usually does if not strictly regulated. Witness … the present. Markets are wonderful and adaptable. If we regulate them, if we redirect their outcomes to better serve the whole of society, they continue to work well, and we have more equality of outcomes, happier people, and fewer predatrors and priests telling us to toughen up as they steal our earnings.
The class that the intellectuals serve are those whose sole purpose in life is to accumulate wealth. It’s a game, well-portrayed and pilloried in the Ellis book-made-movie “American Psycho.” (“Mergers and acquisitions” = “murders and executions.”) These people, these predators, are not the capitalists, the investors, the bankers of old who redirected our largess to its best use. They are rather thieves of the highest order, more like feudal lords or aristocrats than public servants. They are risk-averse, and seek security in collecting the wealth produced by others by whatever means currently available.
In Harlem, police routinely swoop down and make mass arrests of drug dealers in the black neighborhoods. Such a fell swoop is needed on Wall Street – so many of that Italian loafer set should be serving time with Bernie Madoff (whose only real crime was stealing money from the wrong people).
The mass of humanity are not go-getters – they are mere survivors. All those wonderful kids, so ill-served by our schools, will grow up to be very ordinary people who find slots to fill, some fulfilled, most not. Our society is a bushel basket under which many lights are hidden. People are trained to “get a job.” Later on those big mortgages and health insurance and student loans will keep them in place. They will work fifty weeks for two weeks of freedom, see their life’s work be devastated in the latest market scandal, and end up depending on Social Security, that dreaded and awful program, for a decent retirement.
This from a recent article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, “The Sure Thing“: (behind a subscription wall at present). It’s an article about the predator class.
…one of the undisputed finding[s] in all the research on entrepreneurs: people who work for themselves are far happier than the rest of us. [Economist Scott] Shane says that the average person would have to earn two and a half times as much to be as happy working for someone else as he would be working for himself.
That hits home. Why do I start each day with so much vigor and joy? I do not serve the predators, I bide my own time, I live free. If that is the free market, count me in. But what most people do in this country … well, they are many things. But they are not free.
(705 words with these five.)
Piece of Mindful 