infected slut princess wrote:
Why is that? Well, markets are characterized by voluntary exchange –
No, they really aren't.
Markets are not special things that are somehow independent from all other forms of human interaction.
Violence and coercion are commodities, just like everything else. And just like everything else its bought and sold on the market.
We let democratic governments have monopolies on their legitimate use because, quite simply, they trade in the currency of the masses. They need our votes and they buy those votes by using violence in our best interests.
Businesses do not trade in the currency of the masses. Our votes are useless to them. Only our money matters. We are, ultimately, nothing but tools to businesses. We are a means to an end, that end being money. If they destroy us in the process of extracting value from us, then they have lost nothing. We are as ore to be processed, smelted down for green paper, round bits of metal, and electronic numbers in a computer at a bank somewhere.
You seem to be missing one simple fact. Violence doesn't just come from the barrel of a gun or the point of a spear or the edge of a sword. Violence done with a weapon is crude and ultimately less effective than violence done with the plow and the pen . Amateur warriors study tactics, processional soldiers study logistics. This is a truism that few people seem to grasp. Economic power, applied correctly, is inherently more coercive than military power ever has been.
It doesn't matter how much money you have if the grocery stores won't sell you food, you'll starve to death either way. There are such things as necessities. Some are basic things that every person needs, food, clothing, and shelter. Some are more complex but are just as necessary for modern quality of life.
The people who control these commodities hold absolute power of life and death over some number of people. If there is only one person that you can buy food from then you do what that person says or you starve to death.
And he's another thing. Human freedom has no intrinsic value. In fact, it's anti-value. Sure, your personal freedom has a huge amount of value to you, but most businesses would get far more out of you if you were a slave. And, unfortunately, there comes a point where you're materially better off as a slave than you would be if you were free.
A lot of people who try their hand at economics neglect game theory, with is an equally important study of human interactions and one that can provide insight into the workings of markets.
In game theory, there's a concept called a Nash Equilibrium. Nash equilibrium happens when no player can gain an advantage by changing his strategy. Once that happens, the end result is a foregone conclusion, baring random variables. No player will change their strategy because all of the lose worse if they do.
Nash Equilibrium in an unregulated market is the company store. Load sixteen tons and what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt.
One company monopolizes distribution of goods to its employees to the point where they are defacto slaves. It could be selling them $20,000 3D plasma televisions but is effectively only losing value to entropy because the company store model is a partially closed system. Value can come in from labor but it cannot leave. Of course, they won't be so generous. They'll provide just enough to get the maximum amount of value out of the worker. That amount is relative to the industry and the local conditions, but can be truly hellish for unskilled labor. Just as importantly or the people is that the business can and probably will enforce totalitarian control over its employees lives.
Unregulated markets tend towards anti-competitiveness. Vertical integration is an amazingly powerful tool for control, as Standard Oil learned and economies of scale mean that large companies are inherently more efficient than small ones, a fact which encourages horizontal integration.
The end result is like something out of a bad cyberpunk novel, with megacorps holding large swaths of humanity as virtual slaves.
And here's the third fact that people forget. Monkeyspheres are small. Businesses are run by people who are generally non-evil and don't want to oppress you, specifically. Its just that they really don't understand you or your plight at all because their monkeyspheres just aren't big enough. They do not empathize with your suffering because they are only vaguely aware of it at best. It's easy to order the extermination of all the Jews in Europe. Its a lot harder to actually shoot them yourself. But the guys calling the shots aren't out in the trenches. They aren't anywhere near the trenches. While they may understand that they're doing something immoral on an intellectual level, it just doesn't hit them in the gut because they have no emotional connection to it. So non-evil people will, in fact, do a fuckton of evil but virtue of lacking the proper perspective.
In other words, unregulated markets suck because they tend towards insane cyberpunk dystopias despite the best intentions of those calling the shots. .
