People should read Jim Chalmer’s essay on values-based capitalism. And also Tony Blair’s more sophisticated…

People should read Jim Chalmer’s essay on values-based capitalism. And also Tony Blair’s more sophisticated essay I Tweeted earlier, from 2021. To me they’re interchangeable in the way they conceptualise things - a more compassionate ‘capitalism’. /1 https://t.co/552ceLMSe4

I said in that earlier thread based on Blair’s essay, all this will achieve is making the frames conservatives use even more palatable to the public. It accelerates their destructive power. Imagine if I said somebody was a ‘fat dickhead’, and somebody said ‘oi, that’s rude’. /2

So instead I said ‘ok they’re just a dickhead’. It’s not progress, is it? It’s “sorry, not sorry”. Until progressive politics understands that ‘the economy’ is the trick, the con, the reframing of society as some form of machine, they’ll keep losing. We all will. /3

The economy doesn’t exist. There are ‘economic’ type transactions, but there’s no meta-being that regulates them, called ‘the market’. Society is formed socially. It’s not, has never been, and never will be free-floating individuals deciding how to act in concert with others. /4

As I Tweeted about masks, all groups of people, of whatever size, act using one principle. Social conformity. A values-based capitalism, a steering of the market, is fairies at the bottom of the garden nonsense. All markets are driven by social conformity, they’re not in any…/5

…way a mechanism for automatically selecting the most efficient or otherwise best option, and weeding out the inferior options. Betamax, anybody? Chalmers’ idea that we let the market do its thing, and just try to steer it? Where’s the market for school teachers? /6

For well-paid childcare workers? How will we ‘steer’ those things into existence? By saying we value them? We’ve been saying that forever. The supply and demand of the market, hasn’t it done well, with enormous demand for both of those, and zero supply? It’s all a con. /end