I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the…

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1

Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan terms that is deep in our collective psyche now. But what does it even mean? /2

Asking that question gets you blank looks. Because, again, it’s a slogan that is now so deep, that people feel it’s like somebody asking if the Earth is flat. A close sibling is the idea of ‘supply and demand’. /3

Count the times people bring that hoary old chestnut out to explain something, without actually explaining anything. Housing is expensive because we don’t have enough supply! A current favourite. /4

And a closely allied term is ‘competition’. Competition in the market drives the supply and demand, and creates optimum outcomes. APPARENTLY. /5

All sides of politics embrace the competition thing. Like with supermarkets, those evil duopolies are anti-competitive! Nobody seems to be peeling back what any of this actually means. /6

We have a competitor to the evil duopoly. Aldi. Been there for years. Has it changed the grocery ‘market’? Not much. Certainly cheaper in many ways, but not driving swathes of Coles and Woolies customers to shift allegiances. /7

Economics used to be called political economy. There was recognition it was an intrinsically political field. Markets, supply and demand and competition are all political ideas. /8

They’re easily traceable back to a desire by some to replace what they see as an intrinsic evil. The State. If humans can regulate themselves through supply and demand competition in markets, the State is redundant. /9

That was the origin of these terms, either explicitly or implicitly. My university professor friend believes this, but rarely says it. It’s why our conversations go nowhere. /10

Like all public discussion now, it’s just team sports. Dressed up as factual debate. People batting for their team. A person’s ‘politics’ is their foundation team, most of the time. Or it can be their religion. What I call Ur-teams. /11

The team they take their most fundamental cues from, even if they join sub-teams in other areas of debate. I once wasted 2 years arguing with a chiropractor friend. About the science of the body. Like many modern debaters, he would say ‘let’s just stay with the facts’. /12

Meaning he didn’t want to actually reveal his true motivations for the arguments. Said that was irrelevant. None of the subsequent ‘debate’ meant anything, I realised later. It was only him promoting his team. /13

A team led by a whack-job theorist from the 19th century, which the friend unsurprisingly never mentioned, because the thinker was a whack-job. I now block him from my life. A parasite on my time. A cold-eyed zealot disguised as an ‘open mind’, looking for ‘discussion’. /14

And this is where all market conversations go too. For example I’ve been talking about EVs and the enormous role of China in driving their prices down. Professor friend, ‘that’s the market’. I ask, ‘what market’? The Chinese did all this before they started trading EVs here. /15

The costs came down because of massive Chinese investment, over many years. It’s engineering, not economics. ‘No, it’s the market at work’. The conversation never progresses past this. It’s an article of faith, for market believers. /16

Asked to demonstrate what a market is, they often describe ancient trade markets for food and other goods. Except that’s not ‘the market’, in modern economic theory. That’s just trading. /17

The modern economic market is a sentient being, that optimises social relations with the ‘invisible hand’ of supply and demand, of competition. /18

APPARENTLY. Except what optimises those things seems quite clearly to be engineering new ways to make things more efficiently, at scale. Engineering, not economics. /19

Like Henry Fred’s innovations. Engineering innovations. Not market innovations. There was no widespread buying and selling of cars, then. Australia is another good example. /20

Tragically ruled by free market zealots for much of the late 20th and early 21st century. Closed the car industry. Removed ‘protections’. Freeing the market to generate new prosperity for the nation! So, what does Australia produce now? /21

Um, not a lot. A big quarry, with some agriculture thrown in, our old staple. A continent transformed into raw materials, for countries that do build things. That’s what the market did for us. Nothing. It doesn’t exist. /22

The Chinese are dominating with EVs because they bypass all that stupidity and invest and build things. With engineers. The market is a fantasy, of privileged peoples too lazy and complacent to do the hard graft of building things any more. /23

So used to cheap things in the stores that they think they somehow just magically appear there, through the market. They don’t. They come mostly from Chinese factories. Stuff has to be built. Investment is needed. /24

You’ll never convince the market folk of this. That it’s engineering we need, not markets. That violates their team rules. Their real enemy is the State. Praise government and you’ll discover that, really fast. /end

Hmm, obviously that should say Henry Ford.