This is the great mythology that all sides of politics embrace. That high prices are caused by lack of…
This is the great mythology that all sides of politics embrace. That high prices are caused by lack of competition. By monopoly.
Scale is what allows humans to create things cheaply. ‘Economies of scale’. But we’re wedded to the idea that societies will run automatically. /1 https://t.co/QSCzntISkX
We need ‘competition’ to be the problem, because then we can deny any role for planning or leadership. For the State. That’s what ‘the Economy’ always was, a Trojan Horse to remove the State.
It’s not a physical thing. It’s a political construct. Run by an ‘invisible hand’. /2
It’s not invisible though. The State created the economy and is the only way its fiction can survive. Corporations Law brings business into being. And it and a whole raft of other regulations maintain our trade and other economic activity. /3
Societies will not run themselves like some objective machine, provided you just have enough competition. That always was a *political* idea, not an economic one. The politics of the anti-State groups. A particularly US obsession. /4
‘The economy’ always was a way to do politics, while pretending to not be doing politics. A way to pretend you were just following the objective laws of economics, while you were actually dismantling public infrastructure. /5
And as I’ve Tweeted about before, you can see this quite clearly in the way that ‘the economy’ allows no significant political change to occur.
Every meaningful policy to address social problems will be deemed unaffordable, and damaging to ‘the economy’. That’s politics. /6
All of this also acts completely counter to how societies actually function. Humans create status hierarchies. Those hierarchies create scale.
That scale also is a much more efficient way to produce everyday goods and services. Because competition is just battles for status. /7
If you calm those battles by establishing a hierarchy, things flow much more easily. No economic mumbo jumbo about efficient or inefficient markets explains anything. Societies are SOCIAL.
They don’t run themselves. They’re LED. Always. By hierarchies of social status. /end