Not The Weather

This post is about the biggest and most successful scam in human history. It's a scam that affects billions of people, keeps them poor, powerless and ignorant.

"It's The Economy, Stupid" was one of the campaign slogans used in Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush. Clinton ran on a program, as a Democrat, favoring small government and deregulation of the economy. He won, of course, starting the period of deregulation that ultimately led to the dot com bubble and the global financial crisis of 2008. The ideas of "small government" and deregulating the markets and finances both stem from the notion that government ought not interfere with the economy. It's the libertarian misconception of the economy as a natural phenomenon, that the economy is like the weather. It's not. This is the biggest scam of all time; that the economy is some higher force that we can not control.

This idea has been prevalent throughout history and in all human civilizations. It used to be the higher powers of God and the Divine Right of Kings, and now it's "market forces" (the economic factors affecting the price of, demand for, and availability of commodities) keeping us in our place. Like the weather, we can try to predict what it's going to be like tomorrow, next week or next year, maybe advice people to take an umbrella when going out, but that's about all we can do. It's not. It's a scam. The economy is a human invention based on property and property rights, which are also human inventions. There exists no such thing as a natural right to property. I've written about this many times, but I feel it needs repeating; property is a legal construct enforced by the state's monopoly on the use of violence.

The idea of a "self-regulating market," guided by some "invisible hand" is another appeal to an unseen force that we have no control over. Well, I'm sorry, but like property markets are always regulated and there's no invisible hand. Property is always backed by violence, and it has always been so. Owning a piece of land amounts to nothing more than someone saying "this is mine, and if you try to take it from me I'm going to kill you." In modern, more "civilized" times we don't do the enforcing ourselves anymore, but appeal to the power of the state. An individual's amount of power directly translates into that person's ability to appeal to the power of the state. So if you have a lot of property, you claim a larger portion of the state's regulatory powers, like the police, the military and the judicial system. This is the simplest way to illustrate how wealth and power are directly linked.

The libertarian opposition to government interfering with the markets, or government redistributing wealth, is somewhat misguided. The government always interferes with markets and it always redistributes wealth, the only question is which way the redistribution goes. The economy, in other words, is a political program to begin with. It's nothing more than a series of political choices, preferably made collectively. You know, like in a working democracy. Democracy is our final attempt at redistributing power equally. As such it tries to remedy the highly unequal distribution of power established through wealth and property. And it fails. Much of that failure stems from this irrational idea that the economy is separate from politics, the idea of the economy as some higher uncontrollable force, the economy as the weather.

As an individual it's easy to fall for this ruse, because for an individual the economy is like the weather. As an individual, the economy kind of just happens, you can't control the way the economy goes on a global, national or even on a regional scale. Neoliberal propaganda has internalized in our minds that the individual is the standard against which all success, failures, ethics and morals are to be measured. In this hyper-individualist environment it's easy to overlook the fact that everything we've achieved, we've achieved collectively. It's easy to overlook the fact that individual businesses build their fortunes on what we've collectively built previously, like the infrastructure of roads, bridges, electricity grids and so on. It's easy to ascribe the billions of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to their individual merits, as opposed to their ability to extract the surplus value produced by their hundreds or thousands of employees. Finally, it's easy to see the government as this humongous opposing force, because that's exactly what it is right now. But that's because it operates for the benefit of individuals and individuality, instead of the community and communality. And the individuals who come out winning are the ones who benefit from keeping alive the idea of the economy as the weather.

It's not the weather. The economy is a human made construct and is therefore under our control. The government can create jobs whenever they want. We've seen this happen after the Great Depression for example. We've seen in the pandemic that governments can distribute free money whenever they want. In other times they distribute free money only to the movers and shakers of the economy, the ones with extraordinary wealth. The problem is not that there's not enough money or not enough wealth, the problem is that political decisions are made in favor of the owners of private property only, that wealth is redistributed to the pockets of the already insanely rich, and we could simply make different decisions. The economy is nothing more than the decisions we collectively make, which result in the way we individually relate to each other and to nature. If the economy is like the weather, we collectively own the weather-machine, we only need to push the right buttons to create a brighter forecast...

The below linked video contains a discussion with Ryan Cooper about his book "How Are You Going to Pay for That? Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics," and delves into the topics discussed in this post. Here's some of the summary of the book:

From the kitchen table to Congress, debates are punctuated with a familiar refrain: “How are you going to pay for that?”

This question is designed to shut down policy pushes up front, minimizing any interference with the free market. It comes from neoliberalism, an economic ideology that has overtaken both parties. Proponents insist that markets are naturally-occurring and apolitical—and that too much manipulation of the economy will make our society fall apart. Ryan Cooper argues that our society already is falling apart, and the logically preposterous views of neoliberalism are to blame.

The discussion with Ryan Cooper starts at the 19 minute mark and is some 40 minutes long.

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