yesterday”s epolitix bulletin had this lovely snippet:
“The chancellor Alistair Darling uses an interview with the Financial Times newspaper to say sudden changes on taxing private equity could impact negatively on the “absolutely critical” role of the City in the economy”
oh yes of course alistair. whilst i may not be disagreeing with you on this particular point ( well i shan”t say what i think, apart from to laugh hollowly), i do find it amusing given how the usual diatribe from “market fundamentalists” is “oh we don”t want any government interference”.
what they really mean of course is
“oh we don”t want any govt. interference unless it is the kind that specifically allows us to do what we want - i.e. the kind that gives us special license, the kind of thing we don”t call “regulation”, the kind of thing we don”t want you to think of when we talk about not wanting “regulation”. We only want you to think of “regulation” in a specific way - i.e. in the context when the rules are not in favour of us. Otherwise, we love rules, how else would we have the monopoly, the special privileges, the institutional barriers we like to erect around our so-called “free “market”. So yes we don”t want government interference..of course not, why would we want any such thing, we got to where we are today without any such “help” or any institutions, don”t you know, we didn”t have to join all the right clubs, didn”t need to be a member of all the right groups, didn”t need to be able to create money as debt, didn”t need any help to get the financial monopoly we do have, course not.”
very clever i must admit as well - the best deception around. give something a name, keep referring to it, and after a while, people might just assume everytime you say “regulation” it means a particular kind of regulation, rather than the broad sense of the word.
who falls for it? economics students it seems.
oh yes i thought i may as well comment instead of editing the post - i am so lazy! so alistair says we can’t have a sudden change. fine - why don’t we ease into a not-so-sudden change?
is it me or do politicians just not have any brains? why aren’t they honest and just say look, for fucks sake of course we’re not going to mess with the rich people, cos they’ll go elsewhere. so just shut up ok?
Again, you have hit the nail on the head Sonia. I am staunchly in favour of a free market, but we have never really had one. Excellent post.
Yes Rumbold, indeed so am I - which is why it irks me so when people say they are free market fundamentalists but are supporting what is precisely the opposite!
the other thing about this global free market - how when half the world can’t even travel freely (i.e without a visa which is hard to get and depends on your position/situation in life) around the world - can it be called a free market im not quite sure, but there you go.
still, one day we’ll get there
I believe that the free movement of peoples is a good idea, but I do recognize that there are certain barriers in practicial and political terms. However, for goods and services, there should be no barriers.
there are certainly barriers, and i guess my cynical mind suggests at least we may as well be open and honest about that. why not call a spade a spade. it just seems dishonest to pretend to have something we don’t.
But can a free market really be said to include people? A market is about goods and services, so I am not sure that freedom of movement really falls under that category.
it depends on what people understand as the “market” I suppose. (it clearly is something that isn’t the same in people’s minds - naturally - its one word which is trying to sum up a complex set of interactions. )
i think the conventional idea is that yes - its about goods and ’services’ and not about the free movement of people.
personally i understand the ‘market’ to be more than just “economic” transactions because i see the ‘transaction’ as involving something more i.e. social dynamics.
so, given that, i don’t really know what ’services’ are if they don’t somehow involve ‘people’ in some way, (i know economists refer to services as somehow not involving people, something mechanized perhaps!) It all depends on what people are thinking of i suppose, or how they are conceptualising “services”. Artists performers, academics, consultants, well sure you could offer up your services without being there in person, but for live performances, meetings, shows, one might need to be there in person,sometimes anyway. ( these days with the net it is much easier to be able to actually trade with people across the world though the physical networking aspect of business doesn’t seem to be going away as much as the net utopianists would have us think)
I guess when i think market i think conceptually more like the idea of the original Greek ‘agora’. and then, the electronic equivalent is like the e-agora.
in any case, the reality is, that global companies who do offer ’services’ - like the global M&A lawyers, investment advice providers, brokers etc. all do travel the world - including the ones who do need visas to go places -because they are working for ‘recognised’ institutions and it is acknowledged that they have to travel for work - so you get all the right forms and you jump through all the right hoops and you get through. ( say like i do when i used to travel for work, or my dad did as an academic).
Or if you’re an individual, if you’re rich enough, or move in the right circles, then again, the borders don’t really matter - they become formalities.
My point is simply that all of these things are about the ability to make social negotiations/agreements of some kind, and there are structural barriers and social barriers to ‘free interaction’ if you will. ( which is for me - the wider aspect in which i situate the free ‘market’, to make it a bit more clear where i’m coming from)
in the end, you might not go yourself, in person, but in order to get access, to get yourself in the position where people will ‘trade’ with you, or any of these things, you have to deal with social institutions.
Also i think this whole thing depends on what people understand to be ‘free’. From my perspective, what i’m interested in - from a libertarian perspective - is a situation where individuals can easily trade their skills/knowledge/whatever with other individuals who want their skills/knowledge etc. wherever they are, whoever they are. These days we say we favour ‘enterprise’ but we really mean big business, which usually has the cartel-like power and ability to get the ’special’ treatment they do, from national governments, and from supranational institutions like the WTO, all the tax cuts, all the lobbying potential etc. So for me - free - means easier for anyone to “enter”/participate in, not just people with connections and the strings to pull.
i daresay given all this, there probably will never be a ‘truly’ free market as i see it, still, we can try and get as close as we can perhaps.
The so called free markets have been the source of much misery. The best example is the WTO which makes it so difficult for developing countries to compete with the west. The fairtrade movement proves just how unequal free markets really are. Yes we need regulation, but fair regulation so all can benefit not just an élite.
This year Ecotopia in Portugal is about migrations and the reality of borders and Fortress Europe.
http://www.ecotopiagathering.org/callout.html
Great post- and blog. I love your header “critique and commentary on the human condition”- I use the term ‘human condition’ quite a bit myself.
I tried for a while to think of some arguments to properly counter your #7 post Sonia, but could not, so well done.
That is one thing, and it is probably useful to some degree - i’m not going to say its not, or dismiss academic abstraction. It has its uses! but also limitations - so its simply about being realistic about that.
We can then say, that if there was perfect information, if there was freedom to trade and no social restrictions, then x y z. And that’s a fair enough point.
Of course the difficulty is when it is translated into policy thinking - with people forgetting that the underlying assumptions made by academics- were just that - assumptions.
And if we do want to approximate reality, then we might need to consider the fact that e.g. there is no perfect information - and might it mean for our analysis?
thanks harmonie! i’m very flattered as when i looked at your blog i was thinking, what a great ‘about’ page!
Economists always fail to recognize that the world is not in perfect harmony, waiting for their equations. That is why studying history is so valuable; you realize that you cannot box persons and events into neat little compartments.
Well said.