Or why marketmakers are the kings of today:

As it’s currently practiced, the issuance of currency — a public utility, really — is still controlled in much the same manner by central banks. They issue the currency in the form of a loan to a bank, which in turn loans it a business. Each borrower must pay back more then he has acquired, necessitating competition — and more borrowing. An economy with a strictly enforced central currency must expand at the rate of debt; it is no longer ruled principally by the laws of supply and demand, but the debt structures of its lenders and borrowers. Those who can’t grow organically must acquire businesses in order to grow artificially. Even though nearly 80% of mergers and acquisitions fail to create value for either party, the rules of a debt-based economy — and the shareholders it was developed to favor — insist on growth at the expense of long-term value.

The second great innovation was the chartered monopoly, through which kings could grant exclusive control over a sector or region to a favored company in return for an investment in the enterprise. This gave rise to monopoly markets, such as the British East India Trading Company’s exclusive right to trade in the American Colonies. Colonists who grew cotton were not permitted to sell it to other people or, worse, fabricate clothes. These activities would have generated value from the bottom up, in a way that could not have been extracted by a central authority. Instead, colonists were required to sell cotton to the Company, at fixed prices, who shipped it back to England where it was fabricated into clothes by another chartered monopoly, and then shipped to back to America for sale to the colonists. It was not more efficient; it was simply more extractive.

I find myself vacillating between “no way” and “holy shit” in my reactions to this piece. It’s scary as shit because I see this stuff still happening:

When natives of the Indies began making rope to sell to the Dutch East India Trading Company, the Company sought and won laws making rope fabrication in the Indies illegal for anyone except the Company itself. Former rope-makers had to close their workshops, and work instead for lower wages as employees of the company.

Hemp is illegal in America due to one factor alone: it was competition for the lucrative timber markets of the super-elite back in the early 1900s, because it made more, better and cheaper paper than timber. Less value extraction. So the marijuana scare began, and hemp was banned because it looks the same and ‘could be used to hide marijuana in the fields by evil farmers or mobsters.’

It’s nothing new. The rich and powerful use their means to influence the national-level discourse into a way that’s favorable for them and allows maximum wealth extraction from the lower 99.9% of society.

But competition is the way of life! you say.

It may or may not better reflect the laws of nature — and that it is a conversation we really should have — but it is certainly not the result of entirely natural set of principles in action. It is a system designed by certain people at a certain moment in history, with very specific interests.

Is it? Today we have giant corporations creating all our food, with very little cooperation among men because with machines, one can do the work of hundreds, hourly. We’re told it’s good and efficient, but those hundreds no longer have a way to pay their bills and nothing’s free. All the land is owned, so they can’t just go somewhere that no one is living and start their own farm. We drop the price of food and somehow make more people poorer (especially in relation to the top .1%).

Those 100 people that used to get together and farm together, back in the day before markets, when agriculture was just being invented… If they competed against one another, some of them would die. So they all farmed for the good of the town. For prosperity, because you couldn’t live well without food. Now that food is the least of our worries, somehow we’ve made society more disparate than ever before.

Socialism and communism existed before kings and governments. I’m not saying the quality of life for anyone was great back then. I’m saying it was a fucking necessity to overcome nature. Knowledge has trivialized that feat, and immediately started making gods out of men. Knowledge secret and jealously guarded because it was what set them apart from common, ignorant men. Science has reversed this tide somewhat, but it held back by common, ignorant men liking the status quo.

Nature caused communism, it’s what made us dominant. Complacency with dominance, “bread and circuses” has allowed the rise of powerful men to subjugate society to their whims. The markets were created to allow non-producers to ‘get their beaks whet’ so to speak, on the activity of others, however one wanted to do it. It allow the powerful or lucky to excel, but structures things so that most people have to run just to stay in place.

Good luck with that.

Tags: 'free' market

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 15:29.