Catching Up With The Mutualist

The Rent’s Still Too Damn High — Here’s How to Lower It

I frequently argue that, far from the result of the “free market,” the recent speculative bubble was the result of over a century’s worth of government intervention. The bubble resulted from vast disparities of wealth — disparities created by the state and its enforcement of privilege — with a growing share of income going to classes looking to use it for investment rather than consumption.

Someone recently challenged me to describe exactly what government interventions I’d eliminate to remedy this situation, and exactly what effect I’d expect them to have. So here, without further ado, is my free market agenda for macroeconomic stability.
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Attack Tyranny at Its Weakest Link — Enforcement

Liberal goo-goos and “good citizens” of all stripes are fond of saying that “We must continue to obey the law while we work to change it.” Every day I become more convinced that this approach gets things precisely backwards. Each day’s news demonstrates the futility of attempts at legislative reform, compared to direct action to make the laws unenforceable.
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Neoliberalism: All the Taxes of Social Democracy, None of the Fun

Tom Geoghegan (in Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?) defends the advantages of the European model of social democracy against the American neoliberal model. No doubt the usual suspects on the Right feel compelled to defend the honor of the American cowboy capitalism that’s prevailed since 1980 or so, as a meaningful approximation to the “free markets” they’re always going on about.

Those of us on the free market Left, of course, will point out that what the talking heads at CNBC and the Wall Street Journal editorial page call the “free market” is anything but.
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Back in the USSA

Politicians and talking heads, of both the mainstream liberal and conservative persuasions, commonly refer to this as “our free market system,” or maybe “free enterprise.”

But we haven’t had anything even remotely resembling a free market for over 150 years. (For that matter we didn’t have one before, what with Enclosures, the Combination Law, mercantilism, slavery and colonialism.) Since the mid-19th century, what we’ve had is massive collusion between big government and big business. The corporate economy was created almost whole-cloth through a monstrous act of top-down government intervention, with the help of such things as the railroad land grants and other infrastructure subsidies, the exchange and pooling of patents, tariffs, regulatory cartels, and union-busting by uniformed thugs. The New Deal was just corporatist icing on the cake.
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Damning Corporate Capitalism With Faint Praise

Economist Tyler Cowen, in a piece at The American Interest, arguesd that — despite growing differences in nominal income — inequality in “personal well-being” has declined drastically over the past century (“The Inequality That Matters,” Jan.-Feb. 2011).

“Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease ….

“Compare these circumstances to those of 1911, a century ago. Even in the wealthier countries, the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture. The living standards of Carnegie and Rockefeller towered above those of typical Americans, not just in terms of money but also in terms of comfort.”

I suppose I would say Cowen’s is a valid argument, in a very backhanded kind of way — or perhaps that it simply proves too much.
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Greenwashed Corporatism is Still Corporatism

Biodiesel is a fairly high-profile energy source these days. Willie Nelson’s fryer oil-powered car is about as famous as Ed Begley Jr.’s electric.

What you may not know is that biodiesel, despite the tree-hugging market appeal of its promoters, is being cornered by a bunch of monopolists as predatory as J.D. Rockefeller ever dreamed of being. According to Adam Schwartz, head of the Green Guild Biodiesel Cooperative (“Nothing Grows from the Top Down,” Green Guild Biodiesel, June 20, 2010), biodiesel production is being consolidated in the control of the big producers and the soybean industry. “In Virginia new legislation made it illegal to transport vegetable oil without a commercial license, essentially forcing an already marginalized biodiesel community to go completely underground.”
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