Market-based Solutions.
I’m thinking a lot about honor killings, honey-bee die-offs, the rollback of the women’s rights movement, the way our government is rolling out the red carpet for those legal fictions called corporations that we brand as “artificial persons,” anti-biotic resistant staph infections, race/class/gender/nationality/religious violence, the looting of the U.S. Treasury, the venerable old institution of coercion in general, and rape in particular (whether in brute physical, economic, psycho-sexual, or cultural terms). I’ve also been thinking about market-based solutions, and come up with a few rules about them.
1. We are about as much purely capitalist as the old Soviet Union was pure communist – which is to say, not so much. We have about the same chance of becoming a purely capitalistic society as the USSR had of fulfilling Marx’s vision – which is to say, none at all.
2. Market-based solutions (when they work) have the best chance of working in a purely perfect capitalist economy.
3. Larger players in our mostly-not-terribly-competitive marketplace respond to new products by rapidly destroying their implementation, or co-opting them in order to either preserve the existing dominance of their current “solution,” or take their solution to market and market the hell out of it. Which path is taken usually depends not only on what is more cost-effective, but also on the emotional state and opinions of the human beings involved. And, of course, whether or not us yahoos like the proverbial New Coke or not.
4. Market-based solutions will not be implemented for the purpose of a company driving itself out of business. For this reason, a market-based War on Drugs, War on Terror, or anything else, is an eternal proposition.
5. Market-based solutions can not function in a capital vacuum, and therefore suck for poor people and oppressed classes, unless someone can figure out where to siphon capital from (e.g. Big Government).
6. Charity (by definition), whether work or finance-based, is not a product of the market. Basing it in the market makes it something other than charity.
7. Advertising and public relations are in the business of telling you you have problems you didn’t know you had (whether or not you do, or they are actual problems), then selling you the solution to them. Most market-based solutions are created to resolve these manufactured demands, quite often since it’s cheaper to design a solution when you’ve also designed and specced the problem to be solved.
9. The problem your market-based solution is designed to solve may itself be produced by a competing market player, which continues to promote solutions to the problems you create for it. This may even be a co-dependent relationship.
10. There are entire classes of problems that do not lend themselves to market solutions. Domestic violence would be one of those problems.
11. Our media, which perpetuate a great deal of the current social ills, is a market-based problem. Blogs, of all stripes, are a non-market solution which some have attempted to commodify. Some have succeeded (Kos, Malkin), some have failed (The Washington Times is a failure by any measure except as a rathole for money, and an emitter of bozons).
12. The single greatest problem with our “market economy” (even worse than the crazed and skewed information that is often used to make decisions) is the underlying assumption of our legal systems that all participants in a contract are equal before the law. It just ain’t so. The people who are all about selective enforcement are all the argument one needs to be very wary of it.
I think that’s enough for now, but I could go on for a while. Oh, there is one more thing, as I think of the phrase “charging what the market will bear!”
13. When someone is talking about a problem that involves real human suffering, and says “market-based solution” to me, what I hear them say is usually “extortion,” but sometimes “war profiteering.”
Update: 14. Our market is a machine designed to make those who have money to invest even more money. It is disingenuous, after it has been so thoroughly and rigorously tested and expanded, to express contempt when someone points out that it’s doing exactly what it is made to do.
June 26th, 2007 at 15:58
[...] With the latest revelations in the Washington Post about how secretive and scary Cheney really is (that those of us who had been watching him had known ever since he declared himself the best candidate for Vice President, if not earlier), it seems the MSM and corporate America in general have started to look askance at their golden administration. The worm is only now beginning to turn because the upper classes in this country are starting to realize that, Cheney’s declaration to the contrary (surprise, surprise), America is becoming a bad place to do business in. The problem is, that the changes big money (which is actually a simplistic name for a large, chaotic group) might want would not necessarily be to the benefit of everyone else, especially if we leave them to discover market-based solutions. [...]
July 9th, 2007 at 11:40
[...] of y’all are passing familiar with the fact that the badger believes market-based solutions are a pretty damned stupid thing to apply to necessary services. Or even “services” that the people being serviced would rather not have. Perhaps [...]