On America, part 2: Of myths and markets

If there's one thing politicians of all stripes seem to agree on it's the market. Textbooks tell us how a free market economy is “dynamic” and “competitive”. Markets themselves are often used as a byword for “democracy”, yet very little effort is made to explain how markets even function, much less how they function for us.

Yet, when we look at the struggles most of us face on a regular basis – finding a steady job with good pay, decent affordable housing, reasonably priced childcare – it should be pretty obvious that markets don't work in our interests as working people.

There's crumbling infrastructure across the country and an acute lack of housing in America's urban centers. And yet, the construction industry is notorious for periods of unemployment. Auto plants shut down while the need for major public transport projects grows. Enough food is produced every year to ensure every single person on earth has enough to eat, yet billions suffer from starvation and hunger.

People want work, there's a need for their work, yet they don't have work. People need to eat, there's enough food to eat, yet people go hungry. This isn't how we're told the market functions.

So what's going on here?

The simple answer is that markets function in the interest of profit, not for need or use. Food isn't grown so people have enough to eat. Houses aren't built so everyone has a place to live. Shoes aren't sewn so that everyone is comfortable and movies aren't made so that everyone can relax. All these things are produced for the market, which means they're produced for profit.

Proponents of the market claim supply and demand will ensure a balancing of interests between producer and consumer, between buyer and seller, and between employer and employee. Yet, this can be easily disproven by looking at the very industry that we rely on to keep us alive on the most basic level: agriculture.

For the better part of a century the government has actually paid farmers not to grow too much food. During the Great Depression, as overproduction drove down the price of food, farmers compensated by growing more food, further driving down prices. It reached a point that farmers were burning crops in the fields and in train cars in an attempt to keep up prices, all while people across the country suffered deep privation and hunger.

And this occurred at a time when the agricultural industry largely resembled the idealized free market: many small independent producers in competition with one another on a local and national scale. That market – arguably one of the “freest” in history – left farmers, the very people who grew our food, literally starving.

In our own lives we don't have to look very far to see that all that supposed balancing of interests resides in the realm of economic fiction.

Companies make their profits last all year long. Yet our wages only last the growing season, the tourist season, holiday season or whatever the busy season may be in our industry. Companies invest in technology that puts us out of work. Landlords raise our rent. Companies jack up prices while they reduce package sizes. Banks charge us money to get out our own money.

If we've ever had a landlord or a boss or had to deal with a bank or an insurance company, it's obvious that we don't meet as equals. Bosses, banks, landlords, employers: these are the people who hold power within the market.

Markets don't meet our needs as consumers and the certainly don't meet our needs as workers. They never have and they never will. No amount of regulation, deregulation, tinkering, or government ownership can change that.

Instead, it's only through supporting one another as workers , consumers, and community members that can we begin to transform the world from one based on markets and profit to one based on meeting our needs as human beings.

Part 3, which takes a critical look at trade unions and political parties, will explore some ideas for how we effectively do that. Part 1, which took a wider look at the economy and why so many of struggle to get by, can be found here.