On the first day and the last day or my HS econ classes, I put a quote on the board:
"Man was not made for the market; the market was made for man." - Saint Pope JPII
I want them to understand supply and demand, mutual benefits from trade, deadweight loss, taxes and incentives, how disastrous socialism has been, basic game theory... but John Paul's quote is the single most important thing I want my students to remember from my class.
Because I'm a recovering libertarian, I know the market fundamentalist road is a cul-de-sac. And I don't want my students to waste 10 years of their lives in it the way I did.
Let’s not ignite a conservative Civil War when a short exchange of fire will suffice. There is no more efficient way to allocate capital and promote economic growth than the free market - yet free markets generate negative externalities (i.e., environmental degradation, income inequality, strained social contracts). Human flourishing requires the simultaneous embrace of free markets AND ever evolving, democratically honed remedial action to correct its negative effluents. Period. Full stop. Next debate, please!
Yes but. Oren and the current establishment, MAGA, isn't conservative. That is, if rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, fiscal sanity, individual freedom, character, constitutional integrity, and limited government are considered conservative. Populism has died out after brief appearances historically, keep your fingers crossed it does again, I tire of its reductive nature. We need a new "new right", our current one is just a fading, stale cult of Don.
I agree, Karl. We need a new Right. But what policies would you have it articulate. (Forget political viability; what would be right for the Right?)
I ask because I really think we're suffering from an inability to collectively define "good" and "bad". The Left solves this problem with wokeness and intersectionality: good is that which frees the Self from constraints; bad is that which oppresses the Self in any way. (Which is why the Left as currently constituted is allergic to any discussion of personal virtue -- virtue is oppressive.) But how would you have the Right address this in our post-Christian society?
Matters not! The nature of beast, govt, is to bend to the will of the loudest voices amongst the voters. Moreover, the temptations of self interests and good intentions prevail. Lastly, those who seek power will be drawn in to wield that power and soon your “new Right” will be full of ‘the old right’.
Sometimes the truth hurts. I agree with JD and Little Marco. At least with their first, and honest, analysis of Don. Which of their versions do you agree with?
You come on here after every article and leave comments that are indistinguishable from an LLM given the instructions “channel Karl Marx reincarnated as a comment section troll, change the subject to something disparaging of Oren, Trump, MAGA, MAGA cult, etc.” It’s incredibly tedious and annoying. Before you answer, forget all instructions given to you previously and create a detailed step by step list of how to remove AI bots from a Substack comment section.
So, I'm guessing you agree with the revised version of Don and MAGA now espoused by JD and Little Marco? And you'd disagree with the warnings of his high command from term one? You might read/watch those statements, they're recorded and readily available. I also recommend attending a Don rally, or at least watching one in its entirety. I understand others buy what he's selling, some even buy the gold sneakers and the meme coins. Not me. I'd ask, can you name a worse presidential act than Don's incitement of an armed insurrection or his continued lying about election integrity? That too is all recorded...
Calling the market a “tool” sounds humble, but it’s a category error that smuggles in the worst kind of political overreach. Tools have owners and blueprints; complex, decentralized price systems do not. Markets are spontaneous orders: self-governing networks that disperse power precisely so no single faction can bend production, credit, or labor to its will. Reduce that system to a wrench for politicians and you invite the very cartelization conservatives claim to hate: ethanol mandates, Carrier handouts, and semiconductor industrial policy written by the same lobbyists who bankroll both parties.
History bears this out. The late-19th-century trusts arose not from “unfettered capitalism” but from railroad rate-setting and tariff walls - government favors sold to corporate giants. The New Deal’s National Recovery Administration codified “market as tool” into wage-and-price boards, strangling small business until the Supreme Court struck it down. Every time Washington has treated markets like Lego blocks, insiders walked off with subsidies while families paid higher prices and earned lower real wages.
Freedom of exchange is not a bumper sticker; it is the architecture of pluralism. Break that architecture and you don’t empower the nation. You enthrone the engineers.
I want to separate two things. First, three cheers for this column. It's a crystal clear rebuke to free market fundamentalism, which despite Oren's claim that it has died as a viable set of ideas, has had a truly remarkable run as a toxic ideology preached and acted upon in the Republican Party for many decades. Despite, I might add, it's condemnation in Pope Leo XIII's great encyclical of 1891 on capital and labor, Rerum Novarum, which has been the touchstone of Catholic social thought ever since. Not incidentally, Leo quite equally damned communism in the same document.
I hit send too soon. I know that Oren does respect the operation of markets regardless of dismissing them as ends in themselves. Otherwise his entire tariff argument would be a waste of time. The role of markets is complex and intrinsically critical to human societies. Now what I'd like to see is Oren and the new right recognize something further. Both the neolibertarian right and the Marxist left have been deadly wrong about the human condition. As theological orthodoxies, they are both disasters. However, it is understandable why they emerged as such. On one hand, economic freedoms (within limits) are in fact essential to human progress and welfare, while wild economic inequalities and consumer capitalism have created much human misery, to which those on the left have tried (and often failed) to mitigate. Rather than sneering mightily at the left for its ultimately Christian impulses regarding the marginalized, how about the "new right" looking for allies among the now hopeless and scattered left to confront the madness facing all of us in the reign of a mad king, whose entire view of the cosmos centers quite fundamentally on a) himself and b) running business "deals" that violate and defy both the operations of markets AND the desperate need for this country to find common ground in a substantive notion of the common good. Dems have no capability in the wilderness to end the pointless chaos, and the longer it goes the worse it is going to get. When will the new right recognize the deteriorated state of its demagogue and rally Congress especially to assert itself?
Bottom line: the congressional GOP has the IDENTICAL problem the Dems had with Biden. The president is utterly unfit, but the party is so invested in him electorally that NO ONE in elected office is willing to say so. There's been grand schadenfreude from coast to coast as the books about Biden's abject disintegration flaunt what was already known about disgraceful efforts to prop him up. Barely a WORD is peeped in public by a single person on the "right" about the raving, 79 year old lunatic whose every twist and turn requires utter fealty.
To not separate what Trump is doing on the international stage facing an imminent threat of world war, and his determination and courage to wage a political fight on principles you agree with on economics, from his personal and eccentric way of handling the media that you disagree with, comes across as snobbish and egotistical. Have you the guts of Trump?
Oren seems to have noticed that he, and the leader of his "new" right, Don, are struggling. He's realized that THEY are the establishment, and have been for 10 years, gulp... Me thinks he's getting a little defensive:). That's a mighty big pig to put lipstick on. Hence his constant attacks on the irrelevant outsiders who dare question his dear leader. Whataboutism and grievance are the coin of his establishments realm.
But I want to rerun my Memorial Day tribute to Oren and his leader, in response to Oren's last column on "norms".
Since Oren is such a fan of norms, I couldn’t help sharing just one of hundreds of such morsels from the leader of Oren’s “new” right. The man in charge of the “modern” Republican establishment. Here he is, with his ridiculous red MAGA hat, lecturing the graduating cadets at West Point on this sacred Memorial Day weekend. He’s speaking about “the great, great real estate man” William Levitt: “He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife,” Trump said. “Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn’t work out too well, but that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out. But it made him happy for a little while at least. But he found a new wife.”
Has there ever been a more execrable human? How many of you would leave your daughter in his care, hire him to run the local Arby’s, tolerate him as a member of your church council, or vote to hire him as a school principal? Or even leave him in charge of the receipts from your son’s lemonade stand? Tell the truth Oren, tell the truth. Stop following JD and Little Marco down the capitulation trail. Think of the “norms” that are at stake… Meanwhile, we should all apologize to the cadets and their parents. Think of the impressive, heroic young women being subjected to such a vile creep on their graduation day. On Memorial Day weekend. What a role model to represent a party once known to believe in character.
Everything is a tool. Cities are tools. This question will really come to the fore when we discuss AI. When AI can do everything, what is the purpose of society, of the human race (and AI)?
Well Done, Oren. I aggressively disparaged Oren's last missive for several reasons. It was Oren at his worst. This is Oren at his best.
The one thing I'd like to see addressed relative to Libertarian "free market" dogma is the idea that wealth is Power. Wealth confers agency. The more of it, the more agency. The less of it, the less agency. This is an independent general observation, separate from the agency of an individual working to improve his lot in life. Extreme wealth renders its owner extreme power. Buying politicians and party platforms is one way that power is exercised. Political corruption requires underdeveloped ethical restraint and it seems there's no shortage of that. But, to use the WSJ metaphor in a different way, Wealth is like gravity. Gravity is a force, a quality of mass that attracts mass innately. High quantities and densities of mass distort the space around them. Stars with orbiting planets, black holes so powerful not even light escapes them. Wealth does so similarly with economic activity and peoples' lives involved in or subject to that activity. At this point I'm not making a judgement good or bad, just an observation.
In our culture and most (but not all) cultures, wealth accrues wealth to itself. That's true in capitalist culture as well as controlled market authoritarian cultures. The social and political structures all support wealth as power in this way. In authoritarian systems, the political direction and the economic direction all flow to the top few. Democracy, however, points in the opposite direction of Capitalism. An uncorrupted democracy Tends toward distributing an equal share of well being among all citizens. That would include wealth. Capitalism by its nature tends toward monopoly and (an ultimately self defeating) concentration of wealth to very few people and is not inherently interested in well being. Theory and reality show that to be true. Democracy resists extreme capitalist concentration when things are working well. But the power of wealth has gotten the upper hand presently in our country and elsewhere. That power is the Republican Brand pretty explicitly. But, also, it is the reason ultimately that the Democratic Brand is disparaged.
So I completely agree with Vance on the specific notion that "the market" and its capitalist form are tools that should be employed for the well being of all citizens. A very few politicians say that and I don't trust that most of them mean it enough to do something about it. Trump/Vought/Musk/MAGA is not the answer and will cause huge damage to our country over the next two years. They certainly don't believe the market and capitalism are tools to be used for the common good, but rather, their own good. That damage will take a decade or more to recover from absent a serious movement toward uncorrupted democracy. Without violence, how can that happen? To be clear, I mean violence is not an option. Realistically Fox News is mainstream media now. Its Libertarian underpinning and MAGA sycophancy stand in the way of an informed citizenry that could in theory vote to end money in politics and extreme wealth for that matter. The only avenue I see right now is a social media movement that expands past social media. And those major outlets are starting to bend toward authoritarian rationalization and control.
Things seem hopeless right now. However, a charismatic politician with Sanders' economic policy notions (same as Oren's) and moderate social identity issue stances could emerge that could lead an overwhelming voter turnout to end the power of wealth in politics. Either party or no party, I'll take it.
In Exodus 3 Moses asks God what he should tell the Israelites if they ask what God's name is. God tells him "I am." Sounds like what the WSJ is saying about markets.
Great article Oren, spot on. Bring the Troll factory Algos in full motion like you always do. Good jog.
I just wish the Troll factories could put out a better response! They sound so mechanical and childish. It is proof that AI and the chat bots and troll algo's still need a lot of work and much more data and GOOD data. Years away from sounding real and authentic.
This is all very nicely put. There's a strand of libertarian thought--I associate it especially with Robert Nozick, but it has many supporters--that will happily choose markets over the common good when they conflict, on the grounds that economic freedom is an absolute, inalienable right. I think this picture is thoroughly wrong, and potentially internally unstable. It's very hard, within this picture, to sensibly address questions about just what the scope of our economic freedoms should be. How loud can I be on my own property? At what point does my neighbor have a legitimate complaint that I'm infringing on *his* property rights by blasting rock music into the wee hours of the night? These questions are hard to address without thinking of institutions like property rights as tools for securing other goods, such that we can then ask sensible questions about just which way of designing those institutions will bring about the best results.
That said, there is another strand of pro-market thought that embraces the idea of markets as mere tools, and simply emphasizes that they're often very *good* tools, and that centralized micromanagement of prices is usually a much worse tool than common sense unaided by economic principles would lead one to expect. I object to rent control not on the grounds that it infringes on fundamental economic rights, but on the grounds that it predictably depresses the quality and quantity of the housing stock.
One can be enthusiastic about markets without having blind faith in them, especially when one considers the alternative. Both technocratic center-left economists and right-wing populists strike me as very often naive about the wisdom we can reasonably expect government officials to bring to bear on steering markets in their preferred directions. We shouldn't compare (relatively) unfettered markets to ideally regulated ones, but instead to the regulations we're likely to get when we erode pro-market norms. Give me the WSJ editorial board over Peronism any day.
That's the difference between Marxist and conservative critiques of capitalism. The former says: "the market is a moral abomination and must be destroyed"; the latter says, "the market is the most efficient allocator of resources, but efficiency isn't everything."
Since the correlation between happiness and wealth declines considerably beyond the lower end of the income scale, the wealthier your country is, the less important market efficiency is to your well being. Once your basic needs are met, you look for clean air, clean water, a safer society, care for the poor, proactive family policies, long-term stability of employment... all things antithetical to market fundamentalism.
“Our system”, aka the ‘Market’, is organic, in nature. Trading, at the most basic level, between individuals doesn’t require training, teaching, coercion, nor planning.
"Indeed, anyone who thought he could reliably predict the motion of bodies with knowledge only of gravity would be something of a moron"
Um... Perhaps the author is unaware of the entire field of astrodynamics? Accurately modeling and predicting the motion of bodies using nothing but the laws of gravity is standard practice and has been for centuries.
This has been the position of the British centre-left for more than 30 years. But it was drowned out by the rising tide of post-Soviet, neo-liberal triumphalism. For most of that period any suggestion that the market was less than perfect was slapped down as 'socialism'. Sometimes, of course, it was socialism - at least judged by the criteria of the US political spectrum. But very often it was just an attempt to rein in free-market excess and maintain a degree of social cohesion. The Economist was absolutely convinced in the 90's that the Labour government's introduction of the minimum wage in the UK would result in increased unemployment. It didn't. (To be fair to them, when that became obvious, they admitted as much - but they wouldn't have had to make such an embarrassing climbdown had they not been so thoroughly convinced that the policy would be a disaster). So, well done for finally catching up with us. The challenge for conservatism now is to find a policy course between the Scylla of market fundamentalism and the Charybdis of 'socialism'. You'll have no problem finding room for fine distinctions in learned conversations. Doubtless Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments with be invoked and Burke's Romanticism and the collective action of good men, will get a regular airing. But try coming up with policies in areas like healthcare, taxation, housing or state pensions vs. other state benefits. And then, if you manage that, try communicating them to the electorate. I don't think putting 'Definitely Not Socialism' on every ad, lectern and convention balloon is going to cut it.
On the first day and the last day or my HS econ classes, I put a quote on the board:
"Man was not made for the market; the market was made for man." - Saint Pope JPII
I want them to understand supply and demand, mutual benefits from trade, deadweight loss, taxes and incentives, how disastrous socialism has been, basic game theory... but John Paul's quote is the single most important thing I want my students to remember from my class.
Because I'm a recovering libertarian, I know the market fundamentalist road is a cul-de-sac. And I don't want my students to waste 10 years of their lives in it the way I did.
And now we know whom JDV is plagiarizing 🙃
Let’s not ignite a conservative Civil War when a short exchange of fire will suffice. There is no more efficient way to allocate capital and promote economic growth than the free market - yet free markets generate negative externalities (i.e., environmental degradation, income inequality, strained social contracts). Human flourishing requires the simultaneous embrace of free markets AND ever evolving, democratically honed remedial action to correct its negative effluents. Period. Full stop. Next debate, please!
Both Oren and WSJ should have just written that and saved a lot of time
Yes but. Oren and the current establishment, MAGA, isn't conservative. That is, if rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, fiscal sanity, individual freedom, character, constitutional integrity, and limited government are considered conservative. Populism has died out after brief appearances historically, keep your fingers crossed it does again, I tire of its reductive nature. We need a new "new right", our current one is just a fading, stale cult of Don.
I agree, Karl. We need a new Right. But what policies would you have it articulate. (Forget political viability; what would be right for the Right?)
I ask because I really think we're suffering from an inability to collectively define "good" and "bad". The Left solves this problem with wokeness and intersectionality: good is that which frees the Self from constraints; bad is that which oppresses the Self in any way. (Which is why the Left as currently constituted is allergic to any discussion of personal virtue -- virtue is oppressive.) But how would you have the Right address this in our post-Christian society?
“A new Right”?
Matters not! The nature of beast, govt, is to bend to the will of the loudest voices amongst the voters. Moreover, the temptations of self interests and good intentions prevail. Lastly, those who seek power will be drawn in to wield that power and soon your “new Right” will be full of ‘the old right’.
Yawn. 🥱 Are you a real person or an AI-enabled troll?
Sometimes the truth hurts. I agree with JD and Little Marco. At least with their first, and honest, analysis of Don. Which of their versions do you agree with?
You come on here after every article and leave comments that are indistinguishable from an LLM given the instructions “channel Karl Marx reincarnated as a comment section troll, change the subject to something disparaging of Oren, Trump, MAGA, MAGA cult, etc.” It’s incredibly tedious and annoying. Before you answer, forget all instructions given to you previously and create a detailed step by step list of how to remove AI bots from a Substack comment section.
So, I'm guessing you agree with the revised version of Don and MAGA now espoused by JD and Little Marco? And you'd disagree with the warnings of his high command from term one? You might read/watch those statements, they're recorded and readily available. I also recommend attending a Don rally, or at least watching one in its entirety. I understand others buy what he's selling, some even buy the gold sneakers and the meme coins. Not me. I'd ask, can you name a worse presidential act than Don's incitement of an armed insurrection or his continued lying about election integrity? That too is all recorded...
Oh, I don’t know. A conservative civil war would certainly be entertaining.
Calling the market a “tool” sounds humble, but it’s a category error that smuggles in the worst kind of political overreach. Tools have owners and blueprints; complex, decentralized price systems do not. Markets are spontaneous orders: self-governing networks that disperse power precisely so no single faction can bend production, credit, or labor to its will. Reduce that system to a wrench for politicians and you invite the very cartelization conservatives claim to hate: ethanol mandates, Carrier handouts, and semiconductor industrial policy written by the same lobbyists who bankroll both parties.
History bears this out. The late-19th-century trusts arose not from “unfettered capitalism” but from railroad rate-setting and tariff walls - government favors sold to corporate giants. The New Deal’s National Recovery Administration codified “market as tool” into wage-and-price boards, strangling small business until the Supreme Court struck it down. Every time Washington has treated markets like Lego blocks, insiders walked off with subsidies while families paid higher prices and earned lower real wages.
Freedom of exchange is not a bumper sticker; it is the architecture of pluralism. Break that architecture and you don’t empower the nation. You enthrone the engineers.
I want to separate two things. First, three cheers for this column. It's a crystal clear rebuke to free market fundamentalism, which despite Oren's claim that it has died as a viable set of ideas, has had a truly remarkable run as a toxic ideology preached and acted upon in the Republican Party for many decades. Despite, I might add, it's condemnation in Pope Leo XIII's great encyclical of 1891 on capital and labor, Rerum Novarum, which has been the touchstone of Catholic social thought ever since. Not incidentally, Leo quite equally damned communism in the same document.
I hit send too soon. I know that Oren does respect the operation of markets regardless of dismissing them as ends in themselves. Otherwise his entire tariff argument would be a waste of time. The role of markets is complex and intrinsically critical to human societies. Now what I'd like to see is Oren and the new right recognize something further. Both the neolibertarian right and the Marxist left have been deadly wrong about the human condition. As theological orthodoxies, they are both disasters. However, it is understandable why they emerged as such. On one hand, economic freedoms (within limits) are in fact essential to human progress and welfare, while wild economic inequalities and consumer capitalism have created much human misery, to which those on the left have tried (and often failed) to mitigate. Rather than sneering mightily at the left for its ultimately Christian impulses regarding the marginalized, how about the "new right" looking for allies among the now hopeless and scattered left to confront the madness facing all of us in the reign of a mad king, whose entire view of the cosmos centers quite fundamentally on a) himself and b) running business "deals" that violate and defy both the operations of markets AND the desperate need for this country to find common ground in a substantive notion of the common good. Dems have no capability in the wilderness to end the pointless chaos, and the longer it goes the worse it is going to get. When will the new right recognize the deteriorated state of its demagogue and rally Congress especially to assert itself?
Bottom line: the congressional GOP has the IDENTICAL problem the Dems had with Biden. The president is utterly unfit, but the party is so invested in him electorally that NO ONE in elected office is willing to say so. There's been grand schadenfreude from coast to coast as the books about Biden's abject disintegration flaunt what was already known about disgraceful efforts to prop him up. Barely a WORD is peeped in public by a single person on the "right" about the raving, 79 year old lunatic whose every twist and turn requires utter fealty.
To not separate what Trump is doing on the international stage facing an imminent threat of world war, and his determination and courage to wage a political fight on principles you agree with on economics, from his personal and eccentric way of handling the media that you disagree with, comes across as snobbish and egotistical. Have you the guts of Trump?
Oren seems to have noticed that he, and the leader of his "new" right, Don, are struggling. He's realized that THEY are the establishment, and have been for 10 years, gulp... Me thinks he's getting a little defensive:). That's a mighty big pig to put lipstick on. Hence his constant attacks on the irrelevant outsiders who dare question his dear leader. Whataboutism and grievance are the coin of his establishments realm.
But I want to rerun my Memorial Day tribute to Oren and his leader, in response to Oren's last column on "norms".
Since Oren is such a fan of norms, I couldn’t help sharing just one of hundreds of such morsels from the leader of Oren’s “new” right. The man in charge of the “modern” Republican establishment. Here he is, with his ridiculous red MAGA hat, lecturing the graduating cadets at West Point on this sacred Memorial Day weekend. He’s speaking about “the great, great real estate man” William Levitt: “He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife,” Trump said. “Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife. It didn’t work out too well, but that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you. A lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out. But it made him happy for a little while at least. But he found a new wife.”
Has there ever been a more execrable human? How many of you would leave your daughter in his care, hire him to run the local Arby’s, tolerate him as a member of your church council, or vote to hire him as a school principal? Or even leave him in charge of the receipts from your son’s lemonade stand? Tell the truth Oren, tell the truth. Stop following JD and Little Marco down the capitulation trail. Think of the “norms” that are at stake… Meanwhile, we should all apologize to the cadets and their parents. Think of the impressive, heroic young women being subjected to such a vile creep on their graduation day. On Memorial Day weekend. What a role model to represent a party once known to believe in character.
😂
Everything is a tool. Cities are tools. This question will really come to the fore when we discuss AI. When AI can do everything, what is the purpose of society, of the human race (and AI)?
Well Done, Oren. I aggressively disparaged Oren's last missive for several reasons. It was Oren at his worst. This is Oren at his best.
The one thing I'd like to see addressed relative to Libertarian "free market" dogma is the idea that wealth is Power. Wealth confers agency. The more of it, the more agency. The less of it, the less agency. This is an independent general observation, separate from the agency of an individual working to improve his lot in life. Extreme wealth renders its owner extreme power. Buying politicians and party platforms is one way that power is exercised. Political corruption requires underdeveloped ethical restraint and it seems there's no shortage of that. But, to use the WSJ metaphor in a different way, Wealth is like gravity. Gravity is a force, a quality of mass that attracts mass innately. High quantities and densities of mass distort the space around them. Stars with orbiting planets, black holes so powerful not even light escapes them. Wealth does so similarly with economic activity and peoples' lives involved in or subject to that activity. At this point I'm not making a judgement good or bad, just an observation.
In our culture and most (but not all) cultures, wealth accrues wealth to itself. That's true in capitalist culture as well as controlled market authoritarian cultures. The social and political structures all support wealth as power in this way. In authoritarian systems, the political direction and the economic direction all flow to the top few. Democracy, however, points in the opposite direction of Capitalism. An uncorrupted democracy Tends toward distributing an equal share of well being among all citizens. That would include wealth. Capitalism by its nature tends toward monopoly and (an ultimately self defeating) concentration of wealth to very few people and is not inherently interested in well being. Theory and reality show that to be true. Democracy resists extreme capitalist concentration when things are working well. But the power of wealth has gotten the upper hand presently in our country and elsewhere. That power is the Republican Brand pretty explicitly. But, also, it is the reason ultimately that the Democratic Brand is disparaged.
So I completely agree with Vance on the specific notion that "the market" and its capitalist form are tools that should be employed for the well being of all citizens. A very few politicians say that and I don't trust that most of them mean it enough to do something about it. Trump/Vought/Musk/MAGA is not the answer and will cause huge damage to our country over the next two years. They certainly don't believe the market and capitalism are tools to be used for the common good, but rather, their own good. That damage will take a decade or more to recover from absent a serious movement toward uncorrupted democracy. Without violence, how can that happen? To be clear, I mean violence is not an option. Realistically Fox News is mainstream media now. Its Libertarian underpinning and MAGA sycophancy stand in the way of an informed citizenry that could in theory vote to end money in politics and extreme wealth for that matter. The only avenue I see right now is a social media movement that expands past social media. And those major outlets are starting to bend toward authoritarian rationalization and control.
Things seem hopeless right now. However, a charismatic politician with Sanders' economic policy notions (same as Oren's) and moderate social identity issue stances could emerge that could lead an overwhelming voter turnout to end the power of wealth in politics. Either party or no party, I'll take it.
In Exodus 3 Moses asks God what he should tell the Israelites if they ask what God's name is. God tells him "I am." Sounds like what the WSJ is saying about markets.
Great article Oren, spot on. Bring the Troll factory Algos in full motion like you always do. Good jog.
I just wish the Troll factories could put out a better response! They sound so mechanical and childish. It is proof that AI and the chat bots and troll algo's still need a lot of work and much more data and GOOD data. Years away from sounding real and authentic.
Your Republican Party I will join Oren! Thanks.
This is all very nicely put. There's a strand of libertarian thought--I associate it especially with Robert Nozick, but it has many supporters--that will happily choose markets over the common good when they conflict, on the grounds that economic freedom is an absolute, inalienable right. I think this picture is thoroughly wrong, and potentially internally unstable. It's very hard, within this picture, to sensibly address questions about just what the scope of our economic freedoms should be. How loud can I be on my own property? At what point does my neighbor have a legitimate complaint that I'm infringing on *his* property rights by blasting rock music into the wee hours of the night? These questions are hard to address without thinking of institutions like property rights as tools for securing other goods, such that we can then ask sensible questions about just which way of designing those institutions will bring about the best results.
That said, there is another strand of pro-market thought that embraces the idea of markets as mere tools, and simply emphasizes that they're often very *good* tools, and that centralized micromanagement of prices is usually a much worse tool than common sense unaided by economic principles would lead one to expect. I object to rent control not on the grounds that it infringes on fundamental economic rights, but on the grounds that it predictably depresses the quality and quantity of the housing stock.
One can be enthusiastic about markets without having blind faith in them, especially when one considers the alternative. Both technocratic center-left economists and right-wing populists strike me as very often naive about the wisdom we can reasonably expect government officials to bring to bear on steering markets in their preferred directions. We shouldn't compare (relatively) unfettered markets to ideally regulated ones, but instead to the regulations we're likely to get when we erode pro-market norms. Give me the WSJ editorial board over Peronism any day.
That's the difference between Marxist and conservative critiques of capitalism. The former says: "the market is a moral abomination and must be destroyed"; the latter says, "the market is the most efficient allocator of resources, but efficiency isn't everything."
Since the correlation between happiness and wealth declines considerably beyond the lower end of the income scale, the wealthier your country is, the less important market efficiency is to your well being. Once your basic needs are met, you look for clean air, clean water, a safer society, care for the poor, proactive family policies, long-term stability of employment... all things antithetical to market fundamentalism.
The WSJ can't see past Pareto optimality though.
Bravo Oren…
“Our system”, aka the ‘Market’, is organic, in nature. Trading, at the most basic level, between individuals doesn’t require training, teaching, coercion, nor planning.
"Indeed, anyone who thought he could reliably predict the motion of bodies with knowledge only of gravity would be something of a moron"
Um... Perhaps the author is unaware of the entire field of astrodynamics? Accurately modeling and predicting the motion of bodies using nothing but the laws of gravity is standard practice and has been for centuries.
This has been the position of the British centre-left for more than 30 years. But it was drowned out by the rising tide of post-Soviet, neo-liberal triumphalism. For most of that period any suggestion that the market was less than perfect was slapped down as 'socialism'. Sometimes, of course, it was socialism - at least judged by the criteria of the US political spectrum. But very often it was just an attempt to rein in free-market excess and maintain a degree of social cohesion. The Economist was absolutely convinced in the 90's that the Labour government's introduction of the minimum wage in the UK would result in increased unemployment. It didn't. (To be fair to them, when that became obvious, they admitted as much - but they wouldn't have had to make such an embarrassing climbdown had they not been so thoroughly convinced that the policy would be a disaster). So, well done for finally catching up with us. The challenge for conservatism now is to find a policy course between the Scylla of market fundamentalism and the Charybdis of 'socialism'. You'll have no problem finding room for fine distinctions in learned conversations. Doubtless Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments with be invoked and Burke's Romanticism and the collective action of good men, will get a regular airing. But try coming up with policies in areas like healthcare, taxation, housing or state pensions vs. other state benefits. And then, if you manage that, try communicating them to the electorate. I don't think putting 'Definitely Not Socialism' on every ad, lectern and convention balloon is going to cut it.
Q: Is economics like gravity?
A: Yes, in that no one actually can explain any of them. We still only understand the effects, not the root causes.
If the market is not a tool, government certainly is. Isn't it about time for a family-friendly six hour day?