... which was in a position to happen because of the long-term effects of a financial crisis caused by financiers taking enormous risks out of pure unadulterated greed
... firehose of cash policies that were adamantly supported by large corporations, which support "the free market" under the condition that "the free market" means whatever entails their executives getting unfathomably rich
"I can't understand why X was more valuable when there were only 10 of them, as opposed to five trillion of them"
This is not exactly mysterious science. The monetary causes of inflation are not only the most directly observable, but also the most well understood and predictable. There is nothing so special about the US dollar relative to the currency of Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Venezuela that keeps it from being subject to the same pressures. It merely means there is a higher level of economic development behind those monetary policy failures.
Miles, thank you for saying this. I was reading this post and thinking the whole time: Um, do people REALLY think inflation is caused by anything OTHER than, simply, the government printing more money? To me, it seems that simple.
But Freddie: I'm all ears if you want to dedicate a full future post to convincing me otherwise (this post was insufficient, as it's more about the culture war, and doesn't mention the word "printing" at all).
No, this is what happens when you have monetary policy being dictated by governments whose overriding interest is to avoid being blamed for any economic problems whatsoever, and use the printing press to continually devalue a currency by vastly increasing the supply, and to boot, make borrowing that money (in huge sums) come at zero, or even less than zero interest.
Do corporations also have perverse incentives to keep the money firehose from DC running full blast for as long as humanly possible?
Of course, but they pale in comparison to the political incentives when the political livelihoods in DC (whether elected officials, or appointed ones, like in the Fed) are at stake.
Neoliberalism, in the original sense of the word, won.
Everyone is a neoliberal now, except on the furthest fringes.
Markets are the most effective means of production and there's not good evidence that they can be technocratically managed in a positive way by the state.
The political question is not what to do about markets (and hasn't been for decades) because there is nothing to do. The question is to what degree should there be taxation and redistribution.
A lot of ideological argument on the right versus left is just kayfabe because everyone wants markets, everyone wants taxation, and everyone wants a large welfare state.
Leftists can pretend otherwise but it's just LARPing to try to seem like something other than what they are: neoliberals doing a performative schtick.
And if you had told people that feudalism was forever in 1200, they'd have believed you. But they would be just as stupid as you are now. History is long and Alex is not outside of history.
Yeah but the argument isn't that there won't be a different economic system in 800 years.
Or that we are outside capital-H history.
Rather it is that in the foreseeable future there are no alternatives to neoliberalism.
The 'Left' such as it is puts forth a slightly different vision of who should receive what in terms of neoliberal redistribution as compared to the 'Right' such as it is.
A defining characteristic of the Left is that it no longer has any defining economic plan or vision.
Broadly the Left has been folded into the managerial class and the Left's main interests now is how administrative power can be used for ideological surveillance and to force cultural change. COVID biosurveillance, DEI, Ukraine jingoism, enforcement of gender ideology are all manifestations of this tendency. No one is talking about capping profits on IPhones.
We have no evidence in the present that an alternative to market economies is possible that would better promote "justice" and "human flourishing," however those are defined.
For someone arguing for an alternative, the onus is on that person to provide an alternative.
Could something else emerge in the future? Sure. Is the future unknowable, and a long time? Sure. But that kind of philosophizing easily can be a dodge. At best it is a legitimate response to lazy hyperbole, and nothing more.
I’m not arguing for an alternative, merely pointing out that talking about the foreseeable future is ridiculous on its face. Things fall apart, and when they fall apart it usually happens incredibly quickly. I would much rather see incremental change back to what neoliberalism started out as, but revolutions happen, you know?
Had the same thought about the Left putting most of its efforts into social change. Like an end-around, perhaps?
People running for elective office are happy to preen before greedy oil barons in open hearings. But as a group, they're focusing their energies on the places where they can most readily make the world conform to their view of justice.
Isn't this what DEI and the fight over affirmative action at Harvard are ultimately about: That if we can't change the system, we'll make sure everybody -- or at least a few demographic representatives (because representation) -- gets to join the managerial class.
The alternative to markets is revolution. Is it any wonder why this option is only considered seriously at the fringes? The risk is huge, and the number of people with little enough to lose to engage in it are still, for the moment, small.
That depends on what the revolutionaries want. I'm not sure what that means precisely if one is a Marxist revolutionary; the USSR had its roots in Marxism, as I understand it, but I wouldn't argue that any other Marxist revolution would take the same form (presumably, they would learn from the mistakes of that revolution).
It shouldn't run a "productive modern economy" which is another name for overabundance of bullshit and extravangance, paired with crap distribution and access to necessities.
Of course market society isn't going to collapse in the "foreseeable future". The foreseeable future is liberals barely keeping a lid on political chaos and depression across the Western world while desperately hoping that someone comes up with a magic new technology that fixes things. Everyone knows this and nobody can prevent it. Weird bit of rhetorical trickery to say this means there's nothing to argue about, or that we should all accept it and stop complaining.
With regard to “can the market mechanisms that create inflation and the corporations that profit off of it coexist with justice and human flourishing?” - do leftists generally believe that humans have ever experienced “justice” or “human flourishing?” If so, would they deny that the regimes that have the most of both always had market economies?
If you count anarchism of a certain kind as of the left, then the arguments of David Graeber and David Wengrow in their *The Dawn of Everything*, which created a major stir, point to societies that they see as promoting justice and flourishing without market economies, as we understand them. I think their evidence is weak, their arguments sloppy, and their conclusions self-deceiving, but I think the impetus to locate some precedent for a just society prior to modern markets is strong, so the book sales are all out of proportion for a 700-page academic volume.
I don't think Freddie is on that page (or those 700-pages). I do think there are, for example, contemporary European societies that do better than the US in approaching economic justice in terms of the labor theory of value, and that they do so with, at least, no harm to levels of human flourishing. I'm not sure, however, that they are inconsistent with neoliberalism, broadly conceived.
It's an excellent book, far better researched and argued than almost anything comparable in the region of popular history, science, anthropology, or what-have-you.
Because it upsets the apple cart of received wisdom so adroitly, it earned some flailing denunciations, but it's popularity is entirely justified, and encouraging for those who don't want to wallow in fatalism.
Zach, in almost every instance where "Dawn" touched on my field of specialization it grossly distorted the archaeological evidence (there was one exception) and showed little understanding of the historical context. Other reviewers with different specializations have said much the same with regard to their fields. It's not that the book has zero to offer--like popular history books it discusses interesting things that few people are aware of, and there are interesting specific insights along the way. I actually learned a lot from it. But the particular elements that support the overarching anarchist argument far too often rely on distorted presentation and rhetoric. I've seen positive statements about the book's huge volume of notes and bibliographic entries, making it look "well-researched," but the notes are often simply more arguments as misleading as the text, and the bibliography is only impressive in the context of "popular" history (etc.), which you acknowledge it is. What's actually exceptional about the book is that the publisher did not require the authors to cut the notes down radically. Perhaps Farrar, Straus and Giroux presciently realized that the illusion of scholarly depth was going to be essential to sales.
You can valorize "Dawn" for "challenging the tired status quo," but there's a difference between thinking out of the box and thinking clearly, and writing about apple carts, calling analyses of weakness "flailing," and saying that historians who don't accept irresponsible distortions are "wallowing in fatalism" isn't really constructive. It's just rhetoric.
I'm aware that the book provoked lots of discussion and criticism in a wide range of scholarly fields, some of it "flailing denunciations" and some of it more reasoned and sensible. That was basically inevitable for a book with that title. It also received lots of praise, from specialists and popular reviewers alike.
As you're surely aware, there's a difference between willful distortion and different interpretations of evidence. In the exchanges I followed, and some of them were pretty lengthy, I didn't see any instances of distortion, but maybe I'm not deeply embedded enough in the related fields.
Those contemporary European societies are absolutely compatible with neoliberalism. They combine capitalism with a stronger social safety net than we have in the US.
Oh ffs. Nobody is advocating the complete eradication of market economies.
In a world of scarcity and competitive advantage, nobody on the left wants to take away the option to buy the cheapest products and components from the places most advantaged to produce them. Napoleon did that with the continental system and it didn’t work out too well.
Most people on the Left want to mitigate market flaws and rent extraction, especially since unregulated markets undermine a functioning market economy ie exorbitant rents and price gouging take away resources from consumers that they would more efficiently put elsewhere or save if left to their own devices.
If we listen to ppl like you who can’t even tolerate a social Democrat like Sanders, we’ll end up like a country in Central America. The question is whether you can have a bottom that makes work not compulsory but something you do to get extra things besides necessities or a hobby that pays.
Kyle, you misinterpreted my original comment (admittedly "leftist" is an ambiguous term) and vastly over-estimated the gap between our views.
> Oh ffs. Nobody is advocating the complete eradication of market economies.
Very few people in the US are Marxists. However, Freddie is one of those very few people, so in this context when I said "leftists" I meant "leftists like Freddie who actually do want to abolish markets." The section of this piece that I quoted implied that "human flourishing and corporate profits are incompatible" is at the least a plausible statement! (Also, I will note that it is fairly common to encounter people who complain about "capitalism" online, as opposed to, say, "America's especially brutal version of capitalism" or "capitalism without a social safety net," implying that they would not be happy with, say, Germany's system)
> Most people on the Left want to mitigate market flaws and rent extraction, especially since unregulated markets undermine a functioning market economy ie exorbitant rents and price gouging take away resources from consumers that they would more efficiently put elsewhere or save if left to their own devices.
Freddie tends to use the term "leftist" to mean something more specific than "the liberal half of America." As a member of the liberal half of America, I am aware that these are widely-held views in a way that "abolish markets" are not. (I generally view things like exorbitant rents as symptoms of deeper problems, though, such as the needless regulatory difficulty of meeting housing demand in urban areas, and believe that treating the causes is much more important than treating the symptoms)
> If we listen to ppl like you who can’t even tolerate a social Democrat like Sanders, we’ll end up like a country in Central America.
I voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary in both 2016 and 2020. I really don't know what I said that made you so confident that I can't "tolerate" him. The various social democracies in northern Europe were exactly what I had in mind when I said that the regimes with the most human flourishing have market economies!
> The question is whether you can have a bottom that makes work not compulsory but something you do to get extra things besides necessities or a hobby that pays.
I'm a big supporter of UBI, and I believe we can and should move towards such a bottom, but unlike what you said above I think "healthy people shouldn't have to work if they are okay with sticking to the necessities" is actually a pretty uncommon view even among those left-of-center.
Your reply reminds me of your recent interview - I forget with who or which podcast, but I listened to the whole thing, in which you discuss "why communism" is likely inevitable, or at least why humans will somehow move on to a very different way of governing themselves. You said the same thing about feudalism.
The leftist model of government can be summarized as "destroy all of the Renaissance and Enlightenment discoveries and institutions which destroyed feudalism without putting anything in their place." It is therefore not a new thing, but just a manifestation of a powerful subconscious yearning for the return of feudalism or empire. Even the professed concern for the poor was a cornerstone of feudalism, and the left's approach to helping the poor with handouts is just a re-enactment of the feudalist conception of charity as handouts, which can never threaten the social order.
This is why leftism is supported by the aristocracy, not the commoners; and funded in America not by grass-roots donations, but by behemoth foundations established by the wealthiest people in the world. It's why communist states are feudal societies with ambitions of empire, and why it was so natural for the Soviet Union to "switch" from communism to plain-old feudalism. The left wing today is just that portion of the right wing which pretends it's progressive rather than reactionary.
(Those Renaissance and Enlightenment innovations which destroyed feudalism included: currency, corporations, banking, the stock market, the right to sell (or not sell) one's labor and thus choose one's own profession, the commoditization of everyday life (rather than relying on a feudal lord to make your decisions and provide everything you need), equality before the law, free trade, free (non-ideological) inquiry and science, an epistemology based on empirical facts rather than narratives, free speech, seeking compromise rather than perfection, optimizing under multiple constraints rather than maximizing one thing at a time, understanding indirect effects and unintended consequences, and having a legal theory rather than an endless series of situation-based moral judgements.)
Thank you. Your overview (and FdBs) has clicked some things into place for me regarding the left's current behavior, which has puzzled me. When I was coming up, the left (at least culturally) were all about individual freedom and self expression. This didn't last long. I now see that what some lefties really want is not justice and fair play per se, but control and in some cases, revenge.
Thanks! I think we should be careful about saying "what they really want", If we judge them as people (which maybe we shouldn't), we might want to talk about what they want consciously. If we try to understand their actions, we want to talk about what they want unconsciously.
Plus, leftists aren't all the same. I suspect there's a useful distinction between the theorists/leaders/Brahmins and the troops. I think maybe the east coast Brahmins reap most of the benefits from leftism in terms of wealth, power, & prestige, while the west coast warriors pay most of the cost in terms of activism, economic disruption, and the destruction of urban life.
I’d argue neoliberalism is opposed by many progressives by default, not merely the fringes, and more and more on the right. Some of those progressives are inconsistent and in denial about reality (in that they’re not actually socialists, but want more government control), but they think markets are bad by default, or at least very far from ideal.
I’d argue the proposal is simply to exert more government control such that market functionality is smothered.
Worst cases at present in the US are healthcare and housing (and probably infra construction), but the progressive urge to subsidize demand and restrict supply is boundless (and it’s growing on the right).
I don’t know what the right label for this is but it’s incredibly prevalent here and especially Europe. “Red tape capitalism” maybe.
Why do you, a fundamentalist market conservative, bother to come to a Marxist newsletter and complain that not everyone in the world shares your worldview? I find it strange.
Because you’re the smartest Marxist I know and you’re fair minded enough to criticize your own side.
You’re just one realization away from becoming a left neoliberal (and a lot of your readership seems willing to provide comments to help you get there).
Marxists on the whole are preferable for discourse compared to the vaguely progressive institutional cheerleaders like Yglesias who have no principles and will just valorize whatever the instantaneous elite consensus is.
He’s a market conservative — dumbasses do dumbass things. It’s the only thing consistent about these people. They would never actually live in any of the countries where they get everything they want ie Central America with its land completely privatized by a few families ala limited economies of scale.
I think it's a reasonable and achievable if difficult political goal to try to remove markets from healthcare, prison services, etc. I also think that "market thinking" has ruined the ability of the government to do infrastructure projects like building train lines. To give an example I haven't seen talked about elsewhere, I think the government should nationalize OpenAI etc. and release the models to the public domain. I am a neo-liberal in the sense that I think markets are good at some stuff, but I think it's much less stuff than is widely thought, and in many areas of life, the market makes life worse than it would otherwise be.
I don't know much about prisons but I do know a bit about healthcare.
What 'non-market' model are you proposing for healthcare?
Most European countries do not have single payer and rely on markets alongside price controls to balance incentives to create supply while at the same time holding down costs.
The exceptions to this like the NHS are disasters and struggling to provide basic services.
Even Canada's healthcare system which is based to some degree on market demand but excludes private insurers is struggling to provide specialized services for chronic conditions.
So, again, if anything, I'd argue that the more coercive versions of Obamacare you see in Europe that include private insures are what the consensus is for healthcare, and not exiting markets.
Healthcare as a non-market enterprise is a complicated idea. There are so many actual and potential flavors that it's hard to draw conclusions. The NHS--where doctors and hospitals work for the state--is only one model. How about private providers whose services are all reimbursed by the government--Medicare of All, as it were? How about wholly private, even as to insurance, but with tight regulations on quality, coverage, premiums, profits--that is, the American paradigm for electric and other utilities?
The problem with all models is that modern medicine is capital intensive, doctors are scarce (not just artificially, it takes uncommon smarts and guts and grit to become and then practice as a doctor), and societies are less willing to just let people die than they used to be. So, it's a big expense that keeps getting bigger and everyone wants to cut the aggregate spend yet not reduce the resulting experience, which is not a matter of market but a desire for magic.
From what I understand licensing standards are unnecessarily onerous for foreign physicians who wish to immigrate to the US because the AMA is intent on keeping the supply of doctors artificially low.
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. I imagine there are those in the profession who feel that way. But most doctors feel very overworked and stressed, and would welcome more people to handle the load. It's one reason the profession has embraced the advent of nurse-practitioners and physician's assistants. My uncle was a professor of medicine in a foreign country who had to start over as a resident when he came to the US. He eventually became a professor of medicine at Case Western. He experienced the onerous process first-hand. But he always said he understood the need to protect the public from who-knows-what standards used abroad. My own feeling is that there should be reciprocal licensing with certain countries and not others. Personally, I would trust a heart surgeon trained in the UK/Germany/France/Italy/Spain. Trained in some tiny country hard to find on a map? Not so fast....
Yes, my friend who is Canadian and his wife who is Indian both had to jump through terrible hoops to get to work as doctors in the US. It made no sense.
Healthcare is an almost uniquely bad industry to analyze the effects of government interference. It's about the only one I can think of where delivering the service poorly and cheaply can result in greater economic growth.
I also believe in markets (although they are unfortunately distorted by regulatory capture and crony capitalism) and I agree that healthcare, in particular, should be non-profit. But also, things like utilities and infrastructure. Charge enough to cover maintenance and salaries/wages, but that's it. This would help the poor and working class a great deal and it's a better method of redistribution than pure handouts - which often lead to indolence and aimlessness.
Yes, the neoliberal experiment in privatizing utilities has been a failure, and they should be republicized. All of the advantages of diversification come from having small utilities in different local areas. Privatizing didn’t help at all.
Public utilities - yes. But internet run by government? No. If you mean broadband infrastructure - maybe. I think it would be too easy for government to move from providing access to restricting access on ideological grounds - sort of like Parler. Not a fan of this idea because of the high potential for abuse.
Right. For broadband infrastructure - microwave wifi towers, buried fiber, etc., that could work. But not hosting provision. And not content oversight or management. These need to stay private and for profit.
Alex's point was self-evidently false so there isn't really much to debate. "We're all neoliberals now." Obviously, this isn't true, so why assert it besides to stir the pot?
What do you mean there's not really much there to debate? You can always present your case with supporting evidence and arguments--unless of course you don't have any supporting evidence.
I suppose if that's the case then insults make sense.
"Neoliberalism, in the original sense of the word, won".
And how is that working out for you?
Either greatly, which is why you find it unarguable ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it").
Or badly, in which case, you're more like an abused spouse that sticks around because their partner is some big shot who they look up to, and wants "what's best for me".
"Everyone is a neoliberal now, except on the furthest fringes."
Nobody really believes in neoliberalism now, and surely not as much as they did in 1991. Except on the highest echelons and the aspirational wannabes.
"Markets are the most effective means of production and there's not good evidence that they can be technocratically managed in a positive way by the state."
Who said that the "most effective means of production" should be the goal?
And who said anything about changing the market into "technocratically managed"? For one, that's what markets already are today, and have increasingly been for a few decades at least.
Politically managed - not by a political rulling class, Soviet style, but with democratic control, oversight, accounting for externalities, and, most importantly, an ethical code that doesn't being and end with "shareholder profit", is what we'd rather have.
If you tell people "there is no alternative" they don't grow up and become sensible liberals. They become nihilists and adopt any ideology that promises to disrupt the social order, regardless of consequences. Radical Islam, white nationalism, Leninism, whatever. The deal the average person gets under liberalism is not good enough to prevent them from choosing chaos instead, as clearly demonstrated by the last few years of history. You can complain about this if you want but there's nothing you can actually do to stop it.
I believe this framework applies to most policy debates. The right isn't against electric vehicles. They are against the notion of climate change. The left isn't actually against permitting reform for infrastructure projects. They are in fear of losing their best weapon against fossil fuel advancement.
We can fight about the economics but what was frustrating to me about the greedflation interlude was how dumb it was politically. Recall where we were when people like Elizabeth Warren and AOC brought it up: they were frustrated that Democrats weren’t getting enough credit for an economy that was generating a lot of growth and jobs because people were angry about inflation. So (I guess) the idea was you blame inflation on greedy corporations and suddenly people will like Democrats more?
But it was all purely performative- as many have pointed out- the only alternative to “greedflation” are shortages- and it’s very hard to think that would have been politically better. The whole thing was just disappointing.
💯 💯 💯 Freddie, why did I only discover you (from Coleman Hughes’ podcast) within the last year? Maybe bc, even though you speak my language, I never felt like I fit into the culture of the far left (bc it looked like a closeted-academics-just-trying-to-win-in-academia and anti-religious for me) and I remained outside of that circle with my ex-haredi Jewish friends? Or have you just started branching out more? Anyway, another great article to articulate my thoughts exactly, thank you, thank you 🙏
It pays to separate inflation from price hikes due to an organic scarcity of a certain good or goods, and inflation as a monetary phenomenon caused by terrible monetary policy.
The worst inflation is always caused by currency devaluations where the supply of cash basically exceeds the amount of things to buy with it. Throwing trillions of "free" dollars at people during the C19 years did exactly this - way more money out there to spend - but the supply of goods to buy with it constricted as the economy ground to a halt during shutdowns. Goods and services became scarcer as a result of monetary policy here - it was not some sort of coincidence or unforeseeable outcome.
"Greedflation" has always been cope, and the dishonest cynicism with which that excuse was floated by both the White House and Fed to distract from their own hopelessly inept policy of printing money was infuriating.
Even if "corporate greed" were the cause of inflation (as if corporations only just now discovered greed) - what is anybody going to do about it, keeping in mind that corporations have legislatures and the executive as neutered declawed domestic pets?
Changing corporate charters to include legal obligations to other stakeholders (employees, the community in which they exist) is an idea. It might dampen profits a bit, but it would ameliorate negative externalities a great deal and companies could still flourish under this model. Naked pursuit of profit at the expense of human beings and communities is not a healthy paradigm, long-term.
Of course not. It makes too much sense. The accountability would throttle pure profit seeking behavior. Can't have that. This is the one of the ways in which the affluent legally pilfer the commons and degrade quality of life for everyone else. It's a winner-take-all attitude that feeds ego and imho, is one of the main behavioral pathologies that contributes to human suffering.
My idea is about spreading the wealth in a way that doesn't reduce human beings to consumption bots (the way the dole does) and enables them to be invested in and exercise agency in creating their realities. I suppose I'm a bit ahead of my time on this one. Let's check back in a few hundred years.
We are still in what historians may eventually label the aeon of acquisition, where resources are hoarded and withheld by people even when they don't need them - for various reasons. Winner-take-all, exclusivity, a pathological desire to perceive oneself as "better" or more "righteous" than others, disdain for the hoi polloi, etc., etc.
An evolutionary leap in consciousness will be required to lift us out of our "might makes right" mentality and I definitely don't see one in sight. We are regressing at present, imho. For all of our modern tech and advances, we are still barbarians in so many ways and love to play dominance games with each other. It's nice to muse about solutions and what-ifs even so. If we don't imagine a better way forward, we'll never get there.
Do you read Matt Stoller at all? I'm probably not doing it justice, but I thought the argument about greedflation was more about pointing out how consolidated many of the markets in our economy really are. And that with healthy competition, many corporations would not have been able to use the cover of the initial inflation to raise prices as much as they did.
Well, did he "sneer" while making his argument that corporations have always been greedy? Your feelings towards him don't seem very subtle to me, and he pleads ignorance when asked about it in his substack.
"Can the market mechanisms that create inflation and the corporations that profit off of it coexist with justice and human flourishing?"
Remember the old admonitions to first defining your terms and to not assume your conclusion? What do "justice" mean and "human flourishing" mean? The greatest good for the greatest number? The least suffering for the least among us? The highest peak achievement possible for some member of the species? Individual outcomes perfectly matched to individual merit--"just" deserts?
"If Profitable Company that actually charged X dollars for their product had instead charged <X dollars, while still charging enough to remain in business," and "corporations just don’t do that, that their natural market behavior is to maximize profits...."
Why should any organism--physical or virtual, individual or aggregate--behave in such a way? What normal human does just enough to survive and no more? Do we not seek pleasure, too? Whether it's more food, greater comfort, better companionship, stronger stimulation, or deeper thoughts? Why should mere avoidance of death be the only acceptable objective, for anybody, including a corporation, which is at bottom nothing more than a group of human beings who have associated to pursue together a set of common human ends? Does Freddie DeBoer write just enough to keep from starving, and not a word more?
I think you're right, Freddie, to write that these disputes are merely refractions of the underlying disputes about human nature and the right way to order society. And I think the reason that the left and the right wind up talking past each other is that they are both wrong. Both are seduced by the need to reduce the unsatisfying complexity of the human condition to a simpler model. Neither capitalism nor Marxism adequately capture how things work or how they might be made better, once "better" is adequately defined. It's sad, it's a pain in the ass, but complicated arrangements of greys--social democratic, hybrid economic, pluralistic, that kind of nasty real-world stuff--is the only way grownups should think and talk about these adult topics...
Only in translation. Das Kapital and the Manifesto. And, of course, lots of the afterburner writings of others. I was especially interested in Gramschi, for a while.
Why? Cause you think I don't understand what I'm saying?
I was thinking this reading the comments above. Everyone just wants simple solutions - to boil everything down into one neat, elegant truth. But, the world is complex, as you suggest, and so it never works.
It reminds me of a quote by Louis Mackey from the movie "Waking Life":
“What are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear, or laziness?”
At the time I watched the movie over 20 years ago, I would have chosen fear. Now, I would definitely choose laziness. We are lazy apes and don't want to work any harder than we absolutely have to. And, if we can find a shortcut, no matter whether it's fair, or just, or immoral, or borderline criminal, we'll go for it and rationalize our behavior to justify it.
*Hubert Humphrey (not "Humbert"). (I assume that was a typo rather than Freddie knowing something sordid that I don't know about Humphrey, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't deserve that association!)
This is a very black or white framing of the issue that over demonizes the "market". I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Bob Reich would be delighted if the US switched over to the Swedish model of economic development. I'm also going to make a guess that he would not like to see the US become a command economy like the Soviet Union where the gini would be lower simply by virtue of making everybody far poorer. But the fact is that in Sweden there are plenty of corporations and all of these corporations are profit maximizers just like in the states. So my conclusion would be that Bob Reich wouldn't claim to be against the market per se and he wouldn't claim to oppose profit maximization. Rather, he would be opposed to the way in which we currently regulate the market and organize our tax system. At the same time he's pro-greedflation because he's a lawyer and not an economist (or he's just playing politics). Either way your market/justice dichotomy does not hold.
I think having the argument about greedflation IS having "the real argument" to a greater extent than you give it credit, because arguing, "Are markets good or bad for society?" is impossible without having a bunch of smaller subarguments about various aspects. In this post, you say markets are bad because they exploit labor, or, if you don't buy that, because they harm the environment. Those are very different arguments! I could give counterarguments to both, and they'd be non-overlapping. Calling them the same argument because in both cases I'm on the "market good" side and you're on the "market bad" side obscures more than it clarifies. "Having the real argument" means having a bunch of small arguments about portions of the main argument all the time. I'll grant arguing about greedflation is a particularly minor, non-essential, and easily refuted subargument, so it feels a little like your real request is, "have the subarguments where my side has a better case."
It's interesting how socialists think that other people should just take less than the market price out of some vague sense of...something. This basic refusal to live in the reality of human nature is why socialists have been and will always be disappointed. The path to prosperity is to harness the price signals, not rail against them and wish that they were different. It's just another wish to fix prices, the eternally wrong obsession of those who just will not accept how the world works.
Human nature isn't infallible, or even very moral by some measures. I mean tribalism, especially of the 'you look like me' variety, is about as 'human nature' as you can get, but you don't see anyone preening about its virtue. Same with things as hard as using physical violence to solve problems, and soft as having a propensity to eat as much sugar as we can get our hands on.
Greed is a thing. Is it a good thing or bad thing? I would easily posit it is a bad thing. At least it certainly is at this point in our evolution as modern humans...despite it being deeply embedded in our behavioral instincts. And keeping an economic system in place that uses greed as fuel in order to work properly doesn't seem like something that we should just be okay with - anymore than we shouldn't just be okay with any other of our 'less-enlightened' baser instincts that, ironically, allowed us to 'out-evolve' every other species on this planet.
I don't have an answer as to what a replacement economic system could or should look like, it's far too complex for me. But I do know that simply accepting an economic model that relies on basic greed to function properly because of something akin to "well...that's just how the world works", is a figurative slap in the face to all that is good and decent in the world.
If in another thousand years we are still arguing about things like inflation and minimum wage and class struggle in general, all while trying to explore the stars...I would say we have failed as an intelligent species on this planet.
I wouldn't describe the Soviet experiment as a legitimate example of eliminating greed for the public good. It may have slogan'd as such, but it was in reality just another oligarchy/autocracy almost from the outset. And it wasn't the utopian goals that failed...they never even got out of the starting block. It was the same ole' individual corruption and power-mongering that decapitated it.
I think suppressing greed is in fact the way to go. Call it 'self-interest' if you want, but in a world with no where left to develop and finite resources, the only way we're gonna survive is by working together. And that, by definition, means suppressing your own self-interest to some extent. It doesn't have to be all the way to Orwellian for crying out loud.
At the risk of sounding like an archaic hippie - we really all can learn to live together in harmony if we try hard enough. Working harder than anyone else at something doesn't have to be the thing that defines a good life, and that good life doesn't have to be a struggle for affluence until the end of time.
There are so many little things here. Human nature is universal, and our goal should be to accommodate it smartly. I also wish people would just be nicer, which is basically what you, and Freddie, are saying. I struggle to understand why anyone would think such a shift of human nature is possible. I'm actually a hippie myself, basically, but I know why communes don't really work. The old cliché about the guy making my bread for himself and all of that.
The other thing is that even the most well-intentioned people cannot sit around and make tweaks and dictate things successfully. That's how we end up stuck with ethanol. Our only solution is to read the signals and react, and prices are valuable signals that we cannot do without. Things work better when things are at their prices, and as others have noted, it is actually the regulations and subsidies (hiding/distorting prices) that have caused many things to become very expensive relative to inflation. Not the market at all.
It is not immoral or hard-hearted to understand these things, and to understand that using those facts is the key to helping more people in more ways overall. The desire to just just throw up our hands and say let's just set the price, or just give things to people, or just try to shame people for not giving things away, is actually counterproductive.
"...even the most well-intentioned people cannot sit around and make tweaks and dictate things successfully."
But city commissions, and governing bodies in general, do this all the time. They are hired (voted) precisely to make sure we all can get through our daily grind in a fair and safe way in a community of vastly different individual needs and wants. Things like road repairs and water purification and school funding and so on. They do a lot of these things, at least the details of which, very much so by dictation. And can be and are successful at it most of the time.
But to the point about treating prices with this sort of laissez-faire attitude...when you let suppliers have complete control of this, they overwhelmingly tend to use for one thing only: maximizing profits. And this happens even with other competitors around. I've used this example before, but I'll use it again here:
In my town we have a small handful of gas station owner who set the gas prices. These prices have been ~10-15 cents higher than the surrounding communities going back at least 40 years. There isn't much anyone can do about it because 1) the station owners are working together on this...off the books, and 2) nothing can be legally proved or even done about it.
About 15 years ago the last independent gas station closed up for good. It was cash-only to save money, had cheaper gas than anywhere else in town, and always had long lines of cars waiting to fill up. But it couldn't survive. Why? Because the other station owners had lucrative exclusive deals with the regional gas suppliers, and the independent station simply couldn't afford to keep purchasing gas at a higher rate...or even get enough gas delivered to cover the demand. So it had to close shop despite being the most popular station in town.
So our town is simply stuck paying higher gas prices in perpetuity. Why? Not because that's the just the way prices are, or because of the almighty and infallible invisible hand of laissez faire markets. It's simply because of greed. And there's nothing anyone can do about it because our laws don't have any power to do so. This is not some rare thing either, it is par for the course everywhere. You just have to look for it.
I guess I will just say that the line between greed and self-interest is in the eye of the beholder. Greed is something that we should discourage, I do agree with that, as all of the traditional deadly sins should be discouraged. I just don't think that designing a political program on the hope that people will get less greedy is a winning plan.
I completely disagree that we live in a world with no where left to develop and finite resources. Julian Simon was right. Paul Ehrlich was and continues to be dead wrong.
It sounds like what you are calling for is something like the medieval Catholic Church. (And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.) From what I can tell, peasant revolts were pretty rare before the late middle ages, so maybe such social control works, although it does not correlate with much generation of wealth.
Respectfully...I view greed and avarice as pretty much on the same level. They are both bad motivators.
One could try and argue greed motivates people to make money so that they can support their family and pay the bills. But that's not greed at all, that's just basic living. Greed is the excess. Greed is going vastly beyond what one would need to have a decent life, prioritizing more and more wealth above any and all other factors. Like any vice, no one needs greed to be motivated for anything. It's inherently immoral.
You free(k) market ppl really hate the idea of ppl being able to choose how they spend their own money instead of having price gougers and rent extractors take it away from them.
Just go move to a Central American country already Jesus Christ! There is such a thing as market flaws. It’s ppl like you who would be the first to die if there was no social safety net. Markets can create corporate towns, force you to work 60 hours a week bc there isn’t any welfare to fall back on and child labor, so there’s less jobs available and less leverage for workers. You libertarians are far too stupid to be so smug. Luckily public opinion isn’t on your side and you goblins only exist on the internet.
Really interesting article. Speaks a lot to what is happening in the UK at the moment too. We're seeing (right/centre-right) talking heads on the TV telling the public not to ask for pay rises because it will cause inflation. How we should all be ready to tighten our belts and weather the economic storm.
Meanwhile, our privatised water companies are on the verge of collapse because they've spent decades paying out billions to shareholders and building up debt, instead of investing in infrastructure . So they're literally pumping shit into the rivers and sea on a daily basis, failing to fix leaky pipes, sometimes failing to provide even a modest level of service. Again, all while CEOs and shareholders are taking home huge sums of cash. And they tell us that if we want them to fix the pipes and stop pumping shit into our rivers, they'll need to put bills up again.
It's easy to look at this and think 'hey actually, it's their corporate greed causing inflation, not my 1.5% pay rise in my desk job.' But one positive is that more and more people - not just the left, but across the spectrum - are calling for water companies to be renationalised. Because even the true-blue home counties types can see that local monopolies that take in huge sums of money and then deliberately fill beauty spots with sewage signify a broken system.
I don’t know how to tell you, but shrink wrap is SUPPOSED to be invisible
;)
(Seriously, though, I agree; this is another place where costs have been cut.$
... which was in a position to happen because of the long-term effects of a financial crisis caused by financiers taking enormous risks out of pure unadulterated greed
... firehose of cash policies that were adamantly supported by large corporations, which support "the free market" under the condition that "the free market" means whatever entails their executives getting unfathomably rich
Jesus man… have you ever met a corporate cock that you *didn’t* try to immediately suck off ? Not even a rhetorical question.
"I can't understand why X was more valuable when there were only 10 of them, as opposed to five trillion of them"
This is not exactly mysterious science. The monetary causes of inflation are not only the most directly observable, but also the most well understood and predictable. There is nothing so special about the US dollar relative to the currency of Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Venezuela that keeps it from being subject to the same pressures. It merely means there is a higher level of economic development behind those monetary policy failures.
Miles, thank you for saying this. I was reading this post and thinking the whole time: Um, do people REALLY think inflation is caused by anything OTHER than, simply, the government printing more money? To me, it seems that simple.
But Freddie: I'm all ears if you want to dedicate a full future post to convincing me otherwise (this post was insufficient, as it's more about the culture war, and doesn't mention the word "printing" at all).
The government is supposed to be a check on that. And yet lawmakers in both parties abdicated their duty to responsibly guide fiscal policy.
Yes, the capitalist class is very willing to incur inflation when the money printer flows disproportionately into their own pockets.
No, this is what happens when you have monetary policy being dictated by governments whose overriding interest is to avoid being blamed for any economic problems whatsoever, and use the printing press to continually devalue a currency by vastly increasing the supply, and to boot, make borrowing that money (in huge sums) come at zero, or even less than zero interest.
Do corporations also have perverse incentives to keep the money firehose from DC running full blast for as long as humanly possible?
Of course, but they pale in comparison to the political incentives when the political livelihoods in DC (whether elected officials, or appointed ones, like in the Fed) are at stake.
Sorry but there's nothing to argue about.
Neoliberalism, in the original sense of the word, won.
Everyone is a neoliberal now, except on the furthest fringes.
Markets are the most effective means of production and there's not good evidence that they can be technocratically managed in a positive way by the state.
The political question is not what to do about markets (and hasn't been for decades) because there is nothing to do. The question is to what degree should there be taxation and redistribution.
A lot of ideological argument on the right versus left is just kayfabe because everyone wants markets, everyone wants taxation, and everyone wants a large welfare state.
Leftists can pretend otherwise but it's just LARPing to try to seem like something other than what they are: neoliberals doing a performative schtick.
And if you had told people that feudalism was forever in 1200, they'd have believed you. But they would be just as stupid as you are now. History is long and Alex is not outside of history.
Yeah but the argument isn't that there won't be a different economic system in 800 years.
Or that we are outside capital-H history.
Rather it is that in the foreseeable future there are no alternatives to neoliberalism.
The 'Left' such as it is puts forth a slightly different vision of who should receive what in terms of neoliberal redistribution as compared to the 'Right' such as it is.
A defining characteristic of the Left is that it no longer has any defining economic plan or vision.
Broadly the Left has been folded into the managerial class and the Left's main interests now is how administrative power can be used for ideological surveillance and to force cultural change. COVID biosurveillance, DEI, Ukraine jingoism, enforcement of gender ideology are all manifestations of this tendency. No one is talking about capping profits on IPhones.
How much of the future are you confident in foreseeing, exactly? The foreseeable future is a pretty vague, bullshitty kind of term, no?
What's on the horizon?
What else is being proposed?
No I don't have a crystal ball and yes the future is unpredictable.
If you think I'm making claims of certainty you're mistaking my argument which is that the Left is supposed to generate new ideas and possibility.
What are the alternatives to liberalism the Left is suggesting we experiment with?
It's not enough to just wave your hands vaguely.
We have no evidence in the present that an alternative to market economies is possible that would better promote "justice" and "human flourishing," however those are defined.
For someone arguing for an alternative, the onus is on that person to provide an alternative.
Could something else emerge in the future? Sure. Is the future unknowable, and a long time? Sure. But that kind of philosophizing easily can be a dodge. At best it is a legitimate response to lazy hyperbole, and nothing more.
I’m not arguing for an alternative, merely pointing out that talking about the foreseeable future is ridiculous on its face. Things fall apart, and when they fall apart it usually happens incredibly quickly. I would much rather see incremental change back to what neoliberalism started out as, but revolutions happen, you know?
Alex used "foreseeable future" in the sense of "in the here and now." You could substitute the latter phrase and his argument would be no different.
Where are the alternatives? With the privatization of China is there a credible competitor to capitalism in the world, anywhere?
Had the same thought about the Left putting most of its efforts into social change. Like an end-around, perhaps?
People running for elective office are happy to preen before greedy oil barons in open hearings. But as a group, they're focusing their energies on the places where they can most readily make the world conform to their view of justice.
Isn't this what DEI and the fight over affirmative action at Harvard are ultimately about: That if we can't change the system, we'll make sure everybody -- or at least a few demographic representatives (because representation) -- gets to join the managerial class.
The alternative to markets is revolution. Is it any wonder why this option is only considered seriously at the fringes? The risk is huge, and the number of people with little enough to lose to engage in it are still, for the moment, small.
How does revolution efficiently allocate scarce resources to run a productive, modern economy?
It doesn’t.
That depends on what the revolutionaries want. I'm not sure what that means precisely if one is a Marxist revolutionary; the USSR had its roots in Marxism, as I understand it, but I wouldn't argue that any other Marxist revolution would take the same form (presumably, they would learn from the mistakes of that revolution).
It shouldn't run a "productive modern economy" which is another name for overabundance of bullshit and extravangance, paired with crap distribution and access to necessities.
Found the Malthusian!
Of course market society isn't going to collapse in the "foreseeable future". The foreseeable future is liberals barely keeping a lid on political chaos and depression across the Western world while desperately hoping that someone comes up with a magic new technology that fixes things. Everyone knows this and nobody can prevent it. Weird bit of rhetorical trickery to say this means there's nothing to argue about, or that we should all accept it and stop complaining.
With regard to “can the market mechanisms that create inflation and the corporations that profit off of it coexist with justice and human flourishing?” - do leftists generally believe that humans have ever experienced “justice” or “human flourishing?” If so, would they deny that the regimes that have the most of both always had market economies?
If you count anarchism of a certain kind as of the left, then the arguments of David Graeber and David Wengrow in their *The Dawn of Everything*, which created a major stir, point to societies that they see as promoting justice and flourishing without market economies, as we understand them. I think their evidence is weak, their arguments sloppy, and their conclusions self-deceiving, but I think the impetus to locate some precedent for a just society prior to modern markets is strong, so the book sales are all out of proportion for a 700-page academic volume.
I don't think Freddie is on that page (or those 700-pages). I do think there are, for example, contemporary European societies that do better than the US in approaching economic justice in terms of the labor theory of value, and that they do so with, at least, no harm to levels of human flourishing. I'm not sure, however, that they are inconsistent with neoliberalism, broadly conceived.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4338945403
I agree with your thumbnail review.
It's an excellent book, far better researched and argued than almost anything comparable in the region of popular history, science, anthropology, or what-have-you.
Because it upsets the apple cart of received wisdom so adroitly, it earned some flailing denunciations, but it's popularity is entirely justified, and encouraging for those who don't want to wallow in fatalism.
Zach, in almost every instance where "Dawn" touched on my field of specialization it grossly distorted the archaeological evidence (there was one exception) and showed little understanding of the historical context. Other reviewers with different specializations have said much the same with regard to their fields. It's not that the book has zero to offer--like popular history books it discusses interesting things that few people are aware of, and there are interesting specific insights along the way. I actually learned a lot from it. But the particular elements that support the overarching anarchist argument far too often rely on distorted presentation and rhetoric. I've seen positive statements about the book's huge volume of notes and bibliographic entries, making it look "well-researched," but the notes are often simply more arguments as misleading as the text, and the bibliography is only impressive in the context of "popular" history (etc.), which you acknowledge it is. What's actually exceptional about the book is that the publisher did not require the authors to cut the notes down radically. Perhaps Farrar, Straus and Giroux presciently realized that the illusion of scholarly depth was going to be essential to sales.
You can valorize "Dawn" for "challenging the tired status quo," but there's a difference between thinking out of the box and thinking clearly, and writing about apple carts, calling analyses of weakness "flailing," and saying that historians who don't accept irresponsible distortions are "wallowing in fatalism" isn't really constructive. It's just rhetoric.
I'm aware that the book provoked lots of discussion and criticism in a wide range of scholarly fields, some of it "flailing denunciations" and some of it more reasoned and sensible. That was basically inevitable for a book with that title. It also received lots of praise, from specialists and popular reviewers alike.
As you're surely aware, there's a difference between willful distortion and different interpretations of evidence. In the exchanges I followed, and some of them were pretty lengthy, I didn't see any instances of distortion, but maybe I'm not deeply embedded enough in the related fields.
Those contemporary European societies are absolutely compatible with neoliberalism. They combine capitalism with a stronger social safety net than we have in the US.
Oh ffs. Nobody is advocating the complete eradication of market economies.
In a world of scarcity and competitive advantage, nobody on the left wants to take away the option to buy the cheapest products and components from the places most advantaged to produce them. Napoleon did that with the continental system and it didn’t work out too well.
Most people on the Left want to mitigate market flaws and rent extraction, especially since unregulated markets undermine a functioning market economy ie exorbitant rents and price gouging take away resources from consumers that they would more efficiently put elsewhere or save if left to their own devices.
If we listen to ppl like you who can’t even tolerate a social Democrat like Sanders, we’ll end up like a country in Central America. The question is whether you can have a bottom that makes work not compulsory but something you do to get extra things besides necessities or a hobby that pays.
Kyle, you misinterpreted my original comment (admittedly "leftist" is an ambiguous term) and vastly over-estimated the gap between our views.
> Oh ffs. Nobody is advocating the complete eradication of market economies.
Very few people in the US are Marxists. However, Freddie is one of those very few people, so in this context when I said "leftists" I meant "leftists like Freddie who actually do want to abolish markets." The section of this piece that I quoted implied that "human flourishing and corporate profits are incompatible" is at the least a plausible statement! (Also, I will note that it is fairly common to encounter people who complain about "capitalism" online, as opposed to, say, "America's especially brutal version of capitalism" or "capitalism without a social safety net," implying that they would not be happy with, say, Germany's system)
> Most people on the Left want to mitigate market flaws and rent extraction, especially since unregulated markets undermine a functioning market economy ie exorbitant rents and price gouging take away resources from consumers that they would more efficiently put elsewhere or save if left to their own devices.
Freddie tends to use the term "leftist" to mean something more specific than "the liberal half of America." As a member of the liberal half of America, I am aware that these are widely-held views in a way that "abolish markets" are not. (I generally view things like exorbitant rents as symptoms of deeper problems, though, such as the needless regulatory difficulty of meeting housing demand in urban areas, and believe that treating the causes is much more important than treating the symptoms)
> If we listen to ppl like you who can’t even tolerate a social Democrat like Sanders, we’ll end up like a country in Central America.
I voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary in both 2016 and 2020. I really don't know what I said that made you so confident that I can't "tolerate" him. The various social democracies in northern Europe were exactly what I had in mind when I said that the regimes with the most human flourishing have market economies!
> The question is whether you can have a bottom that makes work not compulsory but something you do to get extra things besides necessities or a hobby that pays.
I'm a big supporter of UBI, and I believe we can and should move towards such a bottom, but unlike what you said above I think "healthy people shouldn't have to work if they are okay with sticking to the necessities" is actually a pretty uncommon view even among those left-of-center.
Your reply reminds me of your recent interview - I forget with who or which podcast, but I listened to the whole thing, in which you discuss "why communism" is likely inevitable, or at least why humans will somehow move on to a very different way of governing themselves. You said the same thing about feudalism.
The leftist model of government can be summarized as "destroy all of the Renaissance and Enlightenment discoveries and institutions which destroyed feudalism without putting anything in their place." It is therefore not a new thing, but just a manifestation of a powerful subconscious yearning for the return of feudalism or empire. Even the professed concern for the poor was a cornerstone of feudalism, and the left's approach to helping the poor with handouts is just a re-enactment of the feudalist conception of charity as handouts, which can never threaten the social order.
This is why leftism is supported by the aristocracy, not the commoners; and funded in America not by grass-roots donations, but by behemoth foundations established by the wealthiest people in the world. It's why communist states are feudal societies with ambitions of empire, and why it was so natural for the Soviet Union to "switch" from communism to plain-old feudalism. The left wing today is just that portion of the right wing which pretends it's progressive rather than reactionary.
(Those Renaissance and Enlightenment innovations which destroyed feudalism included: currency, corporations, banking, the stock market, the right to sell (or not sell) one's labor and thus choose one's own profession, the commoditization of everyday life (rather than relying on a feudal lord to make your decisions and provide everything you need), equality before the law, free trade, free (non-ideological) inquiry and science, an epistemology based on empirical facts rather than narratives, free speech, seeking compromise rather than perfection, optimizing under multiple constraints rather than maximizing one thing at a time, understanding indirect effects and unintended consequences, and having a legal theory rather than an endless series of situation-based moral judgements.)
Thank you. Your overview (and FdBs) has clicked some things into place for me regarding the left's current behavior, which has puzzled me. When I was coming up, the left (at least culturally) were all about individual freedom and self expression. This didn't last long. I now see that what some lefties really want is not justice and fair play per se, but control and in some cases, revenge.
Thanks! I think we should be careful about saying "what they really want", If we judge them as people (which maybe we shouldn't), we might want to talk about what they want consciously. If we try to understand their actions, we want to talk about what they want unconsciously.
Plus, leftists aren't all the same. I suspect there's a useful distinction between the theorists/leaders/Brahmins and the troops. I think maybe the east coast Brahmins reap most of the benefits from leftism in terms of wealth, power, & prestige, while the west coast warriors pay most of the cost in terms of activism, economic disruption, and the destruction of urban life.
Of course. I updated it.
I am reading Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran currently, which talks about this a bit.
It looks like an interesting book. I hope they make an audio edition.
I’d argue neoliberalism is opposed by many progressives by default, not merely the fringes, and more and more on the right. Some of those progressives are inconsistent and in denial about reality (in that they’re not actually socialists, but want more government control), but they think markets are bad by default, or at least very far from ideal.
I'm not saying people don't dislike it and aren't unsatisfied.
The point is that nothing else is being proposed.
I’d argue the proposal is simply to exert more government control such that market functionality is smothered.
Worst cases at present in the US are healthcare and housing (and probably infra construction), but the progressive urge to subsidize demand and restrict supply is boundless (and it’s growing on the right).
I don’t know what the right label for this is but it’s incredibly prevalent here and especially Europe. “Red tape capitalism” maybe.
Why do you, a fundamentalist market conservative, bother to come to a Marxist newsletter and complain that not everyone in the world shares your worldview? I find it strange.
Because you’re the smartest Marxist I know and you’re fair minded enough to criticize your own side.
You’re just one realization away from becoming a left neoliberal (and a lot of your readership seems willing to provide comments to help you get there).
Marxists on the whole are preferable for discourse compared to the vaguely progressive institutional cheerleaders like Yglesias who have no principles and will just valorize whatever the instantaneous elite consensus is.
He’s a market conservative — dumbasses do dumbass things. It’s the only thing consistent about these people. They would never actually live in any of the countries where they get everything they want ie Central America with its land completely privatized by a few families ala limited economies of scale.
I don't know.
Wasn't the COVID response wholly dependent on Amazon and Uber Eats bringing us the stuff we need?
Sure the government cuts a check, but the managerial classes are pretty generic consumers, radical ideological pretenses aside.
I think it's a reasonable and achievable if difficult political goal to try to remove markets from healthcare, prison services, etc. I also think that "market thinking" has ruined the ability of the government to do infrastructure projects like building train lines. To give an example I haven't seen talked about elsewhere, I think the government should nationalize OpenAI etc. and release the models to the public domain. I am a neo-liberal in the sense that I think markets are good at some stuff, but I think it's much less stuff than is widely thought, and in many areas of life, the market makes life worse than it would otherwise be.
I don't know much about prisons but I do know a bit about healthcare.
What 'non-market' model are you proposing for healthcare?
Most European countries do not have single payer and rely on markets alongside price controls to balance incentives to create supply while at the same time holding down costs.
The exceptions to this like the NHS are disasters and struggling to provide basic services.
Even Canada's healthcare system which is based to some degree on market demand but excludes private insurers is struggling to provide specialized services for chronic conditions.
So, again, if anything, I'd argue that the more coercive versions of Obamacare you see in Europe that include private insures are what the consensus is for healthcare, and not exiting markets.
Healthcare as a non-market enterprise is a complicated idea. There are so many actual and potential flavors that it's hard to draw conclusions. The NHS--where doctors and hospitals work for the state--is only one model. How about private providers whose services are all reimbursed by the government--Medicare of All, as it were? How about wholly private, even as to insurance, but with tight regulations on quality, coverage, premiums, profits--that is, the American paradigm for electric and other utilities?
The problem with all models is that modern medicine is capital intensive, doctors are scarce (not just artificially, it takes uncommon smarts and guts and grit to become and then practice as a doctor), and societies are less willing to just let people die than they used to be. So, it's a big expense that keeps getting bigger and everyone wants to cut the aggregate spend yet not reduce the resulting experience, which is not a matter of market but a desire for magic.
From what I understand licensing standards are unnecessarily onerous for foreign physicians who wish to immigrate to the US because the AMA is intent on keeping the supply of doctors artificially low.
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. I imagine there are those in the profession who feel that way. But most doctors feel very overworked and stressed, and would welcome more people to handle the load. It's one reason the profession has embraced the advent of nurse-practitioners and physician's assistants. My uncle was a professor of medicine in a foreign country who had to start over as a resident when he came to the US. He eventually became a professor of medicine at Case Western. He experienced the onerous process first-hand. But he always said he understood the need to protect the public from who-knows-what standards used abroad. My own feeling is that there should be reciprocal licensing with certain countries and not others. Personally, I would trust a heart surgeon trained in the UK/Germany/France/Italy/Spain. Trained in some tiny country hard to find on a map? Not so fast....
Yes, my friend who is Canadian and his wife who is Indian both had to jump through terrible hoops to get to work as doctors in the US. It made no sense.
Healthcare is an almost uniquely bad industry to analyze the effects of government interference. It's about the only one I can think of where delivering the service poorly and cheaply can result in greater economic growth.
I also believe in markets (although they are unfortunately distorted by regulatory capture and crony capitalism) and I agree that healthcare, in particular, should be non-profit. But also, things like utilities and infrastructure. Charge enough to cover maintenance and salaries/wages, but that's it. This would help the poor and working class a great deal and it's a better method of redistribution than pure handouts - which often lead to indolence and aimlessness.
Yes, the neoliberal experiment in privatizing utilities has been a failure, and they should be republicized. All of the advantages of diversification come from having small utilities in different local areas. Privatizing didn’t help at all.
Internet should also be run by local government.
Public utilities - yes. But internet run by government? No. If you mean broadband infrastructure - maybe. I think it would be too easy for government to move from providing access to restricting access on ideological grounds - sort of like Parler. Not a fan of this idea because of the high potential for abuse.
I mean a public utility regulated by local government like the water board.
Right. For broadband infrastructure - microwave wifi towers, buried fiber, etc., that could work. But not hosting provision. And not content oversight or management. These need to stay private and for profit.
Wow, I'm sure glad there's nothing to argue about. Almost makes me wonder if I'm still on the internet.
But wait - there's sweeping generalization, glib posturing, self-satisfied ignorance on display on this comment. Phew! We're back, baby.
Lol by not being able to respond to my point you're supporting it.
And now the "lol you've proven my point." Twitter is three tabs down on the left, buddy.
Was there an argument there? Or anything besides ad hominem attacks?
Alex's point was self-evidently false so there isn't really much to debate. "We're all neoliberals now." Obviously, this isn't true, so why assert it besides to stir the pot?
What do you mean there's not really much there to debate? You can always present your case with supporting evidence and arguments--unless of course you don't have any supporting evidence.
I suppose if that's the case then insults make sense.
"Neoliberalism, in the original sense of the word, won".
And how is that working out for you?
Either greatly, which is why you find it unarguable ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it").
Or badly, in which case, you're more like an abused spouse that sticks around because their partner is some big shot who they look up to, and wants "what's best for me".
"Everyone is a neoliberal now, except on the furthest fringes."
Nobody really believes in neoliberalism now, and surely not as much as they did in 1991. Except on the highest echelons and the aspirational wannabes.
"Markets are the most effective means of production and there's not good evidence that they can be technocratically managed in a positive way by the state."
Who said that the "most effective means of production" should be the goal?
And who said anything about changing the market into "technocratically managed"? For one, that's what markets already are today, and have increasingly been for a few decades at least.
Politically managed - not by a political rulling class, Soviet style, but with democratic control, oversight, accounting for externalities, and, most importantly, an ethical code that doesn't being and end with "shareholder profit", is what we'd rather have.
If you tell people "there is no alternative" they don't grow up and become sensible liberals. They become nihilists and adopt any ideology that promises to disrupt the social order, regardless of consequences. Radical Islam, white nationalism, Leninism, whatever. The deal the average person gets under liberalism is not good enough to prevent them from choosing chaos instead, as clearly demonstrated by the last few years of history. You can complain about this if you want but there's nothing you can actually do to stop it.
There are alternatives; it's just that they're all neoliberalism with different hats.
Say the word, Bart!
LARPing.
Yaaaaaayyyy.
I believe this framework applies to most policy debates. The right isn't against electric vehicles. They are against the notion of climate change. The left isn't actually against permitting reform for infrastructure projects. They are in fear of losing their best weapon against fossil fuel advancement.
We can fight about the economics but what was frustrating to me about the greedflation interlude was how dumb it was politically. Recall where we were when people like Elizabeth Warren and AOC brought it up: they were frustrated that Democrats weren’t getting enough credit for an economy that was generating a lot of growth and jobs because people were angry about inflation. So (I guess) the idea was you blame inflation on greedy corporations and suddenly people will like Democrats more?
But it was all purely performative- as many have pointed out- the only alternative to “greedflation” are shortages- and it’s very hard to think that would have been politically better. The whole thing was just disappointing.
💯 💯 💯 Freddie, why did I only discover you (from Coleman Hughes’ podcast) within the last year? Maybe bc, even though you speak my language, I never felt like I fit into the culture of the far left (bc it looked like a closeted-academics-just-trying-to-win-in-academia and anti-religious for me) and I remained outside of that circle with my ex-haredi Jewish friends? Or have you just started branching out more? Anyway, another great article to articulate my thoughts exactly, thank you, thank you 🙏
It pays to separate inflation from price hikes due to an organic scarcity of a certain good or goods, and inflation as a monetary phenomenon caused by terrible monetary policy.
The worst inflation is always caused by currency devaluations where the supply of cash basically exceeds the amount of things to buy with it. Throwing trillions of "free" dollars at people during the C19 years did exactly this - way more money out there to spend - but the supply of goods to buy with it constricted as the economy ground to a halt during shutdowns. Goods and services became scarcer as a result of monetary policy here - it was not some sort of coincidence or unforeseeable outcome.
"Greedflation" has always been cope, and the dishonest cynicism with which that excuse was floated by both the White House and Fed to distract from their own hopelessly inept policy of printing money was infuriating.
Even if "corporate greed" were the cause of inflation (as if corporations only just now discovered greed) - what is anybody going to do about it, keeping in mind that corporations have legislatures and the executive as neutered declawed domestic pets?
Changing corporate charters to include legal obligations to other stakeholders (employees, the community in which they exist) is an idea. It might dampen profits a bit, but it would ameliorate negative externalities a great deal and companies could still flourish under this model. Naked pursuit of profit at the expense of human beings and communities is not a healthy paradigm, long-term.
That would also require a pretty radical change to corporate law, and I can't see the current beneficiaries of this system taking it lying down.
Of course not. It makes too much sense. The accountability would throttle pure profit seeking behavior. Can't have that. This is the one of the ways in which the affluent legally pilfer the commons and degrade quality of life for everyone else. It's a winner-take-all attitude that feeds ego and imho, is one of the main behavioral pathologies that contributes to human suffering.
My idea is about spreading the wealth in a way that doesn't reduce human beings to consumption bots (the way the dole does) and enables them to be invested in and exercise agency in creating their realities. I suppose I'm a bit ahead of my time on this one. Let's check back in a few hundred years.
We are still in what historians may eventually label the aeon of acquisition, where resources are hoarded and withheld by people even when they don't need them - for various reasons. Winner-take-all, exclusivity, a pathological desire to perceive oneself as "better" or more "righteous" than others, disdain for the hoi polloi, etc., etc.
An evolutionary leap in consciousness will be required to lift us out of our "might makes right" mentality and I definitely don't see one in sight. We are regressing at present, imho. For all of our modern tech and advances, we are still barbarians in so many ways and love to play dominance games with each other. It's nice to muse about solutions and what-ifs even so. If we don't imagine a better way forward, we'll never get there.
Do you read Matt Stoller at all? I'm probably not doing it justice, but I thought the argument about greedflation was more about pointing out how consolidated many of the markets in our economy really are. And that with healthy competition, many corporations would not have been able to use the cover of the initial inflation to raise prices as much as they did.
Is there an origin story to the Freddie- Yglesias beef?
I don't really see this as an indication of beef - he has made that point about greedflation explicitly.
Well, did he "sneer" while making his argument that corporations have always been greedy? Your feelings towards him don't seem very subtle to me, and he pleads ignorance when asked about it in his substack.
I think the neoliberal pundit mafia sneers by default. It's not personal.
Freddie and MattY are my two favorite writers.
haha i really like both of them too, which is why I asked the question
So much to unpack. Starting from the bottom:
"Can the market mechanisms that create inflation and the corporations that profit off of it coexist with justice and human flourishing?"
Remember the old admonitions to first defining your terms and to not assume your conclusion? What do "justice" mean and "human flourishing" mean? The greatest good for the greatest number? The least suffering for the least among us? The highest peak achievement possible for some member of the species? Individual outcomes perfectly matched to individual merit--"just" deserts?
"If Profitable Company that actually charged X dollars for their product had instead charged <X dollars, while still charging enough to remain in business," and "corporations just don’t do that, that their natural market behavior is to maximize profits...."
Why should any organism--physical or virtual, individual or aggregate--behave in such a way? What normal human does just enough to survive and no more? Do we not seek pleasure, too? Whether it's more food, greater comfort, better companionship, stronger stimulation, or deeper thoughts? Why should mere avoidance of death be the only acceptable objective, for anybody, including a corporation, which is at bottom nothing more than a group of human beings who have associated to pursue together a set of common human ends? Does Freddie DeBoer write just enough to keep from starving, and not a word more?
I think you're right, Freddie, to write that these disputes are merely refractions of the underlying disputes about human nature and the right way to order society. And I think the reason that the left and the right wind up talking past each other is that they are both wrong. Both are seduced by the need to reduce the unsatisfying complexity of the human condition to a simpler model. Neither capitalism nor Marxism adequately capture how things work or how they might be made better, once "better" is adequately defined. It's sad, it's a pain in the ass, but complicated arrangements of greys--social democratic, hybrid economic, pluralistic, that kind of nasty real-world stuff--is the only way grownups should think and talk about these adult topics...
Only in translation. Das Kapital and the Manifesto. And, of course, lots of the afterburner writings of others. I was especially interested in Gramschi, for a while.
Why? Cause you think I don't understand what I'm saying?
I was thinking this reading the comments above. Everyone just wants simple solutions - to boil everything down into one neat, elegant truth. But, the world is complex, as you suggest, and so it never works.
It reminds me of a quote by Louis Mackey from the movie "Waking Life":
“What are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear, or laziness?”
At the time I watched the movie over 20 years ago, I would have chosen fear. Now, I would definitely choose laziness. We are lazy apes and don't want to work any harder than we absolutely have to. And, if we can find a shortcut, no matter whether it's fair, or just, or immoral, or borderline criminal, we'll go for it and rationalize our behavior to justify it.
*Hubert Humphrey (not "Humbert"). (I assume that was a typo rather than Freddie knowing something sordid that I don't know about Humphrey, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't deserve that association!)
This is a very black or white framing of the issue that over demonizes the "market". I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Bob Reich would be delighted if the US switched over to the Swedish model of economic development. I'm also going to make a guess that he would not like to see the US become a command economy like the Soviet Union where the gini would be lower simply by virtue of making everybody far poorer. But the fact is that in Sweden there are plenty of corporations and all of these corporations are profit maximizers just like in the states. So my conclusion would be that Bob Reich wouldn't claim to be against the market per se and he wouldn't claim to oppose profit maximization. Rather, he would be opposed to the way in which we currently regulate the market and organize our tax system. At the same time he's pro-greedflation because he's a lawyer and not an economist (or he's just playing politics). Either way your market/justice dichotomy does not hold.
I think having the argument about greedflation IS having "the real argument" to a greater extent than you give it credit, because arguing, "Are markets good or bad for society?" is impossible without having a bunch of smaller subarguments about various aspects. In this post, you say markets are bad because they exploit labor, or, if you don't buy that, because they harm the environment. Those are very different arguments! I could give counterarguments to both, and they'd be non-overlapping. Calling them the same argument because in both cases I'm on the "market good" side and you're on the "market bad" side obscures more than it clarifies. "Having the real argument" means having a bunch of small arguments about portions of the main argument all the time. I'll grant arguing about greedflation is a particularly minor, non-essential, and easily refuted subargument, so it feels a little like your real request is, "have the subarguments where my side has a better case."
It's interesting how socialists think that other people should just take less than the market price out of some vague sense of...something. This basic refusal to live in the reality of human nature is why socialists have been and will always be disappointed. The path to prosperity is to harness the price signals, not rail against them and wish that they were different. It's just another wish to fix prices, the eternally wrong obsession of those who just will not accept how the world works.
Well that’s why the gentle coercion of governments is needed to make sure fairness is achieved.
To be fair to socialists, there is a part of human nature focused on “fairness” that we get from the ancestral environment; it just doesn’t scale.
Human nature isn't infallible, or even very moral by some measures. I mean tribalism, especially of the 'you look like me' variety, is about as 'human nature' as you can get, but you don't see anyone preening about its virtue. Same with things as hard as using physical violence to solve problems, and soft as having a propensity to eat as much sugar as we can get our hands on.
Greed is a thing. Is it a good thing or bad thing? I would easily posit it is a bad thing. At least it certainly is at this point in our evolution as modern humans...despite it being deeply embedded in our behavioral instincts. And keeping an economic system in place that uses greed as fuel in order to work properly doesn't seem like something that we should just be okay with - anymore than we shouldn't just be okay with any other of our 'less-enlightened' baser instincts that, ironically, allowed us to 'out-evolve' every other species on this planet.
I don't have an answer as to what a replacement economic system could or should look like, it's far too complex for me. But I do know that simply accepting an economic model that relies on basic greed to function properly because of something akin to "well...that's just how the world works", is a figurative slap in the face to all that is good and decent in the world.
If in another thousand years we are still arguing about things like inflation and minimum wage and class struggle in general, all while trying to explore the stars...I would say we have failed as an intelligent species on this planet.
Well said.
I wouldn't describe the Soviet experiment as a legitimate example of eliminating greed for the public good. It may have slogan'd as such, but it was in reality just another oligarchy/autocracy almost from the outset. And it wasn't the utopian goals that failed...they never even got out of the starting block. It was the same ole' individual corruption and power-mongering that decapitated it.
I think suppressing greed is in fact the way to go. Call it 'self-interest' if you want, but in a world with no where left to develop and finite resources, the only way we're gonna survive is by working together. And that, by definition, means suppressing your own self-interest to some extent. It doesn't have to be all the way to Orwellian for crying out loud.
At the risk of sounding like an archaic hippie - we really all can learn to live together in harmony if we try hard enough. Working harder than anyone else at something doesn't have to be the thing that defines a good life, and that good life doesn't have to be a struggle for affluence until the end of time.
There are so many little things here. Human nature is universal, and our goal should be to accommodate it smartly. I also wish people would just be nicer, which is basically what you, and Freddie, are saying. I struggle to understand why anyone would think such a shift of human nature is possible. I'm actually a hippie myself, basically, but I know why communes don't really work. The old cliché about the guy making my bread for himself and all of that.
The other thing is that even the most well-intentioned people cannot sit around and make tweaks and dictate things successfully. That's how we end up stuck with ethanol. Our only solution is to read the signals and react, and prices are valuable signals that we cannot do without. Things work better when things are at their prices, and as others have noted, it is actually the regulations and subsidies (hiding/distorting prices) that have caused many things to become very expensive relative to inflation. Not the market at all.
It is not immoral or hard-hearted to understand these things, and to understand that using those facts is the key to helping more people in more ways overall. The desire to just just throw up our hands and say let's just set the price, or just give things to people, or just try to shame people for not giving things away, is actually counterproductive.
"...even the most well-intentioned people cannot sit around and make tweaks and dictate things successfully."
But city commissions, and governing bodies in general, do this all the time. They are hired (voted) precisely to make sure we all can get through our daily grind in a fair and safe way in a community of vastly different individual needs and wants. Things like road repairs and water purification and school funding and so on. They do a lot of these things, at least the details of which, very much so by dictation. And can be and are successful at it most of the time.
But to the point about treating prices with this sort of laissez-faire attitude...when you let suppliers have complete control of this, they overwhelmingly tend to use for one thing only: maximizing profits. And this happens even with other competitors around. I've used this example before, but I'll use it again here:
In my town we have a small handful of gas station owner who set the gas prices. These prices have been ~10-15 cents higher than the surrounding communities going back at least 40 years. There isn't much anyone can do about it because 1) the station owners are working together on this...off the books, and 2) nothing can be legally proved or even done about it.
About 15 years ago the last independent gas station closed up for good. It was cash-only to save money, had cheaper gas than anywhere else in town, and always had long lines of cars waiting to fill up. But it couldn't survive. Why? Because the other station owners had lucrative exclusive deals with the regional gas suppliers, and the independent station simply couldn't afford to keep purchasing gas at a higher rate...or even get enough gas delivered to cover the demand. So it had to close shop despite being the most popular station in town.
So our town is simply stuck paying higher gas prices in perpetuity. Why? Not because that's the just the way prices are, or because of the almighty and infallible invisible hand of laissez faire markets. It's simply because of greed. And there's nothing anyone can do about it because our laws don't have any power to do so. This is not some rare thing either, it is par for the course everywhere. You just have to look for it.
I guess I will just say that the line between greed and self-interest is in the eye of the beholder. Greed is something that we should discourage, I do agree with that, as all of the traditional deadly sins should be discouraged. I just don't think that designing a political program on the hope that people will get less greedy is a winning plan.
I completely disagree that we live in a world with no where left to develop and finite resources. Julian Simon was right. Paul Ehrlich was and continues to be dead wrong.
It sounds like what you are calling for is something like the medieval Catholic Church. (And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.) From what I can tell, peasant revolts were pretty rare before the late middle ages, so maybe such social control works, although it does not correlate with much generation of wealth.
It's like most things. Greed works to motivate people - in moderation. In it's extreme form, avarice, it becomes toxic and distorting.
Respectfully...I view greed and avarice as pretty much on the same level. They are both bad motivators.
One could try and argue greed motivates people to make money so that they can support their family and pay the bills. But that's not greed at all, that's just basic living. Greed is the excess. Greed is going vastly beyond what one would need to have a decent life, prioritizing more and more wealth above any and all other factors. Like any vice, no one needs greed to be motivated for anything. It's inherently immoral.
At least to me it is.
Fair enough. But, the definition of avarice is excessive greed. So, they aren't quite the same although they are similar.
You free(k) market ppl really hate the idea of ppl being able to choose how they spend their own money instead of having price gougers and rent extractors take it away from them.
Just go move to a Central American country already Jesus Christ! There is such a thing as market flaws. It’s ppl like you who would be the first to die if there was no social safety net. Markets can create corporate towns, force you to work 60 hours a week bc there isn’t any welfare to fall back on and child labor, so there’s less jobs available and less leverage for workers. You libertarians are far too stupid to be so smug. Luckily public opinion isn’t on your side and you goblins only exist on the internet.
Really interesting article. Speaks a lot to what is happening in the UK at the moment too. We're seeing (right/centre-right) talking heads on the TV telling the public not to ask for pay rises because it will cause inflation. How we should all be ready to tighten our belts and weather the economic storm.
Meanwhile, our privatised water companies are on the verge of collapse because they've spent decades paying out billions to shareholders and building up debt, instead of investing in infrastructure . So they're literally pumping shit into the rivers and sea on a daily basis, failing to fix leaky pipes, sometimes failing to provide even a modest level of service. Again, all while CEOs and shareholders are taking home huge sums of cash. And they tell us that if we want them to fix the pipes and stop pumping shit into our rivers, they'll need to put bills up again.
It's easy to look at this and think 'hey actually, it's their corporate greed causing inflation, not my 1.5% pay rise in my desk job.' But one positive is that more and more people - not just the left, but across the spectrum - are calling for water companies to be renationalised. Because even the true-blue home counties types can see that local monopolies that take in huge sums of money and then deliberately fill beauty spots with sewage signify a broken system.