What is the invisible hand of the market? Proponents make it sound like it will save us all. All you have to do is believe. Have faith. Deregulate. It’ll take care of things. Just you see. “Trust me.”
Let’s break this down.
The Market:
The Market is just another way of saying economics. Because that’s what The Market is. People buying and selling goods and services.
I learned everything I needed to know about economic theory the first day of class. Economics is people. You and me. And the entire theory is predicated upon three false premises.
- People make rational decisions.
- People have rational choices.
- People are informed.
People do NOT make rational decisions. We’re an irrational species. It’s in our genes. Fear and desire war with each other like two rival siblings. Sex sells. That’s not rational. And you’re not going to change it. At least not any time soon.
People do NOT have rational choices. When all the companies are moving overseas to China and Korea to do all their manufacturing, do you really have a choice about the products you buy? Company A makes their products in sweatshop B while company C has their products manufactured in sweatshop F. Or maybe I shouldn’t buy what they’re selling? That isn’t always possible. You need clothes, so unless you can afford the premium prices for American made (and if you’re at all familiar with Abramoff and the Northern Mariana Islands, you know how much that label means), you’re stuck with whatever you can afford. That’s not a rational choice. It’s a need. Same as food and water. Electricity. Roads. Transportation. The list is nearly endless.
Of course, it’s impossible for people to discern rational choices when they don’t have the information necessary to make that distinction.
And people are NOT informed. Commercials are not information. They’re propaganda. There are very few sources of information. Consumer Reports is the most obvious example, but there’s only so many products they can test in a month (and there’s been some controversy in the past over their unbiased reporting or lack thereof). The internet is also a good source for some types of information. But most people are like my mom. They get their info through word of mouth. What. The. Fuck!?!? Did we return to the Dark Ages? What happened to newspapers and TV? Investigative reporting?
Sex sells. Rational choices in information services dwindle until few or none exist. People become more and more uninformed. That’s how it works. You don’t have a choice. And that’s “The Market.”
The Invisible Hand:
People. Businesses. Any entity which has purchasing power. The more purchasing power an entity has, the more control it has over “The Market.” All those big businesses and people so rich they can buy your home with pocket change? Any one of them has more purchasing powering than a state full of us poor slobs. At least. And it’s a lot easier for the wealthy few to work together to maintain their control than it is for us masses of filthy peasants to band together to take it away. Hell, the wealthy don’t even need to work together to keep us down. They just keep us eating away at ourselves. Blacks against whites. Whites against blacks. Women against men. Men against women. Everyone against Hispanics. Against Muslims. Against scientists. Against Christians. Against Jews. Fear. Fear! FEAR!
Keep you afraid. Keep you separated. Keep you down. That’s how they maintain control. That’s “The Invisible Hand.”
. . . .
When the bully beats you every day, there’s no reason to believe he’ll stop because you got rid of the rules supposedly punishing that sort of behavior in favor of allowing “social ostracism” to keep him in check. There wouldn’t be those rules if social ostracism had worked in the first place.
So when I hear “The Invisible Hand of The Market”? Give me a fucking break! The filthy rich of a bogus economic theory, more like.
I reject it. Totally and utterly. It’s a load of crap. It’s there to brainwash you into believing that things will somehow work out because you have control. YOU DON’T! The people who have control are the ones who own the big corporations. They own the information sources so you can’t be informed; you can’t make rational decisions; you have no rational choices. They divide you. They make you afraid. They sell you sex and make you think you have a choice. They did this because they know what I’ve just told you.
This is class warfare, people. It always has been. It never went away. They just used their propaganda machine to make you think it’s some kind of Conspiracy Theory. To make you think you’re crazy. You’re not. Up is still up. Black is still black. That hand really is trying to choke you.
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Works in the lab, not in the wild.
Exactly.
as having the same amount of credibility as horoscopes.
Horoscopes might be slightly ahead.
and just give in to the fact that dogs rule the world…
kinda does away with the invisible hand. It’s manipulation, pure and simple. The market is controlled by people. And people manipulate to make a profit. It’s called greed.
And this is why an unregulated market doesn’t work. Over-regulation doesn’t work, either. There needs to be something in the middle. Which is, of course, what most western economies do.
I’ve recently read The Real Wealth of Nations by Riane Eisler. Highly recommended.
I struggle with trying to buy locally-made non-sweatshop goods. But it’s not easy to figure out what you’re actually buying. And for clothing, for example, the components could have come from some sweatshop textile in Bolivia. But the final product could be made locally.