The only satisfactory response to anarcho-capitalists
Food Politics is a long, carefully laid out indictment of exactly what’s wrong with corporations, specifically as applied to food. When set out in the rapid-fire, matter-of-fact way that she does, you can’t help but feel that there’s a vast, mostly uncoordinated conspiracy to lie to you and increase profits at your expense. Your children tugging at your sleeve to buy them a sugary cereal that’s been marketed as healthful (because it’s fortified with iron or whatever) is the most straightforward symbol of the forces aligned against you. If the market is defined to be “working correctly” when it leads to outcomes that we all would have chosen had we planned them, then the American food-marketing system is surely a case of market failure. And yet the market is working precisely as it’s supposed to: one manufacturer of shitty, unhealthful food is fighting with another manufacturer of shitty, unhealthful food. In some silly sense of ‘best’, the best company comes out on top.
So I think there’s really only one appropriate response when you encounter a ‘libertarian’ who asserts that everything from your failed marriage to your boils will be healed in a more-capitalist world: “No, really, fuck you.”
I’ve been led to believe that there’s not nearly enough shame in this society. People who drive SUVs should be made to feel ashamed that they’re doing so; when they walk down the street, others should cross the road and glare at them. Likewise with libertarians. They are making life worse for all of us. They have the intellectual stature of Holocaust deniers or flat-earthers, and they should be made outcasts in polite society.
I agree with much of what you say here, but the SUV disdain thing I’m not so in line with. I used to do it a lot. I still roll my eyes at Hummers. But it’s hard to say who ’should’ and ’shouldn’t’ have an SUV at a glance.
I completely agree with you on being incredulous about the market as a force for… anything but maximizing profit. Amoral systems tend toward amoral ends. I don’t see why this is so unclear to so many people.
Comment by chris r — January 6, 2008 @ 1:45 pm
I think it’s partly an overgeneralization problem. You’ve got this mechanism that demonstrably leads to good things — i.e., the market, with lots of dudes squaring off against one another. May the best one win. Everyone’s trying to be a dick: I’m trying to charge you an exorbitant fee, and you’re trying to get away with paying nothing. Neither of us can do it, because there are (by stipulation) lots of buyers and lots of sellers. So our private vices become public virtue.
But the setup to that conclusion required lots of things to be true. It required lots of buyers and sellers; in a market with few competitors, it’s much less certain. It focused only on prices; if we’re looking at something more complicated, like “consumer ignorance of nutrition facts,” I submit that conclusions are much harder to come to.
Comment by slaniel — January 6, 2008 @ 10:23 pm
As for the SUV thing: we should discuss more. I’d bet that the fraction of SUV drivers who need them is awfully small. I wonder whether the European cars that I saw while I was there — few and far between, and all of them tiny (à la the Smart ForTwo) — say as much as I think they do about what people “need.”
Comment by slaniel — January 6, 2008 @ 10:24 pm
I agree that “need” and “want” are slippery terms here in the U.S. and that most SUVs are unnecessary (where are all those minivans I used to see?). I just realized I was scowling at people I didn’t know waaaay too much when driving.
Comment by chris r — January 7, 2008 @ 8:35 am
Stephanie wanted to buy a car recently that was exactly like the one she was replacing — namely a Mercury station wagon. Lots of room for groceries and kids, decent fuel economy, etc. She couldn’t find one anywhere, and she was looking pretty hard. They just don’t make minivans or station wagons anymore. She had to settle for a used Mercury station wagon.
Comment by slaniel — January 7, 2008 @ 9:29 am