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Antitrust Civilization Monopolization Paradise Lost World

Permian-Triassic Extinction Event Antitrust

The Great Dying deconcentrated markets:

The complexity of an ecosystem can be estimated by the relative number of species: if a handful of species dominate, and the rest carve out a marginal existence, then the ecosystem is said to be simple. But if large numbers of species coexist together in similar numbers, then the ecosystem is far more complex, with a much wider web of interactions between species. By totting up the number of species living together at any one time in the fossil record, it’s possible to come up with an “index” of complexity, and the results are somewhat surprising. Rather than a gradual accrual of complexity over time, it seems that there was a sudden gearshift after the great Permian extinction. Before the extinction, for some 300 million years, marine ecosystems had been split roughly fifty-fifty between the simple and complex; afterwards, complex systems outweighed simple ones by three to one, a stable and persistent change that has lasted another 250 million years to this day. So rather than gradual change there was a sudden switch. Why?

According to paleontologist Peter Wagner, at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the answer is the spread of motile organisms. The shift took the oceans from a world that was largely anchored to the spot — lamp-shells, sea lilies, and so on, filtering food for meager low-energy living — to a new, more active world, dominated by animals that move around, even if as inchingly as snails, urchins and crabs. Plenty of animals moved around before the extinction, of course, but only afterwards did they become dominant. Why this gearshift took place after the Permian mass extinction is unknown, but might perhaps relate to the greater “buffering” against the world that comes with a motile lifestyle. If you move around, you often encounter rapidly changing environments, and so you need greater physical resilience. So it could be that the more motile animals had an edge in surviving the drastic environmental changes that accompanied the apocalypse . . . . The doomed filter feeders had nothing to cushion them against the blow.

Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution 145-46 (2009).

There is much food for antitrust thought in evolutionary history if you think of firms as representing methods of extracting value from the consumer environment. That makes them like species, all the members of which tend to use the same methods of extracting value from the natural environment. One species of bird uses long bills to get worms. Another uses short bills. And so on.

The Advantage of Incumbency

The Great Dying teaches a number of lessons. First, like the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event about which I have written before, it suggests the advantages of incumbency. The fact that less motile organisms have not reattained their former dominant position in the 250 million years of relative competition that has prevailed since the Great Dying tells you that less motile organisms were not particularly competitive relative to motile organisms. And yet for the 300 million years until the Great Dying they dominated, despite the parallel existence of more motile organisms. Why? Perhaps simply because they evolved first.

Industrial organization economists have long warned about these “first-mover advantages,” but the antitrust laws ignore them. The “conduct requirement” in antitrust holds that simply being dominant is not an offense in itself. There are plenty of good reasons for that rule, because it’s easy to use it to punish justified market success. But one bad reason to support the rule is that the dominant firm is always the better firm. If the history of the Great Dying is any guide, incumbency does sometimes protect uncompetitive firms.

Competition’s Good Side or The Virtue of Theft

The Great Dying’s second lesson for antitrust has to do with motility, for motility means, at least in part, predation and theft. Creatures that move can seek out new environments not yet colonized by stationary organisms feeding off minerals or sunlight. But one of the major things that motile organisms also do is to predate. Motility lets you range across the environment eating the organisms that have done the hard work for you of generating energy from light and inanimate matter.

We think of theft as being a problem in the law. We like to say that theft reduces incentives for innovation and economic growth because it means that innovators can’t fully reap the fruits of their productive labors. The plant that has a leaf torn off by some vicious armored predator has done the environmentally-friendly work of converting light to energy without so much as emitting a single carbon atom, and yet here the fruits of its labors have been stolen from it. Fortunately, we say, in the business context the law is there to stop such theft.

But the fact that the flourishing of motility after the Great Dying was correlated with an increase in ecosystem complexity—a reduction in species dominance—suggests that theft is not necessarily bad, at least if deconcentration of markets is your thing.

This is a familiar point, approached from a different angle. Industrial organization scholars have long pointed out that the strength of intellectual property protection matters. Make the patent term too lengthy and innovation will fall below optimal levels, because inventors won’t be able to build on prior art to create the next generation of inventions. It follows that if patent rights are too strong, then theft of intellectual property could actually lead to more innovation, and richer and more complex markets. Similarly, when a monopolist ties up a source of supply and uses it to suffocate competitors, theft would bring more competition to the market.

Antitrust recognizes the importance of theft for competition, although antitrust—probably wisely—doesn’t say so in quite such stark terms.

Every time antitrust enforcers order a dominant firm to supply an essential input to competitors—and antitrust does do that occasionally, even in the United States—antitrust is, objectively speaking, revising a property right. Which is to say: authorizing disadvantaged firms to steal from the dominant firm.

The nice thing is that when you’re the law you get to define the boundaries of the law, so you can plausibly say it’s not theft that you’re authorizing, but rather that the dominant firm’s ownership rights over the essential input never actually included the right to deny the input to competitors.

Regardless how it’s characterized, antitrust’s forced dealing remedy does allow other firms to take the fruits of the defendant’s labors, and for a price that must be less than their value, otherwise the taking would provide no competitive succor to the beneficiaries. That’s legalized predation in the biological sense. The aftermath of the Great Dying suggests that it’s probably justified, at least if the goal is to deconcentrate markets.

Competition’s Bad Side or The Horror of Predation

But at the same time, one must proceed with caution in celebrating the complexification of ecosystems that followed the Great Dying, because complexity and competition are not ends in themselves.

There’s a reason for which biologists also refer to the great age before any predators had evolved, the Ediacaran period, as the “Garden of the Ediacara.” We can view the rise of motility and predation, and the demise of filter feeder dominance after the Great Dying, as leading to a golden age of competition and complexity. It’s the golden age we live in today (or lived in until we started wiping out large parts of it starting with the end of the last ice age).

Or we can view the rise of motility and predation as destroying a peaceful Eden in which life competed principally on the virtuous project of converting the inanimate into the animate, of extracting energy from the physical environment, rather than from other living things.

From this perspective, if over the first 300 million years of the existence of complex life evolution tended to hit a wall, and for eons life did not get much better at converting the inanimate to the animate, then that says something about the limits of biology. It does not tell us that the motility, predation, and theft that followed represented an improvement.

From this perspective, the rise of motility and predation was instead a symptom of evolution’s defeat. When life could no longer advance by getting better at converting inanimate matter to animate matter, it turned on itself, leading to the hell of predator-prey competition that has characterized the past 250 million years. If only there had been a world government in the Ediacaran capable of enforcing the basic rules of criminal and property law!

Life would have stayed happy.

In general, the antitrust laws today are much more sympathetic to this dark view of predation than to the other. Antitrust enforcers for the most part shy away from revising property rights. And the legal system as a whole, of which antitrust is just a part, gives great priority to property. The natural world is, of course, the state of nature. And if there is one thing that separates civilization from the state of nature, it’s the concept of property, the notion that theft is to be curtailed, and that evolution within civilization is to take place along the old Ediacaran lines, with each attempting to better himself other than at the expense of others.

Over its first 300 million years, complex life does seem to have hit a wall in bettering itself through virtuous, non-predatory competition, at least so far as the biochemistry of energy production out of inanimate matter is concerned. Our inability to generate energy other than by burning fossil fuels shows that for all our own ingenuity we humans haven’t managed to outdo nature either. We live off the productive labors of other creatures, including both living plants and those dead so long as to have been ground into oil. That makes us, and the horror we have meant for the planet, the logical extreme end of the triumph of motility and predation after the Great Dying.

But the fact that civilization’s vision, honored however often in the breach, is fundamentally Ediacaran, suggests to me that there is hope. Climate disaster is effectively forcing us to extend the property laws we enforce within civilization to the life outside of it. With luck, the virtuous, non-predatory competition that results will help us achieve the breakthrough that life could not, and allow us to advance into new methods for generating energy from the inanimate.

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Apocrypha Miscellany World

Of Course They Could Have Carried It

Not quite: “In 1453, Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, and although his troops plundered what they could carry, the building was saved and turned into a mosque,” writes The New York Times, which makes it sound like the building was saved by sheer luck.

In fact, the Turks treated Hagia Sophia with honor. In contrast to other churches that had been seized and converted into mosques, the conquerors refrained from changing its name, merely adapting it to the Turkish spelling. (“Ayasofya” is the way it is written in Turkey today.) Mehmet, says Ilber Ortayli, director of the Topkapi Palace Museum, the former residence of the Ottoman emperors, “was a man of the Renaissance, an intellectual. He was not a fanatic. He recognized Hagia Sophia’s greatness and he saved it.”

Remarkably, the sultan allowed several of the finest Christian mosaics to remain, including the Virgin Mary and images of the seraphs, which he considered to be guardian spirits of the city. Under subsequent regimes, however, more orthodox sultans would be less tolerant. Eventually, all of the figurative mosaics were plastered over. Where Christ’s visage had once gazed out from the dome, Koranic verses in Arabic proclaimed: “In the name of God the merciful and pitiful, God is the light of heaven and earth.”

Fergus M. Bordewich, A Monumental Struggle to Preserve Hagia Sophia, Smithsonian Magazine, Dec. 2018.
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World

Forgetting Why You Won

The New York Times tells us that “China has laid the groundwork to dominate the market for protective and medical supplies for years to come[]” because it has pursued a policy of subsidizing strategically important industries, like PPE, including by protecting them from foreign competition.

History tells us why China does that. It’s the reason for which the victim tends to remember how a fight was won better than the victor. For about a century ending in 1949, China came close to being wiped off the map repeatedly because it couldn’t control access to its own markets and didn’t have dominance in any strategically important industries to use as a bargaining chip. Foreign powers used their control over strategically important industries, not least those relating to defense, to prize open Chinese markets to foreign goods, wiping out local production. It’s not for nothing that one reads in an economic history that “British competition de-industrialized most of Asia . . . .”

That didn’t come about because a large gap in technology or industry existed between China and the rest of the world when China’s fall started in the early 19th century. On the eve of the industrial revolution, China was a wealthy country and could defend its borders. It was a difference of degree that mushroomed into near destruction. The Chinese never forgot their lesson in the foundations of modern power.

But we did. Did we really think that after more than a century of struggle to regain control over their own markets, at the cost of millions upon millions of lives, the Chinese were going to throw their markets back open to the rest of the world, laissez-faire-style, and run the risk that domestic industry would be out-competed once again? Did we think that the Chinese would not sit down and think carefully about how to take advantage of the rest of the world’s fleeting, pie-in-the-sky romance with free trade silently to achieve dominance in strategically important global industries? Did we think the Chinese didn’t learn their lesson?

Whatever you may think of the Chinese government, this is no kakistocracy happily selling its people out for a bit of short-term gain and a life of luxury in future exile, whatever the Times may once have wanted us to believe with its deep dive on Chinese princelings. Whatever it might have been for a spell decades ago now, today China is no North Korea, hobbled by corruption, operated as an extension of a few personalities. It is a government that knows and jealously guards the national interest.

It would be nice if ours did too.

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World

Ethno-Nationalist When We Want to Be

John Broich’s explainer on the Kurdish question is a good example of the contradictions of contemporary American Kurdophilia. He seems to lament the failure of the Kurds to construct what he admits would be an ethno-nationalist homeland out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, even though America today is built upon a rejection of ethno-nationalism of all kinds. As I have observed before, it’s easy to advocate self-determination for peoples abroad, but a lot harder to do it at home, because self-determination weakens and fragments. That makes it good foreign policy and bad domestic policy, at least in the short run, but that also means that advocates of Kurdish statehood don’t have principle on their side.

Broich seems to think that it follows naturally from the fact that the Kurds are “a group of around 40 million who identify with a regional homeland and common historical background, but are now divided between four countries,” that they ought to have their own country.

But I rather doubt that he would support calls by white nationalists to carve an independent white homeland out of the northwestern United States, calls by black nationalists to carve an independent black homeland out of the United States, or calls by Native Americans to carve an independent Native American homeland out of the United States. Or indeed calls by blue staters to secede. Carving up the United States would surely eliminate the region’s current global military and economic dominance.

The fact is that if we believe in democratic pluralism at home, then we can’t try to protect oppressed groups abroad by supporting their calls for statehood, either diplomatically or militarily. The best we can do is support their calls for democracy and equal treatment within whatever countries they happen already to belong. At least, that’s the best we can do if we want to act toward them in a way that is consistent with the way we treat ethno-nationalist aspirations here at home. (Of course, we might not want to run our foreign policy based on consistency and principle, but that’s not how America’s advocates of Kurdish statehood have been making their case.)

Broich observes that the failure of the allies actually to create an independent Kurdistan after World War I resulted largely from European self interest. The British and French were themselves worried that hacking Arabia into too many pieces would make it difficult for both to maintain their spheres of influence in the region, so they scrapped plans for Kurdish self-determination. But the fact that the Kurds lost their chance at statehood because of European self interest doesn’t mean giving them a state would have been good for the region, or consistent with the principles according to which we organize our own country today.

Broich’s unreflective observation that Woodrow Wilson “himself was explicit in calling for a new, broadly encompassing Kurdistan,” sums up the contradictions in contemporary American advocacy of Kurdish statehood. For Wilson, of course, surely believed in white ethno-nationalism for America, and famously segregated the federal government.

At least he was consistent.

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World

Rewards Not Ours to Give

What I do not understand about all the criticism of President Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds is why, exactly, the Kurds should be entitled to a state in northern Syria. I had always thought that carving up sovereigns and doling out territory to favored groups was by general agreement consigned to the dustbin of imperialist history after World War Two. Especially by us Americans, with our relatively anti-colonial past.

But that’s exactly what anyone lamenting President Trump’s withdrawal from Syria seems to be calling for: that we back, militarily, the attempt of a particular group to carve its own ethnic homeland out of an existing UN-recognized country.

In other words, while other Syrians were fighting the Assad regime to create a more democratic, tolerant Syria, the Kurds were fighting the Assad regime to grab land for themselves. That’s hardly the sort of democratic behavior we normally think of ourselves as supporting. Yes, the Kurds helped us fight the Islamic State, but Syria isn’t ours to carve up and dole out to our allies like so many slices of reward cake. Yes, the socialist Kurdistan Workers’ Party has a women’s movement, but again, Syria isn’t ours to carve up and dole out to socialist women’s movements like so many slices of reward cake, especially when we’re not (yet) voting socialist here at home.

And while I’m on the subject of the beatification of the Kurds, I wish to note the irony of the House’s recent rebuke of Turkey for attacking the Kurds in Syria by voting to recognize the Armenian mass killing as genocide. For, as any Armenian will tell you, the Kurds played an important role in carrying out that genocide a century ago.

President Trump made the right call on Syria.

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Despair World

More on the Chinese Nile

We ought to know that we’ve hit a new level of denial when we become convinced that our global dominance is secured by the superiority of . . . our pop culture:

Ten years ago, I joined a U.S. trade delegation for the chance to visit, as a journalist, a remote part of China that borders both North Korea and Russia. As we traveled around, local Chinese greeters proudly pointed out the contrasting vistas: rugged empty hills in North Korea and isolated clusters of Soviet-era buildings in Russia, whereas in China, commerce and construction abounded between booming border towns. In one such town, Hunchun, population 250,000, regional officials asked me if I planned to write anything. Perhaps something cultural, I suggested. I hoped for a window onto Chinese life in this far-flung zone.

The next night they laid on a manifestly ready-made, two-hour pageant of old Manchu ethnographic music and dance, with fluttering feather fans and colorful costumes. I explained to my conscientious hosts that I had hoped for something more contemporary—perhaps portraying current life on the frontier, something about real people and ideas. My request engendered a lot of brow-furrowing discomfort. I had asked for the one thing that their country’s authoritarian system has found it almost impossible to deliver at any level: a vibrant popular culture.

China has become globally competitive in many fields with blinding speed, from the economy and military to science, medicine, sports and even in cultural areas such as cuisine, classical music and contemporary art. But it can’t seem to compete with the West in crucial mainstream genres such as movies, popular music, fashion, novels and the like. I say “crucial” because, without universalizing its culture at a popular level, China cannot ultimately sell a lifestyle for the world to emulate, a set of aspirations that people elsewhere might embrace. Nor can it make its engagement with other cultures more palatable, less like an intrusion by outsiders.

Melik Kaylan, China Has a Soft-Power Problem, The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 5, 2019).

What the Chinese offered this author was the highbrow. But our tastes have eroded so badly over the last generation that we no longer even feel shame at disliking it. Indeed, we have even come to see the persistence of highbrow art in other cultures as a sign of weakness!

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Antitrust Monopolization World

The Lord Grand Secretary on Regulated Monopoly

The present plan for unifying the salt and iron monopoly is not alone that profit may accrue to the state, but that in the future the fundamental of agriculture may be established and the non-essential repressed, cliques dispersed, extravagance prohibited, and plurality of offices stopped. In ancient times the famous mountains and great marshes were not given as fiefs to be the monopolized profit of inferiors, because the profit of the mountains and the sea and the produce of the broad marshes are the stored up wealth of the Empire and by rights ought to belong to the privy coffers of the Crown; but Your Majesty has unselfishly assigned them to the State Treasurer to assist and succor the people. Ne’er-do-wells and upstarts desiring to appropriate the produce of the mountains and the seas as their own rich inheritance, exploit the common people. Therefore many are those who advise to put a stop to these practices.

Iron implements and soldiers’ weapons are important in the service of the Empire and should not be made the gainful business of everybody. Formerly the great families, aggressive and powerful, obtained control of the profit of the mountains and sea, mined iron at Shih-ku and smelted it, and manufactured salt. One family would collect a host of over a thousand men, mostly exiles who had gone far from their native hamlets, abandoning the tombs of their ancestors. Attaching themselves to a great house and collecting in the midst of mountain fastnesses and barren marshes, they made wickedness and counterfeiting their business, seeking to build up the power of their clique. Their readiness to do evil was also great. Now since the road of recommending capable men has been opened wide, by careful selection of the supervising officers, restoring peace to the people does not wait on the abolition of the salt and iron monopoly.

Esson M. Gale, Discourses on Salt and Iron : A Debate on State Control of Commerce and Industry in Ancient China, Chapters I-XIX: Translated from the Chinese of Huan K’uan with Introduction and Notes 34-35 (1931).
Categories
Annals of American Decline Antitrust Despair Regulation World

Why Progressives Once Fought Tariffs as They Fought Monopolies

The Nineteenth Century understood very well that tariffs have the same effect on consumers as do monopolies. Tariffs prevent foreign competitors from undercutting the prices of domestic companies, because the foreign competitors must now pay the tariffs, and that in turn allows domestic companies to raise prices. It is for this reason that in the Nineteenth Century the same Progressive movement that sought to prevent monopoly pricing, either through antitrust or rate regulation, also sought to replace tariffs with income taxation as the source for government revenue. And succeeded.

But what millions of Americans understood in the late Nineteenth Century is greeted as a bizarre and surprising result today.

Compare:

President Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imported washing machines has had an odd effect . . . . It is hardly surprising that the tariffs drove up the price of foreign washers. Perhaps more unexpectedly, they also prompted American manufacturers to raise their prices.
Companies that largely sell imported washers, like Samsung and LG, raised prices to compensate for the tariff costs they had to pay. But domestic manufacturers, like Whirlpool, increased prices, too, largely because they could. There aren’t a lot of upstart domestic producers of laundry equipment that could undercut Whirlpool on price if the company decided to capture more profits by raising prices at the same time its competitors were forced to do so.

Jim Tankersley, Trump’s Washing Machine Tariffs Stung Consumers While Lifting Corporate Profits, N.Y. Times, April 21, 2019.

With:

Beginning as early as the 1860s, the Democratic Party challenged Republican power with a biting critique of the central element of the consumption-tax system — the tariff. . . . The Democratic Party developed a general attack on special privilege, monopoly power, and public corruption — one that harkened back to the ideals of the American Revolution and the early republic. Most important, the Democrats described the tariff as the primary engine of a Republican program of subsidizing giant corporations. In 1882, in his first public political statement, the young Woodrow Wilson declared that the tariffs had “Monopoly for a father.” . . . . In the face of these problems, millions of Americans . . . regarded the progressive income tax at the federal level as the next-best alternative . . . .

W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A History 77, 79 (3d ed. 2016).
To battles won that were then fought anew,
Our bodies hastened while our minds withdrew.
Categories
Annals of American Decline Despair Regulation World

Congestion Pricing Is Just the Latest in Progressives’ Betrayal of the Regulatory State

Once upon a time, most ways into New York City were tolled. Then the original progressive movement hit. Progressive economists like Harold Hotelling argued persuasively that because the marginal cost of running another motorist over a bridge was near zero, there was no economic reason for which everyone who wanted to drive over the bridge should not be allowed to do so. The way to recover the vast fixed costs of bridge construction was not by charging a toll, but by extracting contributions from motorists that would not discourage them from using the bridge whenever they wanted to do so. And the way to do that was to tax them, regardless how much they actually used the bridge.

This solution to funding infrastructure construction — taxation combined with free access — was a regulatory solution, and not just any kind of regulatory solution, but a rate regulatory solution, because the government chose to set the price of infrastructure access: only you could easily miss it, because the government set that price at zero.

In this way, the original progressive approach to roads and bridges was not different from the progressives’ approach to markets of all kinds, which was to regulate terms of sale with social justice in mind. Thus the government in this period encouraged AT&T to recoup its own fixed costs by charging high prices to wealthy long-distance users, freeing the company up to provide local calling services, which were used more heavily by the poor, at very low rates. And the government forced the railroads to recoup more of their fixed costs from intercity routes used by the wealthy, even though competition would typically have held prices down for those customers, and to use the savings to charge lower prices to rural customers.

The progressives’ approach to regulating roads and bridges though a combination of taxation and zero price access was socially just, too, because of course it meant that city driving was free for everyone.

Then, for reasons that remain unclear, progressives seemed to forget what the entire regulatory project was all about, and in the stunningly short space of three years in the late 1970s, they collaborated with conservatives to tear down most of the regulatory state at the federal level. They deregulated the airlines, trucking, railroads, and natural gas. And in ensuring decades the federal government stopped regulating banking, and telecom rates as well.

One might have thought that the resurgence of the progressive movement in recent years would have led to a rediscovery of the original progressive model of price and quality regulation, but instead the movement has seemed time and again to mistake policies that the original progressives fought bitterly to overcome for progressive solutions to today’s problems. This has played out to a farcical extreme in the recent progressive love affair with the antitrust laws, which promote the unrestrained competition that the progressives fought so hard to overcome through the regulatory model.

And it is sadly in evidence now too in the progressive love affair with congestion pricing, which amounts to no more than reimposing the toll system that the original progressives fought so hard to take down. To be sure, the original progressives missed something important about roads: they congest, and they pollute. So Hotelling was wrong to assume that the marginal cost of allowing another driver to cross a bridge would always be near zero. That cost stays near zero until the bridge reaches the optimal level of congestion, after which point the cost of adding another car to the bridge is very high indeed.

But the solution to the problem of congestion isn’t to start charging users a price for access. That just takes us back to the bad old days when being poor meant you lost your right, even, to access that most quintessential of public spaces, the streets. The solution is to ration access to the streets using a criterion that isn’t tied so closely to wealth. And technology makes that easier to do today than it ever has been.

I’ve argued that one approach would be for the city to use a smartphone app to decide who gets access based on a combination of first-come-first-served and proximity to public transportation. You could log in from the comfort of home, the app would decide whether the city can accommodate you based on current traffic conditions and whether you are near a subway, and you would instantaneously receive an authorization to proceed or a request to go into town by other means that day. A colleague has suggested to me that those with jobs in the city should get priority.

Regardless how the rationing mechanism might be structured, the point is that price — and its sinister correlation with wealth — doesn’t need to play any role. Nor should it, unless you are so naive as to believe that those who are willing to pay more are always those who can put the streets to more productive use, rather than simply those for whom a dollar isn’t worth as much as it is to others, because they happen to have more of them.

What’s so troubling about the progressive embrace of congestion pricing is that progressives don’t seem to care about the classist consequences, setting today’s progressives rather starkly apart from the originals. Instead, today’s progressives view the price system as the solution not just to big city traffic, but climate change more generally — in the form of the carbon tax. What they don’t seem to understand is that there is no magic to price when it comes to rationing access to resources that are in fixed supply, like city streets, or air. Price is just another ration card, just another way of deciding who takes and who doesn’t. Only unlike other rationing mechanisms, price gives the rich priority.

Why would progressives ever opt, among the myriad criteria to use in sorting those who get to take and those who do not, to choose the one that selects for wealth? This approach may of course be self defeating — the gilets jaunes movement that almost toppled the French government consisted of poor people aggrieved by a gas tax aimed at fighting climate change, a tax that the government was forced to withdraw.

But even if reliance on price rationing doesn’t prove a political loser, it’s still socially unjust. Why should the poor bear the burden of saving the world’s climate? Yes, under carbon taxes and congestion pricing, the rich do end up paying, but they also end up getting to drive. The poor might end up better off, if some of the proceeds of the tax are redistributed to them, but they still won’t get to drive. Why? Because if they were to benefit so richly from redistribution of tax proceeds, or from exemptions designed to temper the effects of the tax, that they were still able to access the streets as much as the rich, why, then the carbon tax wouldn’t actually reduce emissions after all!

It is this sort of seemingly naive betrayal of the regulatory state, and the civic values that it stood for, by those who ought to be sticking up for those values, that makes the current progressive movement a shadow of the original.

Categories
Annals of American Decline Regulation World

Markets and American Decline

Operating from headquarters in a hilltop villa in the capital city, protected by government soldiers, a businessman with strong ties to his own government back home, a belief in his own manifest destiny, a desire to go down in history as a bringer of industrial development, and deep experience in completing hydropower and mining projects, submits a bid to the country’s leaders to build them a new oil refinery. The bid is backed by a loan guarantee from one of his country’s largest banks, provided as part of an initiative by his country’s government to win the friendship of other nations by providing development support.

Lacking an office in the country in which the refinery is to be built, a former mid-level government official with no experience building anything tries to cobble together a bid of her own from shared office space in her own country. She finds an investor — not at home but in a third country — gets an expression of interest from some executives from a firm in her own country with refinery construction experience, and places a bid in which she promises to secure the rest of the funding for the project by selling shares in the venture on capital markets. When ministers visit her country as part of consideration of her bid, they are shocked to be shown around shared office space, and insist that she line up a more secure source of financing. She begs her government to sign on, but the most she gets is a letter from a government lender saying that it would considering lending a fraction of the project cost.

Once upon a time, this would have been a tale about American power. The first person would be a TR, say, supremely confident about his place in history, carrying out a Marshall Plan (if you will forgive the anachronism) reflecting the ambition of the U.S. government to use aid to secure the allegiance of the world. The second person would be some luckless underfunded competitor operating out of a backward country with a weak state lacking the vision to promote its businesses and interests abroad.

But of course the first person in this story is Chinese and the second is American. As the article in today’s Times strongly suggests, the American won the bidding only because Uganda’s leader hopes to encourage American competition, and thereby to improve the terms he gets from the Chinese in the future. Indeed, the American project may well fall apart, as GE — the firm with expertise in refinery building that had shown interest in the bid — has started to exit that line of business.

How did we get here? The answer is our decades-long obsession with market magic. There has been much talk in some circles about the “fissured workplace,” the converting of many jobs into “independent contractor” positions that allow employers to treat their employees as temp staff with no job security and few benefits. Firms no longer have employees, but instead simply tap contractor markets, buying labor hours when they are needed and not when they are not, much the way you make a run to the supermarket for lemons when you need them and not when you don’t, instead of tending your own lemon tree.

Well, more than just labor markets have fissured. Everything has fissured, as our obsession with markets has spread to every corner of the economy since the 1970s. Just look at how the American bid for the refinery came about. Not at the instigation of our government, despite its recognition that China’s dominance in African business is putting us at a great strategic disadvantage, but because a mid-level foreign policy official, thrown out of work by the exit of the Obama Administration, saw a market opportunity. She then went into a set of different markets in order to try to cobble together a bid. She rented shared office space, tapping the fissured commercial real estate market, in which businesses no longer own their own space, let alone build their own custom spaces, as they once did. She also had no funding of her own, but promised to tap the fissured funding markets by selling shares in the project. And she had no experience building refineries, so she also promised to tap the fissured project market, potentially by bringing GE into the project. Markets, market, markets.

All these markets are supposed to make our economy and nation stronger, by ensuring that everything is allocated to the people who need the things the most. Workers can be repurposed via the market from one job to another at a moment’s notice, office space can be saved for the most important projects, cash can flow to the most important projects, and so on.

But what market excess really does is expose our economy and nation, to risk. The trouble with markets is that they are risky. At the end of the day the Ugandans got a bid that was worth little more than the paper it was written on. It was in effect a commitment from an amateur to use acceptance of the bid by the Ugandans to convince investors to invest, refinery builders to build, and so on. What the Chinese offered, by contrast, was a government-backed commitment to fund construction of the refinery by an experienced firm. The parts of the Chinese offer were so well integrated — so unfissured — that the Chinese even insisted on importing 60% of the labor and materials from China to complete the project. That’s right, the Chinese would bring in their own laborers to complete the work.

No wonder the American bid was at a severe disadvantage. If you were taking bids to have your floors redone, would you go with the man off the street with no experience, no operations, and no money — even if he offered the lower price — or the experienced flooring operation that’s ready to get to work as soon as you sign on the dotted line?

When you do business with integrated operations, instead of markets, you carry less risk, because integration reduces risk. It makes sure that the money is there, the expertise is there, the workers are there. You may still bear the risk of non-completion, but that risk is lower. And when the state gets behind its businesses in these deals, as the Chinese government has via its Belt and Road initiative, risk is reduced further. The Chinese drive a hard bargain, using the infrastructure they build to secure repayment of the loans, but they can do that because they have something credible to sell.

If the story of a businessperson trying to get along in an international deal — one that forwards the President’s own policy of going head to head with China — without government support, without expertise, without financing, without even an office, sounds the story of a failed state, that’s because a fissured economy — an economy in which everything, at every level in the supply chain, has been turned into a market — is a failed state. It’s a country that can have no vision or unity of purpose because its government is paralyzed by the need to respect market boundaries, unable to direct the economy according to any vision, and in which every individual and private firm is paralyzed too, at the mercy of markets in everything that they do. Therein lies the state of nature.

Of course it was not always this way. Until market dogma took over the country in the 1970s, American industry looked a lot more like Chinese industry does today. Long-term commitment to workers and suppliers was the norm. Indeed, in America’s many regulated industries, the government required firms to provide packages of services, instead of fissuring the services into the a la carte menus that have proliferated today. The government promoted international development as a strategic goal, most famously in the Marshall Plan.

And, perhaps most importantly, America had a taste for greatness. It would not have thought that “the threat posed by the Belt and Road Initiative to American interests is debatable.”