Your Mom’s A Blog

As a country we seem to have some idea of fair play.  We want things to be fair and we seem to pride ourselves on our fairness.  The wealthy in the free market can very literally spit in the face of fairness or fair play and get away with it totally unscathed.  Let us belabor the obvious for a moment.  In a free market there must be buyers and sellers.  Without both of those there isn’t much of a market.  There must also be producers and consumers.  Without production, there is nothing for the sellers to sell, nothing for the buyers to buy and therefore nothing for anyone to consume either.  The wealthy are usually able to gain control of production because, as previously mentioned, the system favors wealth.  The wealthy are able to more easily collude and manipulate the market and the government to their ends.  But the bottom line is that there must be people at the bottom producing the items that are being sold and people at the bottom buying the items that are being sold.  Without those there is no system.

The wealthy have fought to prevent anyone else in the free market system from manipulating the system as they have.  In the early days of American economic growth and expansion, companies hired mercenaries to scare people through the threat of physical harm or even death from joining the union.  They would use these same people to break strikes.  And they could go back to the oldest trick, praying on the desperate to get what they want.  The number of companies guilty of these kinds of abuses in American history is long indeed.  But, mysteriously, when the union tries to organize, the company is the little guys’ best friend.  The teamsters are the big scapegoats of the corporate world.  They say things like “fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage.”  But for something like a thousand years they have been proving that without intervention they would rather pay a full day’s work with a starvation wage, if they can.

Some people have argued that a person should have the right to do with their money what they see fit.  It has been said that no one has the right to tell you how you must spend your money.  But this only seems to be applied to companies fighting off unions.  As an average middle or lower class citizen, how much we pay for anything is often dictated to us.  In the US most of us need fuel to thrive.  Our cities are spread out and we can’t live, shop and work within easy walking distance.  Yet early in 2009 the price of oil was as low as it was in 2000.  Gas in 2000 in Missouri cost 99¢, today it is around $2.50, which is about what is cost in early 2009.  If supply is not shrinking and demand is not shrinking and demand is not outstripping supply, what other factor is making gas so expensive?  Moreover, in many places the individual cannot choose the provider of basic services.  Water, trash, electricity and gas, are all provided by one entity and the users of these utilities have prices dictated to them, no negotiation is possible.

In certain situations the free market, even when it works perfectly and no one is cheating the system, causes problems.  Consider the United States legal system.  We have a system where the prosecutor’s job is to prove guilt regardless of the defendant’s guilt and the defense’s job is to prove innocence regardless of innocence.  You might argue that this system is inherently flawed and perhaps it is, but the free market and profit motive render it even more ineffective.  A good prosecuting or defense attorney must win cases to be considered good and therefore get more clients.  Statistically speaking since a person can only be guilty or innocent, the by random chance, any accused individual should be guilty 50% of the time and innocent 50% of the time.  Granted this is a vast oversimplification.  Though I have no proof, I suspect that an attorney who only wins 50% of his or her cases is not considered a great attorney.  What this indicates is that a great attorney must sometimes convict the innocent, or acquit the guilty.  Thus, in order to make as much money as possible, an attorney has a clear and obvious motive to subvert the legal system when and where they can to guarantee a win.

There is currently, before the Supreme Court, a case challenging the immunity of prosecutors.  Two prosecutors were determined to have framed two men for murder.  Both were sentenced and served 25 years of a life sentence before the prosecutors’ misconduct was discovered.  If these attorneys had not been motivated to win in order to make money they would have simply lost their case due to lack of evidence as opposed to manufacturing evidence to get a bogus conviction.

The profit motive promoted by the free market often presents people with the choice of doing what is right, or doing what is profitable.  It is difficult to make an argument for the benefit of hard drugs.  Despite the fact that their use is basically always detrimental to someone or some group, there are people who sell these drugs.  It might be argued that the profits from these drugs are very high because of their relative scarcity due to the fact that the government has made them illegal.  However, people still sell cigarettes, cigars and pipe tobacco; people still sell soda, chips and candy.  Obviously the government has hindered free trade when it comes to drugs, but the system still rewards it.  The system also rewards decisions that take capital from the workers and gives it to the shareholders.  The system rewards plans that increase prices legally or illegally to take more money from the consumer and put it in the pocket of the company.