The word “market” is usually associated with the stock market or perhaps a farmers market. This is a truncated view based only on what we see or hear reported in the financial press. The market in the real world is a vast collaborative effort involving exchange relationships all over the world, designed by no one in particular, to serve material needs and thus affects the whole of our lives.
For most of our lives, we never imagined that the market could fundamentally fall apart. For decades, the complexity and reach of market forces have only grown, resulting in the biggest prosperity boom for the many in the history of the world. Everything has been there for us.
Some years ago, I asked one of the world’s best experts on economic freedom whether the world’s system for material provision could ever really be shattered. He said no. It’s too entrenched, too powerful, too all-encompassing, too complex. No power in the world can overcome it, he opined.
Then one day, in the course of a few short weeks in 2020, he was proven wrong. We’ve learned that while the market isn’t designed by governments, much less administered by them, it can be destroyed by government. That’s exactly what they set out to do with totalitarian edicts to “shut down the economy” for a few weeks that lasted years.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men have yet to put Mr. Market back together again. You feel it in many aspects of your daily life. Employers can’t get decent employees. That’s not only because today’s workers lack skills and a work ethic. It’s also because more than 5 million people dropped out completely. The number of people not in the labor force vastly exceeds what that number was in 2019. Half the people who left never came back.
![(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.theepochtimes.com%2Fassets%2Fuploads%2F2023%2F07%2F03%2Fid5371453-1_JAT_2023.07.03-1200x868.png&w=1200&q=75)
Employees with high-end, no-show jobs are feeling very insecure. Rightly so. Service sector workers are overworked and underpaid, especially given inflation.
Travelers face an amazing barrage of bad luck from suddenly canceled flights to shocking and hidden fees everywhere.
Goods and services routinely fluctuate wildly in price. Just a few months ago, eggs were nearly unaffordable. Now, they’re so cheap that stores have to limit the number of buyers.
And inflation continues to make a mess of everything. I was just in a Goodwill over the weekend, and the prices were higher than the same goods’ retail price from a few years ago (which I could tell because the original price tags were still on there). This place used to be considered a charity to help the workers, but that wasn’t at all obvious to me. This is now where the bourgeoisie shop and work.
Take a brief look at the insane market for cars.
May the gods favor you if your car breaks down. Even a punctured tire can create a debilitating problem of waiting weeks or even months for a replacement. Service on used cars is in extremely short supply. The service technicians are AWOL, and supply chains are still a mess. Unless you’re willing to use tape and bubble gum to keep it together, you could be without your own wheels for a long time.
The average age of a car on the road these days is 12.5 years, which is a record. This is partly because cars last much longer and drive more miles than they used to, which is a good thing. But it also means more repairs. And this reality is making the older cars much less useful. When you can get repairs done, they’re wildly expensive.
Another reason there are so many older cars on the road is that the new ones were in extremely short supply for much of 2020 and 2021. When they did become available, they were unaffordable, and many rolled off the assembly line without modern features. This is because the chips used to run the features weren’t obtainable at any price.
The story of the chip problem is a drama of its own. U.S. carmakers stopped ordering chips when the shutdowns hit, based on the decades-old practice of only holding in inventory what one needs right now. In late fall of 2020, they tried to start up again, but the chipmakers had moved on to manufacturing for gaming consoles and home appliances.
Lacking new cars, buyers turned to used ones, which are extremely expensive because of parts shortages and a lack of service workers.
We aren’t Cuba yet, but consider that case for a moment. The stoppage of progress after Castro’s communist revolution is most obvious in that the streets even today look like an antique car show. There are wonderful cars from the 1940s and ’50s, after which, progress stopped. This isn’t just because of the embargo but because the country stopped creating wealth.
But think of this. Those cars from the 1940s and ’50s could be repaired by anyone with some acquired skill. You can improvise parts and substitute functionings. They were analog cars. Today’s cars are digital and run by computers. They’re kept in good repair thanks only to complex supply chains. When those breaks, these cars become tin cans.
Today’s world of cars in a Mad Max environment wouldn’t be souped-up gas guzzlers battling it out in the desert. It would be landfills filled with useless aluminum, with many of the cars poisoned entirely by old batteries.
This is the absolute worst time for the Biden administration to be pressing everyone to adopt an electric vehicle. The federal government has given Ford, which is facing terrible times, a $9.2 billion loan to beef up its EV production. Government itself has become the major benefactor of the company as it tries to satisfy an extremely limited demand.
Experience so far suggests that electric cars will always be a niche market. It’s a second car for urban residents who don’t have far to drive, which is to say that they’re fine for the 15-minute cities that government wants to impose upon us. For everyone else, their expense and pathetic range in winter make them nothing but a downgrade from gas-fueled cars.
They’re no better and actually probably worse for the environment. Once government has managed to saturate the market enough with these things, it'll be conveniently discovered that they too run on “fossil fuels” that endanger the environment. There will be another big national campaign for us all to bike everywhere.
One can’t help but notice that the exorable trend in policy today is to make the United States more like Mao’s China, complete with universally issued androgynous clothing and a bicycle on every porch, with extreme controls on culture and consumption to purge every last reminder of the West from our minds.
The wild and destructive pretense that government could turn off the market like a light switch is the root cause of much of the chaos of our times. It’s still with us and getting worse.
May this be a lesson of our times and all times. The market is delicate, complex, and so broad and deep that it surpasses human understanding. The planners only pretend to understand it, and every attempt to control it creates chaos that they can’t possibly anticipate.
