The Free Market -- Fighting to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory again
Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 04:23:54 PM PDT
The World Bank is populated by Milton Friedmanite free-market cheerleaders. And for the last 20 years they've been telling the starving nation of Malawi that they should not subsidize fertilizer for their farmers, because the "market" would take care of solving their problems.
It turns out once again that free-marketdroids are wrong. Malawi reinstated their subsidy program last year, and they're now turning away food aid.
Who'da thunk it? There's a reason, of course. And I've talked about this kind of thing before.
Markets do not exist in a vacuum. I'm less and less impressed by the intellectual savvy of economists as I learn these things. I remember seeing a bumper sticker that trumpeted "ECONOMICS -- Easy to learn, vital to teach!" I wondered if they were "teaching" Chicago school free-marketdroidism.
Here's the problem I have spotted a couple of times now with the free-market philosophy. When an economy has a basic dependency -- a condition where there can only be input for a product -- it seems that allowing the free market to control that product is a guaranteed recipe for catastrophe.
Take oil. Oil is the basic foundation of our energy based economy. For 70 years or so we've allowed oil interests to dominate our economic and political decisions and although things have USUALLY and TEMPORARILY worked out, it turns out that by themselves those oil interests are unable to choose for the benefit of the economy, rather choosing only for their own personal benefit. The only beneficiaries of this system are the ones who were first to stand between the rest of the world, and the spigots out of which the oil is pumped. Unregulated, the energy industry has run amok, poisoning our atmosphere and deliberately ripping gaping holes in our land, all the while screaming like angry toddlers at the mere thought that our economy might be freed from their thralldom.
In an agrarian economy, fertilizer fills that vital function. The economy can't exist without it. Providing it would seem to be of critical interest to the government of the nation. Why wouldn't they want to ensure that enough was available? The only people who could benefit from restricting or controlling the supply would be a handful of otherwise unimportant economic players who could in a fit of greed or short-sightedness (I repeat myself) gain tremendous profits from restricting supply.
But World Bank "experts" told Malawi to stop fertilizer subsidies. Under immense pressure they complied and promptly began starving their people. After then deciding to ignore this "expert" advice, Malawi is turning away food donations. The conclusion should be obvious: those free-market principles do not apply to a critical foundational good like fertilizer.
But of course, guess what: "experts" who are self-assigned don't take mere real-world evidence as a repudiation of their bullshit theories.
Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi’s policy, though they criticize the government for not having a strategy to eventually end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn production estimates are inflated and say there is still a lot of room for improvement in how the subsidy is carried out.
"The issue is, let’s do a better job of it," said David Rohrbach, a senior agricultural economist at the bank.
Of course, "let's," Mr. Rohrbach. Because you did such a fucking good job before the Malawi government took over from your clueless ineptitude that you managed to starve people to death in service of a brain-dead ideology.
The arrogance of these people is appalling. There is no joy in finding out how catastrophically wrong and useless free-marketdroids really are, not when people don't just go homeless but actually starve to death because of their shitty ideas. Schadenfreude isn't really the word to describe it.
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