The Left In Knots, Part 2: The free market is based on greed. We should replace it with the state.

The statist left claim that it is the free market, and not anything inherent to human beings, that creates selfishness within individuals. Put another way, that greed is a systematic result of the private ownership of the means of production in a profit seeking free market economy. However, what the left cannot explain is how selfishness is overcome by replacing the market with state planning or regulation.

Decisions politicians and regulators make affect themselves, their political base, their constituency, their private investment interests and their donors while also affecting others. All regulatory policies inherently favour one group at the expense of another and in any single regulation there are often millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of profit on the line. Regulations, in the form of state granted licensure or health and safety regulations, can have the effect of wiping out unwanted competition in any one industry leaving the market captive to a monopolist with massive potential earnings. Corporations, knowing this, take huge advantage of state power by offering politicians and policy makers’ bribes, campaign donations and cosy jobs upon retirement.

What this amounts to is that, as opposed to a free market, the state planner must provide nothing of worth to society to enrich themselves or those in their favour. The effort required to enrich oneself as a politician is multiple times lower than that of a free market where one must offer a good or service that individuals want. As such incentives towards selfishness are multiple times higher for state officials.

The left may claim the state can be restricted from enriching itself by laws restricting, for example, politician’s incomes, corporate donations or corruption; but it ultimately up to the state itself to enact and enforce these. When one party to a contract has a monopoly of power (the state), it can behave in any way it wants without any threat of redress for the victims (society).

Neither will the state, on balance, attract the sort of character necessary to resist the temptation for personal advancement at the expense of society. What is unique about wealth gained through profit, as opposed power, that it attracts such a relatively unethical type of person? If individuals do not behave like angels in seeking profit through the market why will they do so in seeking profit through power?