That Quacking Sound

"MARKETS WORK. GO FIGURE: 'Businessweek reports that Americans appear to be burning less gasoline as a result of driving less.'"

Glenn Reynolds' item

Where's the ethics in this? Where's the politics? I don't know why people keep referring to what's going on with energy as a "market" while it's stepped on by government every mile of the way from the field to your tank, and from the generator to your AC outlets, ad infinitum. And it's supposed to be evidence of markets working because people are being priced out of what's being called a "market"... almost as if it's a good thing or something.

If The New York Times had run a Walter Duranty headline in 1931 that went, "Reports are that peasants appear to be consuming less wheat as a result of eating less," what might have Americans thought of it, or of an economy manifest so? What might have been the right thing to think of it?

My god, the lapse of ethics and politics in economics is just rotten. All over the place you'll see people equating the applications and results of force with voluntary exchanges of values, up and down long production chains from raw materials to finished products, with arbitrary coercive interventions everywhere along the way. I don't know why people don't or can't keep track of the crucial political difference between force and trade, but they just don't. I suppose it's because something useful to consumers is eventually squeezed out the ass-end of the thing after every government shark along the way has had its bite. "It's not capitalism, but it's got bits of capitalism shot through it." (paraphrase of my mate Jid's Brit-bit parody of a Python sketch) It kind of looks like what a market might do, and the CPU's are running on time, after all, so all that quacking out there must mean that this is The Genuine Duck.

Jesus.

Look: resistance to eating one's own children could be plotted along an elasticity curve, too. I can't imagine what's so fascinating about this sort of thing. It's a lot more important to me that Americans are less able to exploit this vital material of such energy density in order to conduct the productive daily lives that they would be able to without all these cramps all over it.

...and being called "markets", to boot. Could we at least not be poking sharp sticks in the body?

Is there no goddamned decency?