The Mouse Might Yet Roar...

Capitalism - you gotta love it [or not]! Stores and fast-food chains across the US are rapidly hiking wages out of sheer desperation due a crippling shortage of labour due to the pandemic [source: Associated Press]. I think that really emphasises just what is wrong with our current [non] free-market system. For a market to be truly free, pricing flexibility has to subsist on both sides of the employment divide: wages, profit chains and retail values are inextricably linked in a finely balanced equation.

The problem we have increasingly faced in the last forty years of largely unfettered markets is that the equation has been deliberately mutated into a kind of spreadsheet formula: one dimensional and omnidirectional;  under the sole control of the capitalists themselves. Throw in societal structures that have existed since the days of feudalism, with their subtle layers of control and coercion, and you have a toxic mix in which the few continue to flourish at the expense of the rest of us.

The pandemic has thus demonstrated the multi-way nature of the market economy: the interdependence between ownership, the means of production and the market; a relationship that is neither simple nor straightforward. Workers within a free economy are not simply cost-factors in the balance sheet of goods production and sale. They also represent the other half of the market equation, without which there would be neither production nor sale, and hence no market at all. That fine balance has increasingly been ignored over the decades since Thatcher effectively took the brakes off the greed economy and set us on the path we were careering down until Covid-19 threw itself under the wheels.

Just as with World Wars, the irony is that it takes a global catastrophe and millions of deaths to get us to even imagine the finely tuned, collaborative markets that we could enjoy so easily if only politicians weren't almost always in the pockets of the rich, and proper checks and balances were applied to market activity: it doesn't fall to either capitalism or outright socialism to achieve this - we just need to apply some rules and stick to 'em.

The next global event that threatens us is already waiting not so quietly under the smokescreen of the current one: climate change. If we mess about in like manner for much longer on that front, no amount of money, or number of yachts and expensive gew-gaws will save the rich, let alone the silenced majority.