Martin Elson
Some things feel like weather. Rent goes up, wages stay flat, a patent keeps a drug’s price high, and it all seems to happen the way rain does, to everyone and by no one. Much of it isn’t weather. Markets as they stand rest on a great deal of enforcement: property law, contract law, patents and copyright, banking licenses, central banks, courts, police guarding warehouses. That structure has been around long enough to feel natural. It is architecture, and architecture has architects. They had reasons, and the reasons mostly weren’t about you.
That claim needs care, because this site also argues that much order is undesigned. Order Nobody Designed defends language, custom and prices as things no one planned. If markets are just one more imposed system, the two arguments collide. They don’t, once you separate the two layers Kevin Carson separates in “Hayek’s Fatal Conceit.” Exchange is not imposed. People trading what they have for what they want, and prices emerging from millions of those trades, is as close to spontaneous order as anything gets. What sits underneath is different. Property rules don’t come out of the market; the market presupposes them. Who may own land, ideas or the right to issue money is settled before anyone bids, and enforced by someone who can’t be refused. Change those rules and every price changes with them. Cost the Limit of Price follows that through.
So the weather is real: it is the trading. The architecture is the rules the trading runs on. Some of those rules grew, the way much of the common law did. Many were drawn up: enclosure acts, patent statutes, the laws on who may lend. All of them stand because someone enforces them. That changes the question. It isn’t whether to impose a system on a natural one. It is which rules, and the test for rules is the one in Start Here: can people say no, and can they leave?
None of this is held with certainty; Start Here says how the site holds its claims and what would change its mind.
Seeing the architecture tends to make people angry, and anger corrodes if it has nowhere to go. The structure was built over centuries by people mostly long dead, and most of its current beneficiaries are running the program rather than maintaining it on purpose. You can’t get even with architecture. What you can do is refuse to add to it. Don’t defend a toll because it’s legal. Don’t launder cruelty through abstraction, as if a policy that wrecks lives were only a line in a budget. Don’t decide that some category of people falls outside the family for the duration of a project; that is the move every vanguard makes before it does its worst. And in the small structures you do build, a household, a club, a co-op, a team you run, leave the door open and let people say no.
The rest, the systems and the scale and the eight billion people, isn’t yours alone to fix and never was. Carrying it as if it were is how clear-eyed people end up bitter, burned out, or convinced they need to seize power of their own. Ellerman, Carson and Bookchin did their part by handing over a new frame. Your part is smaller and closer: how you treat your partner, your friends, and the few people actually in range. That sounds like a deflation, but it is where the leverage is for any one person, including the ones who pretend otherwise. The discomfort is the cost of seeing, and I’d rather pay it than not see.
Sources
- Kevin Carson, “Hayek’s Fatal Conceit” (C4SS, December 2020). Property rules are prior to the market; prices are only as good as the rules behind them. CC0. original
- Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Farrar & Rinehart, 1944). Markets built by law and enforcement; enclosure; “laissez-faire was planned.”
- David Ellerman, Property and Contract in Economics (Blackwell, 1992). The frame credited to Ellerman in the closing paragraph.
- Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Cheshire Books, 1982). The frame credited to Bookchin in the closing paragraph.