market forces

A favorite line in the Wall Street Journal is "let market forces take care of {anything you care to add}." According to the WSJ anything and everything can be solved this way and should be solved this way. It is like a mantra. And there is no doubt in my mind that market forces can "fix" things, depending on how you define fix. If fixing things means letting go and see what happens then the WSJ is the do-it-yourself newspaper par excellence.

The main reason why the WSJ aficionado's want to let the market fix things is because they are afraid regulations will cut into their profit margins. It is not that they want to fix things or that they even care. It is just that they are afraid as all hell that someone would do something that would take even a 1,000th of 1 % of their profit margin. In the old days this used to be known as greed and it was considered bad. Now if anything, greed is good. Never mind, it won't last.

Letting the markets decide is not only synonymous with doing nothing, it is also the dumbest thing one can do. But why do you think rich people, who ought to have some smarts -after all they were smart enough to move wealth in their direction and makes us believe this was the right thing to do- would take such a course in the face of overwhelming evidence that it can't last ?

There are several reasons why. First off, they are incredibly greedy. So greedy that their fear of missing out on something is many times greater than their reason or common sense. They will follow that fear until they are absolutely, 101% sure that there is no other way to go. And even then they will first try to shift the blame and the obligation of a fix onto others. Unfortunately when things move fast, such a strategy is too little too late.

Secondly, they feel immune to most threats. They live in ivory towers and are largely unaffected by bad news. It is only natural for them to think that this will continue forever. Marie Antoinette, the one who famously said, "Let them eat cake." never saw it coming either. She thought she was above it all and untouchable. Why me worry? Most superrich feel the same way. They think they will survive and survive well.

Thirdly, there are many so many apocalyptic predictions -and better than 99.9% of them never materialize- that most people are very suspicious of doomsday scenarios. The few times that everyone really worries -as in the famous Y2K "crisis"- are usually non-issues and the aftermath of those just reinforces the notion that all doomsday scenarios are unrealistic.

But it is not predictions of doom that should worry you. It is simple facts. The fact that most fisheries are overfished. The fact that we can see the end of oil and fossil fuels. The fact that Lake Mead is dropping below the Las Vegas city intakes. The fact that the climate is changing. The fact that the rain forest is shrinking. The fact that the population is exploding. What all these facts tell you is that something will happen soon unless we take serious steps and implement severe restrictions.

Sure, the markets will take care of it. But markets take care of things in a very simple way. They crash or collapse causing immense and long-lasting hardship. Surely we are intelligent enough to find a better way ?