When people talk about the free market and how it operates, they take as a given the ‘law’ of supply and demand. This is one of their axioms, i.e. self-evident truths that need no proof. But the law of supply and demand is far from axiomatic, indeed many societies for great swathes of their history have not used it at all. Merchants, farmers, pastoralists and craftsmen knew their costs and expenditures and had a rough idea of how much they needed to add on in order to live well, and that was how the price was arrived at. The idea that you can charge a great deal for something because it is in demand leads to the logical conclusion that when there is famine you can charge a fortune for food, which is completely indecent.
\nThe current situation is an extreme logical extension of that, for people who have grown obscenely wealthy, through derivatives trading and managing hedge funds, which are themselves many multiples of total world wealth in this new science fiction view of economy, are now looking for tangible uses to which they can put their intangible and illusory money, and so they are buying commodities: gold, oil and now food, and thus we experience the rise in prices. For middle class Westerners this is bad enough even if merely somewhat constricting, but for the impoverished here and in much of the world this is a genuine danger.
\nSupply and demand is not a ‘law’ but a strategy of trade when it has gone beyond the limits. Things have their values, and profits have their natural limits. This spurious law is just one example of economics being a pseudo-science erected in order to justify theft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When people talk about the free market and how it operates, they take as a given the ‘law’ of supply and demand. This is one of their axioms, i.e. self-evident truths that need no proof. But the law of supply and demand is far from axiomatic, indeed many societies for great swathes of their history … <\/p>\n