“As capitalism sinks into ever deeper trouble, it is time to topple false Gods as part of the process of finding our way to better institutions, and indeed to a better system.”
“Market mechanisms” and “market solutions”: politicians, bureaucrats, media pundits, and academics like to refer to them as if they were somehow politically and ideologically neutral, above partisanship. They are not. Or as if they were uniquely fair and optimally efficient, which they are not either. The market is just another human institution invented and reinvented periodically across human history. Just like other institutions, markets were strictly regulated or altogether excluded when human communities rejected their outcomes as socially unacceptable. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle shared profound criticisms of markets and debated over efforts to exclude or regulate them. Many more critics and debaters followed, thereby enriching the tradition of market criticism.
Markets are one way of distributing goods and services from producers to consumers. They are established when divisions of labor occur
— source rdwolff.com | Richard Wolff | Aug 14, 2022