This is also true of what are very misleadingly called “markets.” Markets, in whatever form they take, are also constructed, managed, designed in specific ways in our particular system, and this goes back for hundreds of years. Markets are typically double-edged. Market discipline is a great thing for the poor and the vulnerable. But for the rich and the powerful, they demand and receive protection from the Nanny State. That’s the way markets have always been, with very rare exceptions, and it’s dramatically true in the United States. We call this “free-enterprise economy,” and so on. That’s only very partially true. For one thing, it’s largely managed internally to huge tyrannies called corporations, which are interlinked in all sorts of ways in strategic alliances and so on.
But quite apart from that, if you have the power, you expect protection from the state, and that’s not marginal. If you look over the dynamic sectors of the U.S. economy today — telecommunications, internet, computers, biotechnology, automation run through it — and look into their history, you’ll discover that virtually, without exception, they were developed, designed and paid for by the general public, at public expense. So cost is socialized. Profit is privatized.
