Mendacious "Conspirators"

The recent news has led me to think a lot of sophomoric (and conspiratorial) thoughts about economics, especially about the basics, the four factors of production (as they are called), land, labor, capital, and entrepreneur. It’s said that every economy, be it socialist, capitalist, syndicalist, corporatist, or none of the above, must involve these factors. In some of those systems the factors don’t look like the ones we in capitalist countries have come to know and love. Socialist or communist central planners assign land its purpose and cause labor to work wherever the need seems most pressing. Every year the planners roll out a so-called five year plan and pass it off for the ambitions of an entrepreneur. They gather capital like manna from heaven (the way I do those “adjustments” I enter into my checkbook every month). The gains occasionally paid to the people by collectivist regimes depend on forces that closely resemble the dictatorial whims of those ancient Gods who habitually favored the physically powerful, while enslaving the rest. To history’s credit, arrangements of the overtly collectivist sort have fallen out of favor, being replaced by the competing conspiracies of the free market.

But don’t get me wrong. Those socialists and communists meant no harm. If their subjects wound up as serfs, that was no concern of the central planners. Their subjects were the ones with the problem, not them. The planners were just trying to make a living, and God knows, you can’t blame ‘em for trying..

Capitalist economies are only slightly different (or so major league conspiracy theorists would have us believe). The central planners in those setups don’t call themselves “central planners.” They go by the name “bureaucrat” or “Corporate Executive Officer.” I’m sure you thought the CEOs and the bureaucrats were enemies. Think again (the theorists advise). The bureaucrats work to make the world safe for CEOs, so the CEOs can plan how to maximize the profits of the centrally planned organizations they control.

This “conspiracy” confuses the way most folks think about the way the factors relate to one another in capitalist economies. The factors are supposed to operate independently of each other as self-contained areas of competition, but they realized years ago that if they were always at each others’ throats, none of them would profit. At least that’s how three of them thought, the land owners, the capitalists, and the established entrepreneurs. The laborers were originally excluded from “the enlightenment.” They’ve joined in now, but only as small time operators, still hung up on achieving socialist “equality.” The unions representing labor have never been much more than pains in the ass. They started out as pure craft cartels, creating little socialist enclaves that sought – and got – favorable treatment for their club members, at the expense of everyone else. The long term effects of the craft union movement are still with us. They’re the reason today that plumbers earn more than school teachers. But the craft unions themselves, after passing through a period in which they displayed overt socialist sympathies, finally transitioned into legitimately organized crime gangs. That worked fairly well until they refused to pay protection to the bureaucrats. They exist today as political front organizations that function to keep the proles in line. They take orders from the conspirators at the top of the great pyramid of Central Bankers, Knights Templar, TV Evangelicals, movie moguls, and baseball team owners who run the free world.

But again, don’t blame any of those people, not the unions, not the conspirators, not anybody. They’re just looking out for number one, same as we all do. They’re just better at it than the rest of us.