Edition 011: The Market as a Design Choice

When you fill your gas tank, buy groceries, look for a job, or scroll through your phone, you are participating in markets. We are all told that markets are efficient ... What we are not told is that the system was built on fictions. Not lies, exactly. Fictions. Things the system treats as true because it needs them to be true, even though they are not ... The market is a design choice. It was built by people, for purposes, under conditions, and it can be built differently ... Karl Polanyi, an economic historian writing in 1944 ... identified three things the market treats as ordinary products that are not products at all: land, labor and money ... Land was here before any of us. It doesn't truly belong to anyone. And yet the market treats it as a product ... Labor is human activity. It's your time. The hours of your life that you exchange for a paycheck ... Wage is not a reflection of what a human being is worth ... It is the minimum the market can get away with giving you depending on how desperate you are ... Money feels like the most obviously real thing in daily life — you either have it or you do not — but money itself is a fiction ... The winners are consistently the people who own the land, control the labor, and create the money. The losers are consistently the people who live on the land, sell the labor, and need the money. The fiction serves the transaction. The consequences fall on the people.