How Elon Musk wields disproportionate power over politics - Andy Brown
Markets are incredibly efficient. Every microsecond of every day someone somewhere is voting with their money and sending signals out about what they want to be provided. Those messages enable shops and service providers to make rapid changes to supply what the community needs.
So in theory it is one giant highly democratic process in which the hidden hand of the market ultimately makes the right decisions and resources are allocated in the most efficient way.
Yet the votes aren’t equal. A billionaire gets a much bigger say over what happens to resources than someone with a disability that prevents them from working or someone employed in a factory in Yorkshire.
Markets don’t care where things come from and will direct production to the place that is the cheapest and most convenient. All too many British communities have suffered decades of hammering poverty and neglect as a consequence of markets closing off opportunities for them and taking those jobs elsewhere.
In an unmanaged market decisions get made solely on the basis of the cost benefit analysis for the individual or the business. If it is cheap to throw sewage into the river or release deadly chemicals into the air then that is what will happen. If it makes money to fuel a civilisation by digging up and burning fossils then we all suffer from a rapidly warming planet and an increase in the ferocity of wind, rain, and heat waves.
When things go wrong it is necessary for governments to step in and exercise some control. Enthusiasts for unmanaged free market economics haven’t got a great track record of success.
They turned a blind eye to the suffering as we lost our manufacturing. Then they told us that removing regulation from financial services would securely replace those jobs. That gave us the 2008 crash that is still responsible for a third of our entire national debt.
They advised us to ease regulations on the building industry. Which killed a lot of people in horrible ways in Grenfell Tower and resulted in huge repair bills.
They told us monopoly water providers would be more efficient once privatised and operating under market forces. The result was high bills, low investment and filthy rivers.
By comparison the most successful economy over the past 40 years has been China which took the decision to use the power of markets when it was helpful but to get government to consciously plan change when markets needed guidance or control.
Unfortunately the Chinese state has also proved to be very good at unhelpful interventions such as setting up prison camps staffed by brutally enforced labour from ethnic minorities.
So the sensible model to follow is a mixture of free markets and planning by a government that is accountable to the public at the ballot box and which isn’t able to be pushed around by those with access to a lot more money than the rest of us.
Right now that model is proving very hard to come by. When one single individual owns as much wealth as one third of Britain’s entire national production there is a real danger of the country being dominated by a small clique of ultra wealthy oligarchs.
Imagine that you got 1,000 millionaires together. That would be a powerful group of people. Now do that another 1,000 times. That group of one million millionaires would not have as much money as Elon Musk.
That gives him an inordinately large market power. He can buy Twitter for several billions and take a casual view about losing money on it provided it allows him to pump out propaganda about the value of his company stocks.
As an immigrant he can issue a stream of lies about the danger of immigration. As an extraordinarily rich person he can inform the poor about how well he understands the best interests of those who are struggling to get by in long neglected communities.
Should the government seek to exert control over his activities he can afford the best lawyers and drip feed criticism of that non-compliant government into social media in ways that make it look like it comes from ordinary people.
He can afford to use his small change to fund political election campaigns. Which is one of the big reasons why we have Donald Trump in power and you and I are paying so much for anything that has to be transported to a shop.
The far right spent decades telling us all how important it was to allow markets to be free from control. Now that the jobs have been exported that same far right is being heavily funded by oligarchs. Who are busy telling us it is a bad idea to tax oligarchs. That oligarchs should be free to publish lies. That it was fine for oligarchs to sell software that stripped children naked and put them in pornographic poses.
We urgently need sensible national and international controls on the oligarchs.
Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley.