The image above was made by @amberjyang with Midjourney using the prompt 'a line of empty storefronts in minneapolis.'
Empty storefronts are everywhere in my hometown of Minneapolis. Groups of fentanyl users can often be seen swaying improbably in front of the vacant spaces. In a free market system, the cost of these spaces would fall to a level where adventurous entrepreneurs were willing to lease them. Instead of letting this happen, the City of Minneapolis is now subsidizing rent for select companies. From a recent news story about it:
Take a walk around downtown Minneapolis and you'll see them: empty storefronts — one after another. Now, the city of Minneapolis is opening up its checkbooks, spending $224,200 — money previously approved in the 2024 budget — to combat the problem.
In other words, the city is handing a quarter of a million dollars in tax money directly to landlords. While this is a relatively small program, it could easily set precedent for ever larger handouts to property owners. The same property owners who have been price gouging at every opportunity, to the point that their properties are now hilariously unaffordable. In other words, they caused the problem with their greed and they're being rewarded with our tax dollars. The problem itself will of course not go away until prices actually come down, which is unlikely ever to happen with the government artificially propping up the outrageous amounts.
A similar pattern is evident throughout our economy. Public funds are injected into companies that might not be able to operate at all in a truly free market environment. Sometimes these subsidies are direct, as with the example above. But there are also a great many indirect subsidies distorting our economy. According to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report, millions of full-time workers aren't paid enough, and must rely on government assistance for basics like food and housing. This amounts to billions of taxpayer dollars a year, paid mostly to retailers and landlords, so companies like Wal Mart and McDonald's don't have to raise their wages to a reasonable level.
Our economy appears even less free when you consider policy interventions that shield companies from liability for the harms caused by their products. Drug companies don't have to take responsibility for any damage caused by their vaccines. Oil companies don't have to take responsibility for their impact on human health and the environment. Single-use plastics would be very rare if manufacturers had to pay for their safe disposal.
And then there's the issue of preferential treatment in awarding government contracts. Some companies are favored over others by politicians and this favor isn't at all related to merit. The companies with friends in city hall or in Washington win while everyone else struggles to compete in the unfair environment. In the extreme, this results in lobbyists dictating policy that makes it impossible for small or mid-sized companies to operate profitably.
A truly free market would mean an end to direct and indirect corporate subsidies. Protectionist trade policies like tariffs would also have to go if our free market was to be global. Personally, I'd support transforming our economy into a free market system, but only if everyone's individual lives were subsidized by universal healthcare and a basic income equal to the cost of survival. A free market system would be inherently unethical otherwise, to the extent that it relied on coerced labor from unwilling labor market participants.
In our situation, we have a totally distorted economy and a national currency that's rapidly losing purchasing power. Prices need to come down and everyone knows it, but when they do inevitably fall it may provoke a crash. Personally, I'd welcome a real estate crash that brought prices down to about 10% of what they are now. I'd also welcome a similar crash in the healthcare sector and in several other areas.
Right now, the economic environment in the US favors corporate entities over human beings. Our corporate subsidies dwarf our direct subsidies to individuals, which is totally backwards. It's about as helpful to average people as trickle down economics. Or quantitative easing.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.