These are not natural things and processes. Mankind, through governments, created them, and can change them, even radically. It is paucity of imagination and, as Galbraith effectively said, the smoke and mirrors created by those who set economic policy to make it appear more complicated than it need be in turn to justify intervention, that conspires to perpetuate these great injustices – almost all of them disbenefitting the vast majority and benefitting the rich, tiny, minority.

I don’t know what you are talking about, as I thought it’s obvious from my comments that I am in favour of “an intermediate state which defends the mixed market”.

I am happy to argue about the extent to which the state should intervene to defend variety and small businesses against the tendency for large chains to dominate.

The comments I was making were aimed at fundamentalists of the sort who would accuse Mrs Thatcher of being a “social democrat”, who it seems to me must regard any such intervention as “nanny state”.

‘We’ are subjected to our state whether or not we like what it offers.

‘We’ are having this conversation.

It is not up to the state to ensure availability, it is up to the state to ensure the limits of availablity are to our satisfaction and enforce these limits.

I don’t see that you can predict with any accuracy whether or not a top-notch restaurant on your high street would fail (though I suggest the high street of most town centres probably isn’t the best location for such operations).

Finally, you can’t have your cake and eat it – either it is the costs or the profitability of the business which prevents it from existing: if the market supports it the costs will be borne. So no, you are incorrect to suggest that I’m making the case for central planning.

It is shockingly obviously you haven’t read Schumacher (either that or you couldn’t be bothered to read the three-word title of the book) in which he rejects both big-state and small-state absolutist solutions and settles on an intermediate state which defends the mixed market.

Frankly it is bizarre that you could misinterpret my comment in the way that you have.

Hurrah! Now you’re talking, old bean!

“If we are to satisfy every individual need we must ensure the availability of the widest possible variety of choice.”

Who’s “we”?

Bespoke products may offer better value, it’s surely up to the market whether people are prepared to pay for it or not. Is it up to nanny state to ensure the more costly but “better” product is available? Who says it’s “better”? Nanny state?

The Michelin guide may not have noodle bars and hamburger chains in it, so how come my High Street is full of these things and has no Michelin starred restaurants? If a Michelin starred restaurant opened up, it would fail – people aren’t willing to pay what it costs to run one of those. It’s up to anyone to buy a local shop and run whatever business they can run in it and make a profit. Noodle bars, kebab joints and burger chains tend to prosper best. Are you saying nanny state should take the line “it’s good for you, I’ll take your tax money and subsidise Michelin starred restaurants in your High Street”?

A good grasp of human nature is rooted in an understanding of evolutionary biology. Chesterton did not understand evolution. In fact he rather arrogantly denied it. His essay The Man in the Cave is favourite reading for creationists.

maybe you need to be reminded of the ‘diseconomies of scale’ argument put forward by EF Schumacher in Small is Beautiful.

I agree that bespoke products sometimes cost more, but often they offer better value too.

I also agree that industrialised mass-production can be more efficient, but much as fast food is convenient the michelin guide doesn’t include any noodle bars or hamburger chains.

If we are to satisfy every individual need we must ensure the availablity of the widest possible variety of choice.

The library may well have gone to Seton Hall, as it has a big GKC establishment:

http://academic.shu.edu/chesterton

the work of which, I think, rather illustrates my comment about GKC being held firmly in the grip of right-wing Catholics.

I was thinking of blogging about Prince Charles the other day blaming the economic situation on “consumerism”. I think he’s got it the wrong way around, and your comments above fit into this – consumerism is what we are “forced” into by the banking and land systems.

cf “The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics” (Michael Rowbotham)

I mention Chesterton because I’m fairly familiar with his work, and he did come top of the reading list your referenced. Despite his whimsical style, underneath he was often spot on where most other thinkers at that time were badly wrong, and he had a good grasp of human nature, which I’m afraid, many others even in this same line of mutualism small-scale etc don’t have. Unfortunately, he has rather been captured by right-wing Catholics who see in him what they want and ignore what doesn’t fit in with their ideology. He did himself no good either with his jokey anti-semitism, which looks particularly horrible in the light of events which occurred after his death.

A point I have been making elsewhere is that there’s something of a tradeoff between society working because everyone fits into traditional roles set by custom and that society’s sense of morality, and a society which is more free in what people can do, but then requires more state intervention to pick up the pieces – this is why in my comments on the Baby P case I’ve posed the issue that if we are going to allow people to live fairly loose lives and have children as they will, inevitably we must balance that either by expensive state intervention in child protection issues, or just accept that sometimes Baby P cases will happen. Chesterton’s “home, family and Church” line picked up on this, in a way which many advocates of a state-free or at least loose state society skirt round.

Now, I can see your heart’s in the right place, but I’m afraid your line “we’d all be using small scale local services if it wasn’t for the wicked state” just doesn’t wash with me. For example, sure I too like the idea of small scale local suppliers feeding and clothing me, but guess what – when I go shopping, I go to the big chains. So do most other people. When given a choice and ask to cast their pound vote in the free market, they cast it for the biggies. I can’t agree they do this entirely because they have been forced to. So to me the idea that a more free market state is going to break down into small suppliers is nonsense. But, yes, I do see the big suppliers as in many ways just as responsible for making us dependent in a “nursery Britain” way as the welfare state.

You note Microsoft as big bad business, yes, it got in at the right time and established a standard. People use Microsoft products because they like the idea of a product they can pick up and use anywhere they are because everyone else uses it.

Am I saying “the world has become so bland that everyone needs Coke and Nestle cereals because they don’t have the imagination to want anything more individualistic”? No, but I’m noting that’s what people do buy. Are you going to step in as Nanny and tell them they shouldn’t? Sure, it would be nice if they didn’t, but in the real world they do, and I know even I do. I do it because it’s readily available, and I know what I’m going to get wherever I am. And, sorry, but the economies of scale in manufacturing mass market products DO make them cheaper than alternatives. Sometimes it’s nice to experiment with new things, but sometimes comfort leads me to the familiar, and I can’t be bothered to research into the alternative. And, yes, small scale bespoke products do cost more, I buy my clothes from a big supplier because I can’t afford my own tailor. So, I suspect, do you. One may very well hope that changes in technology will change that, but I’m not convinced that the sort of “let the market rip” ideology of the article which started this thread would lead to that happening. It certainly hasn’t during the times this ideology has been dominant since it became the fashion in the 1980s.

Sorry, Jock, but what you say on this reminds me so much of how the Trotskists refused to see how real human beings work, and were so convinced by their ideology that they fitted the real world round it rather than vice versa, with villains conveniently brought in to blame every time things didn’t work out as they said it should.

These four monopolies have not been touched. They assert more influence than ever before. Influence that always tends to screw the poorest and enrich the richest. And if we continue to tinker without offering a rememdy for these influences we are part of that consensus. Maybe a nicer, cuddlier, less well known part, but a part nonetheless.

So sad when it was our ideological forebears that grasped those problems and began to try to do something about it before the socialists took over the left.

Actually, I think the modern economy depends on such firms because the economy of scale they provide gives us a wider range of choices and cheaper prices.

Cheaper than what? Cheaper than Microsoft products perhaps? Cheaper than food would be without subsidy and barriers to entry (like the loss of small abattoirs through EU regulation, say)?

Are you suggesting it is entirely due to the state that most of our food now comes through a few large supermarket chains, and without the state we’d all be using small corner shops?

The fourth and fifth biggest of which are mutuals. The second biggest was described last year as a “ten billion pound property company with a small grocery business on the side” by one of its largest shareholders. They get us cheaper food because they are able to screw farmers who have already been screwed by landlords because of subsidies and for the larger ones increase the cost of our food because of the same subsidies. That’s a huge mess of intervention right there. I thought people understood almost as a given that our food was way more costly than it could be because of state intervention, and that the big supermarkets rely as much on their monopolistic presence, bolstered by state planning regulations and their skewed use of land compared with independents.

The way that small banks and building societies have coalesced into larger ones – all due to the state?

Banking is the supreme example of state manipulation. Setting absurdly high barriers to entry so only the biggest can really compete. The very stuff they deal in is manipulated by the state on their behalf (need you be reminded who demanded the creation of the Federal Reserve system – clue, it wasn’t exactly the Meatpackers union).

Each town would have its own small builder of motor cars were it not for the state … oh, come on, now.

Interesting that in Britain, until nationalization (that’s confiscation by the state – the height of interference), that’s not far off the truth.

What actually seems to be the case is that small scale mutualist industry and services have survived better in those parts of Europe which have more rigid control of the economy with laws designed to protect them.

I think you put too much emphasis on size. Mutuals do not need to be small – look at Mondragon in Spain, €36bn in assets. I tend to think they would be smaller. But since you cited the motor industry, there are hundreds of small and medium sized enterprises go into the creation of a car, even by the biggest auto-giant.

Look at your own “industry” – we would not even be discussing this in this fantastic medium that’s going to change the world if it weren’t for individuals coming together in mutualist type arrangements – if it were left to Microsoft, all we’d have is a bunch of patents and hugely expensive software and little choice.

The fact is that though you CLAIM to be oh so different

Patronizing, much! Not enough to get me to leave the party though, sorry!

from the free market types such as Thatcher and Bush

You still haven’t grasped the gulf of difference I’m afraid. In what way is creating vast private monopolies in place of public ones, giving sweet deals to your mates like Murdoch and Halliburton and defending a monetary and property system that robs the poor and concentrates wealth remotely like someone who wants to see those monopolies of power busted apart?

you who claim your fundamentalist free market is true liberalism and the Trots of old.

Whatever.

The reality is that the sort of small scale local business on which your 19th century economical liberalism worked has disappeared.

Indeed, in many cases, it has all but disappeared. But it has disappeared because of corporate welfare not despite it. Corporate welfare is nearly always directed at organizations that can supply the requirements of some grand scheme or other.

The game has changed because the large scale of things – which provides us with many benefits – means it just doesn’t work in the way it did when it was much easier to regard a simplistic free market approach as quintessentially liberal.

Benefits of scale were far more important when people were less able to communicate directly with other people. Large trans-national corporations doing deals on our behalf to buy coffee from Ecuador or chocolate from Ghana were also massively boosted by the skewed financial system they controlled (many of the biggest commodities firms have seats in the IMF/World Bank structure so they can help pick and choose which countries to screw next by application of the same monopolistic monetary system as screws the rest of us). Nobody is arguing that at some stage in the development of world trade such merchant adventurers were necessary and the firms they gave rise to useful.

But that was then, too, and we are on the cusp of such global interconnectivity that their importance will wane, unless you are really saying that the world has become so bland that everyone needs Coke and Nestle cereals because they don’t have the imagination to want anything more individualistic, even as the world and its multitude of different cultures is opened up to us on such a grand scale.

When you joined this party, from what you said, we still needed to book most international calls, it took three flights to get to Nairobi (no weekend breaks in Mombassa then – in fact very few overseas holidays in general), and if we wanted a pen pal our schools organized them for us, and we did it in long hand with something called paper and a pen. The world has swung back in favour of the individual, and if states refuse to recognize that it could become very messy indeed (especially as we can now so much more readily see how psychopathic our “leaders” are compared with Mr Wilson sitting behind a BBC desk to deliver his party broadcast).

Then you go on to comment at length about Chesterton happening to be one of about two hundred “suggested reading” as if mutualists somehow take him as gospel. If you looked through that list a bit more, I think you’d find that “suggested reading” does not mean “these people are all mutualists and you have to believe what they said”. After all, the list contains work from both Naomi Klein and William Kristol – I can’t think of any outlook on life that would regard both of them, simultaneously, as gospel.

I think it may now be your turn to “come on” Matthew. I despise Thatcher with all of my heart, but how exactly did she defend the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor? Surely what you have said there is so much easy lefty banter?

I have looked at your “Mutualist” web site, and I am pleased to see there a lot of reading which has influenced me in the past. Good to see Chesterton and Belloc there, for example, I retain my membership of the Chesterton Society, but I do note when one mixes with these people one finds they tend to be right-wing Catholics.

So here’s one problem – modern day people who admire that sort do often tend to see in it what they want, and are thus far more kind to modern market economics than Chesterton would be. The distributists wanted real property to be distributed, not paper property. Chesterton was horrified at the idea of one many owning two shops, how would he have coped with Tesco’s? The big problem with distributism, it seems to me, was for it to work as intended it would actually require a very heavy state which investigated everything you owned, and if it was more than enough to support you, would take it from you and give it to those who had less. Chesterton himself, in some places, does seem to support taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but very few of his modern admirers have picked that up, and modern supporters of the free market believe any form of wealth tax or the like to be anathema.

The other thing is that Chesterton and his admirers supposed quite a strong moral force in society, which would cause people to interact naturally in a mutualist way. That was why Chesterton was also part of the Catholic revival. Chesterton gained a reputation as an anti-semite which he has never been able to shake off because the Jew to him became symbolic of the outsider who wasn’t part of the cultural norm and who thus disrupted the unspoken but universally respected rules of interaction between people on which mutualism depended.

So Chesterton was very keen on marriage and the family, and suspicious of social libertarianism. I suspect the modern liberal who tends to froth at the mouth at the very mention of Christianity (Laurence … ) would find this side of him very hard to take, yet it was integral to his view of how society could and should be.