The unstated suggestion here seems to be that the government is not already THE (and best) system of control.
The market didn't outlaw slavery (because it loved the profits); the government did.
The market didn't limit the work week to 40 hours (because it loved the profits); the government did.
The government is the moral conscience of the people. The market is a mindless paperclip maximizer. You can't expect it to care about anything individuals care about, like not being slaves or being healthy or having a life.
The market didn't put billions in some politician friend's pocket; the government did.
The market didn't put people in jail because the system has failed them; the government did.
The market didn't decide that drugs are bad while financing the very drug lords in tropical countries that are dealing in our streets; the government did.
The market didn't pass a law to permit themselves to skirt the law. They asked, but the government signed.
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What you call the market is the combination of economics and politics. But the market itself, the free trade among people, is a neutral party and a chaotic self-driven mechanism. But if someone has the power to dictate what is a valid trade and what is not, to put tariffs on A and not on B, the market stops being a neutral chaotic equilibrium and instead tends to accumulate money on one side rather than the other.
Because in the smaller scope, where government action is not as heavy handed, the market works beautifully. Every shop in my high street thrives and dies the same way: good products = profit. Bad products = death, and get replaced by someone better.
That is, until someone that got huge thanks to government action (i.e. favour and corruption) can just destroy this equilibrium by opening a Walmart causing every shop to die.
What you call the market, almost as a slur, is the same mechanism we have had for thousands of years. Monopoly, exploitation of labour, squeezing money from the poor to make the rich even richer is governmental action. You don't become a trillion dollar company without many good friends in the palace. Nor it is the "division of labour" that money and trade enable that made the trillion dollar company.
The market is the convenient scapegoat for the thieves running the show.
> The unstated suggestion here seems to be that the government is not already THE (and best) system of control.
There are many form of government. Which form do you speak of? We must've lost so many idealists and visionaries in the past 150 years, that we have stopped dreaming a better, fairer world for everybody, and just decided that this is the best we can do. Maybe voting for the other colour next time will help, who knows. Whatever can one do?
The market did all those things; acts characterized as government are services traded on the market. Yeah, there are formal restrictions on doing that, but just as free marketeers bleat that regulation of more conventional goods doesn’t stop them from being traded and creats a black market still guided by market forces, that's also true of government acts.
People who use appeal to the market to sell political ideas never seem to apply their logic consistently, tailoring their description of what buying and selling is “market” based on what they are trying to sell you.
> But the market itself, the free trade among people, is a neutral party and a chaotic self-driven mechanism.
The market is not a party at all, it is an abstraction describing interactions of all the parties; and it is no more neutral than the ultimate outcome of the aggregate of interactions is.
> The market did all those things; acts characterized as government are services traded on the market.
We live in a world dominated by trade, everything has a price and an index. But here you're saying that the chicken came before the egg rather than viceversa. I wouldn't be so sure.
The point I'm making is that there is the market, and there is the government. The one that has the power to affect the other is the government itself, with its laws and tariffs and monopoly over violence. The result is some kind of symbiosis, of course, but everything started in the king's court, not the other way around.
Blaming the market for the ills of our world is like blaming the Internet for the existence of revenge porn. Both money and the internet are simply a technology to exchange information and some form of energy, and if it didn't exist, people would invent it (see black markets)
> The point I’m making is that there is the market, and there is the government.
And my point is that that’s a an artificial, politically motivated distortion of reality.
> Blaming the market for the ills of our world i
I’m not doing that. I’m pointing out why giving the market blame or credit for anything is pointless, and only possible through selective, ends-directed reasoning.
The move to the 40-hour workweek was driven by striking and spilled blood in the labor movement for multiple centuries. The auto industry doesn't even make the top ten.
The market didn't outlaw slavery (because it loved the profits); the government did.
The market didn't limit the work week to 40 hours (because it loved the profits); the government did.
The government is the moral conscience of the people. The market is a mindless paperclip maximizer. You can't expect it to care about anything individuals care about, like not being slaves or being healthy or having a life.