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COMMENTARY
July 29, 2009
Buyer's market
Our word for today will be: "monopsony." This is an item of economist's jargon, which I promise to define in due course.Economists generally get a bad rap, being disliked along with dieticians, dentists, and other notoriously boring bearers of bad news. Priests, rabbis, imams, and so forth, also suffer. They have Good News, to be sure, but no one listens. The bad news is, invariably, that it's time to get our act together. An economist, however, cannot tell you what to do, with the confidence of a minister of religion. On the strength of his dismal studies, he can only suggest a few "if-then" scenarios. If you do This, then, everything else being equal (as it never is), That will happen. Example: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." The "economist" quoted is Wilkins Micawber, who nevertheless allowed that, "Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families." But when they do: "Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end!" Charles Dickens, the creator of Mr. Micawber, may have been playing to some droll and satirical purposes, yet elsewhere he articulates, more deeply than any economist could, another dimension of that last great truth: "Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort." The biggest enemy of industry is success, and on this continent at least, we are harvesting ruin from that. For those who have forgotten the "sixpenny principle" of Mr. Micawber, and yet still haven't experienced starvation -- our urban, progressive elites come to mind -- reality is supplanted by the wildest fantasies. They are actually capable of believing, for instance, that economic growth can be restored by borrowing more money; or that the resulting deficits can be reduced by increasing the size of the government -- things once believed only by the certifiably insane. This is all necessary background to our definition of the word "monopsony." We cannot understand the ludicrous ideas that animate our liberal ruling classes without understanding how they lost their minds. To be fair: still touching at some points, but on the core relationship between cause and effect, their intellectual grip is gone. Now, let us review the meaning of "monopoly." It is a market in which there is one seller, and many buyers, and in which, therefore, that seller sets all the terms. The perfect example is a government department, or nationalized industry (healthcare is the classic case), in which the individual "buyer," or citizen, has all his powers of negotiation reduced effectively to zero. He gets what Nanny State thinks he deserves, and moreover, he begins to act accordingly: like a serf, appealing for everything he needs to master. A "monopsony," though equally evil, is yet technically the opposite. It is a market in which there are many sellers, but only one buyer. It is a market in which, to a laughable degree, the buyer now gets anything he wants. The classic example is the fate of the labourer under socialism, who becomes, for all practical purposes, the perfect slave. An excellent contemporary example is "climate change science." The one customer is the government, and the product they are buying is "scientific proof of anthropogenic global warming." They need it to justify government takeover of every aspect of the carbon economy. And since no one else needs it, they have their choice of suppliers. According to the figures gathered by Joanne Nova, in a report for the Science and Public Policy Institute published last week, U.S. taxpayers alone have been billed at least $79 billion, so far, for these "scientific studies," commissioned for the express purpose of creating the greatest possible alarm from the most carefully selected data favourable to the "anthropogenic global warming" hypothesis. (In other words, the exact opposite of honest science.) Meanwhile, public outrage is focused upon the 1/5000th of this amount which the Exxon corporation has spent on auditing that science. The SPPI is itself a privately-financed think tank, so will be demonized on that ground, among persons who were never taught in school that guilt-by-association is a logical fallacy. Indeed, even Ian Plimer, perhaps the most independent-minded Australian earth scientist ever to be born, has been taking malicious hits of this sort, from the climate-change lobbyists he has exposed. Plimer is the prominent geologist whose recent book, Heaven and Earth, subtitled, "Global Warming: The Missing Science", does the best job I've seen of showing that the premise behind all the government-commissioned studies is knowingly false. For it can be demonstrated that, above 50 parts per million, carbon dioxide accumulations do not heat the atmosphere at all. But even without knowing that, we should have been alarmed, by the existence of a monopsony. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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