The Market Politic
Cafe Hayek explains through a wonderful use of metaphor, how politics compares to retail grocery shopping.
You must choose one of the pre-filled carts. Whichever one you choose will be chosen, in part, despite some of its contents. The cart you choose will be the best one for you given the other options – but it would not be as beneficial for you as would a cart that you personally rolled through the supermarket aisles and filled yourself, precisely as you wished, individually selecting and rejecting each item according to your preferences at the time you are in the store.
Perhaps that’s why so many Socially Aware people, so many Scolds, dislike retailing. In markets, each of us gets pretty much exactly the set of things we want (out of a vast set of possibilities). With each of us filling our own cart with exactly those items, and only those items, that each of us wants, there’s no role for busybodies who fancy themselves to be especially fit for choosing what millions of other people have access to and acquire.
Similar comparisons can be drawn between retailing and corporate “bundling” of products and services as well as Microsoft’s efforts to bundle every conceivable application into the operating system. Purchasers always end up getting a lot of stuff they don’t need or want in order to get what they do want.
If you get a shopping cart full of groceries you don’t like, you would have to give them away, sell them to somebody else, or throw them away. With Microsoft or say, phone company packages, or cable packages, you can’t discard or trade what you don’t want, you just throw your money away on it, which is a hidden price increase on the part of the package that really wanted.
I needed to buy some Krazy Glue yesterday and went to the local Ace Hardware. They had a big selection of glues. If you bought a double packages, you paid less per tube of glue. For example, one tube for $2.50 but two tubes in one package for $3.50.
The double packet seems like a much better deal. But if you never used the glue or it went bad sitting on the shelf, you actually paid much more for the one tube of glue that you would use. Rather than paying $2.50 for one tube, you paid $3.50 and a lot of glue went to waste as well as all the natural resources and human energy that went into producing it.
Fortunately, Ace had plenty of different sizes and types of glue so I didn’t have to buy more than I needed.
As Cafe Hayek points out, politicians and political parties are at a minimum forcing us to buy two tubes at a higher price when one at a lower price would have been sufficient. They’ll even bundle in the all the broken pieces that need to be glued back together as well as any tools you need to break it into pieces again.
And when you’re done with that project, you can go back to the market politic for some more glue. Extras included.
Pointer from Jay McCarthy.
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