Fixed - Mobile
Regulated - Free
Professional associations, local authorities, mutual societies and stable families were impediments to the mobility and individualism that are required by unfettered markets.
They limit the power of markets over people. In a late modern context re-engineering the free market cannot avoid weakening or destroying such intermediary structures, and such was their fate in Britain.
It is odd that there are still those who find the association of free markets with social disorder anomalous. Even if it could itself be rendered stable the free market is bound to be destructive of other institutions through which social cohesion is preserved.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.36
Even for those whose incomes have risen personal economic risk has increased perceptibly.
Most Americans dread a mid-life economic dislocation from which - they suspect - they may never recover. Few think now in terms of a lifelong vocation. Many expect, not without reason, that their incomes may fall in future.
These are not circumstances which nurture a culture of contentment.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.111
Like social democracy, protectionism belongs to a world that cannot be revived.
Sovereign states will continue to shelter industries they regard as strategically vital; but the classical policies of trade protection, as applied across entire economies, are unworkable or counter-productive.
When companies can split up their operations and locate them practically anywhere in the world, services can be contracted out to remote countries throughout the use of information technologies, financial assets are traded in cyberspace, and protectionist policies are a dead end.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.204
[…] it is only in a closed economy that egalitarian principles can be enforced. In open economies they will be rendered unworkable by the freedom of capital - including ‘human capital’ - to migrate.
[…] The classic solution to the problems of financing the provision of public goods is mutually agreed coercion […] This classic solution breaks down when taxation is not enforceable on mobile capital and corporations. If sources of revenue - capital, enterprises and people - are free to migrate to low-tax regimes, mutually agreed coercion does not work as a means of paying for public goods.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.89
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