The economy is the free interaction of free people within the limits, be they broad or narrow, of the law. The aggregate effect of this is what people talk about when they talk about the state of the economy. The economy is not some machine with knobs to be twisted to produce desired ends by (un)intellegent designers and central planers. Some people, though, do not seem to understand this, as James Lindsay explains, which is quoted in full do to the limit of Twitter’s/X’s embed feature.
The post-liberals’ main selling point, I think, is that it believes the economy should work for the people, not people for the economy.
This isn’t just wrong in the usual sense, though; it’s a category error. It fundamentally misunderstands what the (or an) economy is.
The economy isn’t this kind of black box thing that the government controls, for better or for worse. The economy is roughly something like the activity that arises around production, service, and trade among a population, and between populations, that are doing those things.
That is, nobody controls the economy, and the economy can’t be made to work for people. Neither do people work for the economy.
People work. They produce; they trade; and they serve. The aggregate outcome of that effort is called “the economy.”
Further:
People cannot work for the economy, although they can train their work toward certain measures of economic activity, like GDP or whatever, though almost nobody actually does that in any economy whatsoever. People work for themselves, their clients, and their employers, as the cases might be, and the usual metrics they shoot for are “more in than out,” a.k.a., profit.
The government can set constraints upon how people work, produce, trade, and serve through legislation, policy, pressure, and litigation, but the that is not them making the economy work for people. That’s them manipulating the ground states from which the economy emerges. These aren’t the same thing.
Think of it like a playground at a school. There’s some playground equipment; there are rules; there are monitors and punishments for bad behavior. The play that takes place, in aggregate, is the economy. The kind of play that comes out might depend in some ways upon the equipment, rules, monitors, and punishments, but those things do not actually determine what that play looks like. You cannot make the play work for the kids, and the kids don’t play for the sake of the play. They just play, and they’ll make the best do they can with the situation at hand.
When we hear post-liberals saying they want to make the economy work for people, it is not actually clear what they mean by that since they don’t control the economy, nor does it work (or not work) for people. It’s hard to imagine what they think they’re going to do if they don’t understand this basic point first. There are things they can control, but they cannot control the thing they’re saying they want to control.
What it comes off as, whatever is it, is as if they want to be the school marms and gym teachers who tell the kids how to play on the playground so the play takes a certain look to it. The reason people are equating this with socialism is because that’s the same thing socialists do, for the same reason, even though there are some differences here in the underlying philosophy (the post-liberal socialism is nationalist, ultimately, rather than universally class-based).
It really irks me to hear these popular slogans that are, at best, category mistakes, and that, in reality, mask manipulative and coercive programs that ultimately amount to the government using guns (at the end of the day) to tell people how to work.
Remember, controlling the economy is about controlling the people.
