Between 1981 and 1987, the US federal government showed its commitment to the free market by cutting its spending on housing from eight billion dollars to three billion. Housing for the poor, which had to be subsidised, was cut from 20,000 units a year in the 1970s to 5,000 a year in the 1980s.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pursued exactly the same free-market policies in Britain, with exactly the same results. Perhaps the most astonishing feature of the great decade of the free market in Britain was the increase in the numbers of poor and homeless people. At the start of the decade, 6.1 million people were living on or below the level at which they were entitled to supplementary benefit. By 1985, this had grown to 9.4 million, and has been growing ever since.
As in the United States, Margaret Thatcher’s interpretation of the free market is that only people who can afford expensive housing really want or need houses. Under her guidance, councils have been almost completely prevented from building subsidised houses to rent. For the first time since the 1880s the streets of central London are filled with hungry, homeless people, begging for money for a meal and preferring to risk the elements rather than spend their pittance on an insanitary and dangerous dosshouse.
This astonishing increase in the starving millions, with all the indescribable wretchedness and hopelessness which goes with it, is the chief achievement of the free market in its Great Decade. Its supporters, led by the American president and the British prime minister, have from time to time harked back to that famous dictum of Christ: ‘the poor ye have always with you’. Jesus Christ, who, if he existed, was certainly poor, seemed to be saying that since there was not enough to go round, some people were bound to end up with next to nothing. Like so many of the remarks attributed to him, this one has been taken up by supporters of the free market everywhere to blame poverty on the poor themselves: on their own fecklessness and inability to ‘better themselves’. ibid.
The rise and fall of the ‘business cycle’, capitalism’s ‘booms and slumps’, do not wait to see which government is in office. They follow economic laws over which parliamentary laws have nothing but the remotest control. Governments can shell out money for the unemployed, but only enough to keep them worse off than the very lowest-paid of the employed. They can employ a few, train a few. But no government can alter the rules of a catastrophic economic system.
... The market and the struggle between classes which it creates lay down the priorities for society. If there is full employment, and the trade unions are strong, they fight for decent housing and welfare. This is just as likely to happen under a Tory government as under Labour. Houses, hospitals and schools then get built for the masses, because the employers and the moneylenders can afford them. But when capitalism is in crisis, the battle for every penny intensifies. Unemployment weakens the unions, and it is the employers who feel strong, militant and confident. ibid. ch6
But they counted our life a pastime, and our time here a market for gain: for, say they, we must be getting every way, though it be by evil means. Wisdom 15:12
The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios ... The idea that you can actually predict what’s going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market. George Soros
The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime. George Soros, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve p194, 1995
I am a conservative Republican, a firm believer in free market capitalism. A free market system allows all parties to compete, which ensures the best and most competitive project emerges, and ensures a fair, democratic process. Sarah Palin
Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must do all the things that markets undo or cannot do. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs McWorld
Markets are interested in profits and profits only; service, quality, and general affluence are different functions altogether. The universal, democratic prosperity that Americans now look back to with such nostalgia was achieved only by a colossal reigning in of markets, by the gargantuan effort of mass, popular organizations like labour unions and of the people themselves, working through a series of democratically elected governments not daunted by the myths of the market. Thomas Frank
If by free market one means a market that is autonomous and spontaneous, free from political controls, then there is no such thing as a free market at all. It is simply a myth. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude p167
It is impossible to underestimate the shock – a sense of stunned disbelief. Steve Fraser, author Wall Street: A Cultural History
The market broke very sharply. And a lot of people were wiped out with it. It was very painful. Steve Fraser
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. John Maynard Keynes
Among the causes of the recent financial crisis was an unjustified faith in rational expectations [and] market efficiencies. Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve chairman
The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder. Arundhati Roy
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus st23
The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it’s approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn’t true. Jeremy Grantham
The market was not a wicked thing, it was lively and human and sociable. Martin Durkin, Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary, Channel 4 2013
The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries. Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans, Prologue xxiii 2008
Britain and the US are not the homes of free trade; in fact, for a long time they were the most protectionist countries in the world. Not all countries have succeeded through protection and subsidies, but few have done so without them. For developing countries, free trade has a rarely been a matter of choice; it was often an imposition from outside, sometimes even through military power. Most of them did very poorly under free trade; they did much better when they used protection and subsidies. The best-performing economies have been those that opened up their economies selectively and gradually. Neo-liberal free-trade free-market policy claims to sacrifice equity for growth, but in fact it achieves neither; growth has slowed down in the past two and a half decades when markets were freed and borders opened. ibid. Prologue xxiv
The importance of international trade for economic development cannot be overemphasized. But free trade is not the best path to economic development. Trade helps economic development only when the country employs a mixture of protection and open trade, constantly adjusting it according to its changing needs and capabilities. Trade is simply too important for economic development to be left to free trade economists. ibid. ch3
Prohibiting a market does not mean destroying it. Prohibiting a market means placing a prohibited but dynamically developing market under the total control of criminal corporations. Lev Timofeev, Russian dissident mathematician
It is not globalisation in itself that has spurred the spectacular growth of organised crime in recent years, but global markets that are either insufficiently regulated, especially in the financial sector, or too closely regulated, as in the labour and agricultural markets. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Legislation of a legal market is bound to fail when a healthy black market exists for the same product. With guns so cheap and easy to get, the standard criminal has no incentive to fill out a firearms application at his local gun shop and then wait a weak. Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner
What keeps us from seeing corruption are our illusions that our economy is a rational system, a free market open to all. ibid. caption
Hunts Point: there are three massive wholesale markets here selling meat, fruit and veg, and fish. New York: America’s Busiest City II, BBC 2016
An army of delivery men and women working day and night. Most of them use bikes to courier the food. ibid.
3 a.m. The busiest time for the [fish] market. ibid.
What the free market ideology does is it organises the economy in such a way that the state really has no role, so the free market ideology is actually taking power through these economic decisions and transactions completely out of the hands of the public and giving free rein to all manner of actors and vested interests that have nothing to do with the popular will. Nafeez Ahmed, The Crisis of Civilization, 2011