source : the age
Money may be the root of all evil, but the alternative is far worse.
This week The Green Institute, the new think tank headed up by former Greens firebrand Max Chandler-Mather, proposed “publicly owned supermarkets” that would, he says, save families thousands of dollars in groceries.
Michael Howard
Having spent my childhood school holidays on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, with my grandparents in East Germany, I remember publicly owned supermarkets well. Shortages were an everyday fact of life. The joke goes that a man walks into a shop and asks the assistant if they don’t have any meat. The assistant scowls. “No comrade. This is the shop that doesn’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the road.” The less funny reality was that the shelves were often empty or the produce spoiled. The profit motive may be distasteful to some, but its output is quality and plenty.
The moral valence of money – of profit – is the fundamental ongoing philosophical debate of our times. As the terms “left” and “right” become increasingly meaningless, it is the dispute over money that increasingly defines the political divide.
For me, this realisation arrived late – only quite recently. At the end of one of those enjoyable conversational debates you’ll be familiar with, if you have friends who see the world differently. It became apparent after we’d challenged each other pleasantly for a while that this was the key point on which we simply would never see eye to eye. My conversation partner was firmly of the view that money is corrosive and behind everything that is wrong with the world. To my mind, the alternative is worse. When money isn’t the primary unit of exchange, what replaces it is patronage and power.
Money is a great equaliser. It’s possible to earn more. People just give it to you if you deliver something they value. And you can then convert it into anything you like. From physical goods to time, money can buy whatever you desire.
But people who don’t feel they have enough money sometimes start to believe it is intrinsically bad. And some people who have plenty lose perspective on how freeing it is.
Societies which try to do without it, or which pretend it should be pooled and shared, quickly fall into the trap I observed behind the Berlin Wall. Perhaps the reason “communism has never been tried properly” is because it simply doesn’t work.
When it’s not possible to accumulate money to buy the things you want, people trade in power instead. The Estonian Institute of Historical Memory maintains a website called Communist Crimes that records many examples of how unequal an ideology based around equity can be. The institute describes different kinds of privileges available to the “nomenklatura” – those with rank within the regime. Among these was first dibs on goods and services that were in shortage. While the general population had to put up with this as just part of life, the apparatchiks received preferential allocation of goods, medical treatment and housing, among other things.
The only way to obtain these things was to ingratiate yourself with the regime. Which meant that, rather than money, the instruments of barter were power and patronage. There was still money. Even communist countries couldn’t do without currency entirely. But it was just a secondary type of worth, good enough for the ruled. No matter how much they saved, they could never obtain the things available to the rulers.
Now, The Green Institute in Australia, Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York, or far left party Die Linke in Berlin, which recently won a significant chunk of the vote, aren’t actually advocating for communism. Yet in their various ways, they are falling for the central fallacy of the failed Marxist doctrine.
Set aside for a minute The Green Institute’s laughable proposition that governments, which, regardless of colour or creed, struggle to deliver effective services, would be able to manage the sophisticated logistics of getting fresh food from farms to a national network of stores. Even if they somehow managed that, nationalised supermarkets would inevitably lead to a decline in quality, availability, and choice – just like in the Soviet Union. Profit is the motive to work out the thorny problems of catering to the individual preferences of millions, and to deliver to a standard that would see them met.
Die Linke’s suggestion that Berlin’s housing challenges would be solved by seizing the housing stock of large real estate companies to distribute to the people is, apart from an assault on ownership or investment of any kind, absolutely no guarantee that those who most need it would receive adequate housing. Rather, placed in the hands of a political party, the much more likely scenario is that stock would go to loyalists. It’s a very short step from political control of an asset to its use to make friends and acquire more power.
In New York, Mamdani’s plan is a combination of publicly owned grocery stores, rent control (which has pushed up prices through other second-order effects) and universal childcare. According to an analysis by Canadian think tank The Fraser Institute, universal childcare has already failed in Canada, where the system has unsatisfactory outcomes. The children who were meant to benefit from “early childhood education” suffered. “Instances of hyperactivity, aggression, and anxiety all increased measurably in the years following Quebec’s policy change,” the report said, and “negative effects on motor and social development were also found.” What’s more, there is evidence that most of the spots were captured by higher-income families who got themselves on the list early. If there’s one ironic “equity” outcome of the experiment, it may be to drag down the development of the children of wealthier families.
None of this is to say that money can’t be used as a means to power. But the difference between power that money can buy and power which must be acquired through patronage is that anyone can save up for the former. Power, on the other hand, is always in short supply. The only way to break its sway is to use money to solve shortages without it.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.
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Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.
