![]() Where are the free market revolutionaries when you need them? They’re rather thin on the ground. I expect to be paying what I call the Apple Tax – the phrase used to describe the premium paid for using its products and services – until the day I die and it’s not for lack of trying. These bits of code extend so deeply into so many areas of our lives, it isn’t worth the trouble of us switching services. They are also able to hide the algorithms in the process. They’ve succeeded where the Soviet Union’s Gosplan failed. They are able to influence both supply and demand, a sort of “socialism in one company”. Giant technology platforms have discovered they can do something new, which is to internalise the role that an open market would once play. Today we see greater economic concentrations of power than at any time since the Robber Baron Era of the 19th century, and that’s no coincidence. As for markets, nobody seems to care much any more. To get elected, Blair and Brown had to follow suit too.īut history didn’t get the cease and desist order, and it has been very busy since. ![]() “The most important thing we had to communicate was that we understood markets, because markets had won,” a senior member of the Clinton administration once told me, reflecting some years later. His essay predicted an infinite future of economic liberalism. History was supposed to have ended in 1990 after the collapse of Communism, according to Francis Fukuyama.
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