Speaker 1: All media. Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming
Speaker 1: at you today with one of these little requests that
Speaker 1: I make sometimes when there's something that we would like
Speaker 1: you to do, when it's very important to do. So
Speaker 1: today I want to talk to you about Syria, and
Speaker 1: specifically Northeast Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria,
Speaker 1: many are rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship of Basha
Speaker 1: a Lasad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and
Speaker 1: other minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks, ethnic
Speaker 1: cleansing and occupation by Turkis back to Jahadis groups in
Speaker 1: an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing
Speaker 1: the Rajava Revolution. Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing
Speaker 1: war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have
Speaker 1: already been forced to be displaced and thousands more are
Speaker 1: in danger. To make matters worth this remains largely absent
Speaker 1: from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to share your solidarity with the people of northern and
Speaker 1: Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action
Speaker 1: by passing the Emergency legislation to stop the fight, hold
Speaker 1: Turkey accountable, and commit US support to the Syrian democratic
Speaker 1: forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you
Speaker 1: want to take action today, you can go to Defendrojaba
Speaker 1: dot org. That's d E F E N d R
Speaker 1: o ja va dot org. If you are able to
Speaker 1: the most effective action we can take right now is
Speaker 1: to call a couple of representatives, one representative and one Senator.
Speaker 1: A representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York.
Speaker 1: He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the
Speaker 1: House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is two zero
Speaker 1: two two two five three four six one. The other
Speaker 1: one will be Senator James rish He's an Idaho Republican.
Speaker 1: He is a ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His
Speaker 1: phone number would be two zero two two two four
Speaker 1: two seven five two. If you'd like to have some
Speaker 1: talking points, you can find those on Defendrojaba dot org.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to this
Speaker 1: humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people
Speaker 1: who who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you
Speaker 1: can donate to two organizations that I would suggest to
Speaker 1: first we be Heavier store the Curtis Red Crescent. That's
Speaker 1: h E Yva s O R dot com and you
Speaker 1: want to go slash e n If you want to
Speaker 1: see their website in English, you can donate there. The
Speaker 1: other one will be the Free Burmer Rangers who are
Speaker 1: currently working in Raka. I was talking to my friend
Speaker 1: Abat who works with them. You can donate to them
Speaker 1: at www dot free fr e E Burma b U
Speaker 1: r m A rangers dot com. We will put all
Speaker 1: of this in the show notes or the URL, so
Speaker 1: if you're driving you don't have to write them down.
Speaker 1: Those are the concrete ways that we can help right
Speaker 1: now and what is unfolding as a very terrible situation
Speaker 1: in Assyria. Thanks.
Speaker 2: I hope you do an episode Welcome to It could
Speaker 2: happen here a podcast where I your host Miya One,
Speaker 2: talks about inflation. We have covered inflation on this show extensively,
Speaker 2: and now it is once again time to return to
Speaker 2: it as we head into a world where concerns about
Speaker 2: inflation and the economy are the most cited justifications for
Speaker 2: people voting for one Donald Trump. But unlike our other
Speaker 2: Oh God had so many episodes about inflation. This one
Speaker 2: is going to be a bit different. Is going to
Speaker 2: start out somewhat similar in that I am going to
Speaker 2: lay out a brief explanation of the sort of material
Speaker 2: causes of the inflation cycle, and talk a bit about
Speaker 2: inflation theories, which is what we've been largely doing on
Speaker 2: this show for a while. And then I am going
Speaker 2: to explain why none of that shit mattered, why none
Speaker 2: of what was actually causing inflation mattered a single bit,
Speaker 2: because ultimately, our experience of inflation, and more importantly, of
Speaker 2: price in general, is based on a sense of justice
Speaker 2: or as the academics call it, a moral economy, and
Speaker 2: not on anything that's sort of going on. So let's
Speaker 2: begin with what is going on with inflation now. As
Speaker 2: we've discussed before on this show, most economists do not
Speaker 2: understand why inflation happens. People will take theories. Those theories
Speaker 2: are usually quite bad. There is no mainstream consensus on
Speaker 2: what is going on. As both me and my friends
Speaker 2: at the magazine Strange Matters have pointed out, former Federal
Speaker 2: Reserve Governor Daniel Tarulo said, quote, the substantive point is
Speaker 2: that we do not at present have a theory of
Speaker 2: inflation dynamics that work sufficiently well to be of use
Speaker 2: for the business of real time monetary policy making. So again,
Speaker 2: this is a guy who used to be a Federal
Speaker 2: Reserve governor who has admitted that they have no idea
Speaker 2: what the fuck is going on with inflation. Looking at
Speaker 2: the extent to which people don't know what's going on
Speaker 2: to inflation and how the various theories simply don't work
Speaker 2: is a large part of Steve Mann's Notes towards the
Speaker 2: Theory of Inflation, which is a Strange Matter's article that
Speaker 2: a lot of this will be pulled from. And we've
Speaker 2: had Ze on the talk about this before. So there
Speaker 2: are a lot of theories about inflation and none of
Speaker 2: them work very well. Inflation on a fundamental level is
Speaker 2: just prices going up. People have this tendency to think
Speaker 2: about inflation in terms of the value of money going down,
Speaker 2: but on a pure level, all inflation says is that
Speaker 2: prices go up. Now, the most common theory of inflation
Speaker 2: is inflation is based on there being too much money
Speaker 2: in the economy, And the thing about those theories is
Speaker 2: that they don't work outside of like a very few
Speaker 2: specific examples of hyperinflation that loom large over our understanding
Speaker 2: of what inflation is, even though they have absolutely quantitatively
Speaker 2: and theoretically, they have absolutely nothing to do with the
Speaker 2: inflation that we've seen over the past four years. So
Speaker 2: instead of talking about that shit anymore, Man and the
Speaker 2: Strange Matter's crew developed what they call the supply chain
Speaker 2: theory of inflation. So I'm going to read the quote
Speaker 2: from Notes Towards the Theory of Inflation. As economist JW.
Speaker 2: And Mason recently remarked on his website, inflation is just
Speaker 2: an increase in prices. So for every theory of price setting,
Speaker 2: there's a corresponding theory of inflation. If inflation theory is
Speaker 2: downstream of price setting, this is still a quote from
Speaker 2: that article, but not the Jovansing quote. If inflation is
Speaker 2: downstream of price theory, then no account of inflation can
Speaker 2: begin with the macro economy at all, since prices are
Speaker 2: set at the micro level. Rather, you need to look
Speaker 2: at particular industrial sectors, their supply chains, and ultimately the
Speaker 2: pricing decisions of their firms. Only then are the true
Speaker 2: causes of inflation, both the internal failures of the industrial
Speaker 2: system and external shocks to it, which can cause price rises. Revealed.
Speaker 2: Man's price theory is fairly simple, right. It flows from
Speaker 2: the basic observation that prices are set by guys in offices,
Speaker 2: not by something abstract as like market forces and supply
Speaker 2: and demand in economic terms. What this argument amounts to
Speaker 2: is the argument that corporations are price makers and not
Speaker 2: price takers. Right, there's a bunch of guys they sit
Speaker 2: in offices and develop a strategy of but what prices
Speaker 2: are going to be? And that's you know, how they're set,
Speaker 2: And what matters to the people who develop prices are
Speaker 2: things like goodwill, which is to say, not pissing off
Speaker 2: their customers by raising prices, and things like their balance
Speaker 2: sheets which reflect you know, their incomes and costs. Price
Speaker 2: in this model is just cost plus markup. And we
Speaker 2: know this is how prices are actually set because, as
Speaker 2: Man points out, people have gone through and done surveys
Speaker 2: of pricing managers and ask them how they set prices
Speaker 2: and the answer is costless workup. So what would cause
Speaker 2: these guys in offices to increase their prices? Well, these
Speaker 2: are companies that are all part of a global supply chain,
Speaker 2: a very very broad global supply chain, and a very
Speaker 2: complicated global supply chain. This means that if the cost
Speaker 2: of the stuff they buy from other suppliers on the
Speaker 2: chain in order to produce what they're selling, if those
Speaker 2: prices go up, because there is, to use a purely
Speaker 2: hypothetical example, a giant pandemic, those costs increases eventually had
Speaker 2: to be passed down to the people paying the products
Speaker 2: so that the corporation can maintain its balance sheets and
Speaker 2: maintain it sort of price plus markup as something that
Speaker 2: you know, covers their costs. Right, This is what set
Speaker 2: off the giant inflation spike in the US and the
Speaker 2: Biden administration. You know, the cost side of cost plus
Speaker 2: markup exploded. But it doesn't really matter why the prices
Speaker 2: increased for our purposes, and our purposes are looking at
Speaker 2: sort of why Trump won the election. What was important,
Speaker 2: you know, about inflation wasn't even the price increases. It
Speaker 2: was the narratives around inflation and how we understand the
Speaker 2: economy at a moral level. And for that we're going
Speaker 2: to turn to one of the most popular accounts of inflation,
Speaker 2: so called greedflation. Now, as we've said, price is cost
Speaker 2: plus markup, and you can raise prices because of cost,
Speaker 2: but you can also do this because you want to
Speaker 2: increase your markup. And this is something that happened during
Speaker 2: the inflation search. Companies realized that consumers were willing to
Speaker 2: accept higher prices without the usual good will hit because
Speaker 2: they thought the prices were going up because inflation was happening,
Speaker 2: and because they were willing to accept the higher prices
Speaker 2: and not you know, try to shop somewhere else, corporations went,
Speaker 2: fuck it, let's just keep jacking the prices up. And
Speaker 2: this really really pissed people off. It still does, and
Speaker 2: this is something that was true across the entire political spectrum.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: People were very, very angry about this sort of reflation thing,
Speaker 2: and that rage is more important than the technical details
Speaker 2: of why inflation happened, because the way we understand inflation
Speaker 2: is not through conventional economics. We understand it through the
Speaker 2: moral economy. And when we come back from a different
Speaker 2: kind of economy, which is to say, this ad break,
Speaker 2: we are going to examine what the moral economy is,
Speaker 2: how it differs from our sort of regular economy, where
Speaker 2: it came from, and why it's relevant to our situation now.
Speaker 2: And we are so back, all right, let's talk about
Speaker 2: the moral economy. The moral economy is a concept developed
Speaker 2: by the British historian E. P. Thompson in the early
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies. Thompson was attempting to explain the previous century
Speaker 2: and a half of bread riots by what he termed
Speaker 2: the English crowd by applying anthropological principles to their actions.
Speaker 2: I'm just going to read from Thompson's The Moral Economy
Speaker 2: of the English Crowd here. It is, of course true
Speaker 2: that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractice
Speaker 2: among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within
Speaker 2: a popular consensus as to what we're legitimate and what
Speaker 2: we're illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This, in
Speaker 2: its turn, was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of
Speaker 2: social norms and obligations of the proper economic function of
Speaker 2: le parties within the community, which, when taken together, can
Speaker 2: be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor.
Speaker 2: In outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as
Speaker 2: actual deprivation was the usual occasion for direct action. Now,
Speaker 2: the moral economy of the English Crowd in the eighteenth
Speaker 2: century is about a very specific period in British history,
Speaker 2: which is to say, the seventeen hundreds, and about how
Speaker 2: people thought bread should be sold. Peasants and the new
Speaker 2: urban workers had very specific ideas about, you know, bread,
Speaker 2: about how bread should be produced, about who should be
Speaker 2: allowed to sell it, about where and when they should
Speaker 2: be allowed to sell it, about how it should be sold,
Speaker 2: how it should not be sold. And because of this,
Speaker 2: you know, because of their experience in sort of previous
Speaker 2: systems that before the sort of imposition of the free
Speaker 2: market system or quote unquote free market system, they have
Speaker 2: a very specific series of hatreds. They hate middlemen, they
Speaker 2: hate grainhoarders, they hate all of the aspects of the
Speaker 2: new quote unquote free market impose additional costs and burdens
Speaker 2: on them. And they also believed that elites have a
Speaker 2: kind of moral duty to the masses based on the
Speaker 2: norms and traditions of their society. And when they welch
Speaker 2: on that deal in a way that makes people's lives worse,
Speaker 2: people get extremely pissed off. These peasants and urban workers
Speaker 2: particularly hated price increases, and they hated price increases so
Speaker 2: much that this frequently turned into riots. But the actual
Speaker 2: contents of these riots are very interesting. Instead of simply
Speaker 2: seizing all of the grain, they do something else entirely.
Speaker 2: Here's Thompson again. Quote. The central action in this pattern
Speaker 2: is not the sack of grainaries and grain or flour,
Speaker 2: but the action of quote setting the price. From a
Speaker 2: few lines later, they might then order the farmer to
Speaker 2: send quote convenient quantities to market to be sold, quote
Speaker 2: and at a quote reasonable price. The justices were further
Speaker 2: empowered to quote set down a certain price upon a
Speaker 2: bushel of every kind of grain. So, if you follow
Speaker 2: this here, right, what's happening in these British bread riots
Speaker 2: is that the revolt isn't just about their you know,
Speaker 2: being a price to grain. It's that people have a
Speaker 2: very very specific moral understanding of what the price of
Speaker 2: grain should be, and they take direct actions that are
Speaker 2: designed to set the price of grain to the level
Speaker 2: they thought it should rest at. And this kind of
Speaker 2: action is extremely common sort of across Europe in this
Speaker 2: entire time period.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It's also a hallmark of the French Revolution. You can
Speaker 2: see in this right, in this sort of rage over
Speaker 2: price in the sense of justice. The outlines of our
Speaker 2: current moral economy you have, you know, staggering outrage's price
Speaker 2: in clarice is seen as on jests, which is reflation
Speaker 2: or just inflation in general, because people are just mad
Speaker 2: about the concept of the price going up, paired with
Speaker 2: rage at the elites, which manifests the sort of hatred
Speaker 2: of Joe Biden the Democrats for being the people who
Speaker 2: presided over the price increases. We also have our own
Speaker 2: rage about price gouging in immediate market terms, and this
Speaker 2: is something that the most annoying libertarians and the defenders
Speaker 2: of the market love to point out. There's nothing actually
Speaker 2: wrong by market economics about say Martin Skrelly jacking the
Speaker 2: price of medicine up until you can't afford it anymore,
Speaker 2: or you know, other things that we find extremely terrible,
Speaker 2: like people jacking the price of water when people need water,
Speaker 2: like bottled water dreat hurricanes. We are all outraged, So
Speaker 2: why do we feel morally strong about it? And that
Speaker 2: is the moral economy, babe. This is something that you know,
Speaker 2: These these reactions, right, the emotional reactions we have to this,
Speaker 2: the sense of injustice that we feel, are almost entirely
Speaker 2: outside of the realm of what you would call traditional
Speaker 2: economics right, And that's because we're functioning on something that
Speaker 2: is in some senses older than that kind of economics.
Speaker 2: But there's something else going on here at a fundamental level.
Speaker 2: And what's important about you know, price and the reaction
Speaker 2: to inflation is that it's an outrage based on a
Speaker 2: sense of justice. Right. This rage is not a measure
Speaker 2: of direct exploitation necessarily. I think it was the political
Speaker 2: scientist James C. Scott who wrote his own book called
Speaker 2: The Moral Economy of the Peasant, and Scott argues that,
Speaker 2: you know, and ib Thompson also argues this that it's
Speaker 2: the moral angle that causes people to revolt, not the
Speaker 2: direct level of exploitation. You can, in fact, you know,
Speaker 2: inflict hideous exploitation on people as long as they think
Speaker 2: that it's just. But when you violate these moral principles,
Speaker 2: that's when people really lose it. But it also means, right,
Speaker 2: the fact that the sort of sense of outrage is
Speaker 2: not necessarily directly tied to the exploitation level. It means
Speaker 2: that rich people can be bad about inflation even though
Speaker 2: they're completely fine, because these people also still have this
Speaker 2: sort of sense of justice about what prices should be. Now.
Speaker 2: It's also worth noting here that it is possible to
Speaker 2: have high inflation rates and have everyone be fine. In fact,
Speaker 2: we have discussed scenarios like that on this show. In
Speaker 2: my episodes about the rise of Lulah, the current president
Speaker 2: of Brazil, we discussed how military dictatorship in Brazil produced
Speaker 2: an economy that was, you know, you had twenty percent
Speaker 2: year on year inflation, right, but also you had forty
Speaker 2: percent yearly wage increases, and so everyone was like kind
Speaker 2: of fine with it because the amount of money you
Speaker 2: were making was going up every year. So nobody really
Speaker 2: cared about even things like the military dictatorship itself. There
Speaker 2: was not an enormous amount of opposition to it. But
Speaker 2: then Brazil's trade unions figured out the government had been
Speaker 2: lying about inflation numbers, and this started off a series
Speaker 2: of protests that you know, would send Lula like into
Speaker 2: his big name of his political career, and eventually this
Speaker 2: is one of the sort of dominoes that leads to
Speaker 2: knocking down the military dictatorship. And that's because you know,
Speaker 2: the level of exploitations people were living under hadn't changed,
Speaker 2: but the deal that they had made right the sort
Speaker 2: of deal with with the military government of like, we
Speaker 2: won't do anything, our wages will continue to go up,
Speaker 2: and inflation will get need to be work at a
Speaker 2: certain level such that we're still getting paid. That deal
Speaker 2: was violated, and that sense of injustice was powerful enough
Speaker 2: to really kickstart in extremely powerful brasilient labor movements and
Speaker 2: kickstart the fall of a dictatorship. Now, one of Thompson's
Speaker 2: arguments was that the success of Adam Smith and his
Speaker 2: cohort and Smith is moving around and making his arguments
Speaker 2: about what the free market is in the period where
Speaker 2: we're dealing with all of these sort of grand crises.
Speaker 2: His argument is that the success of Smith was moving
Speaker 2: economics out of the domain of morality where it was born.
Speaker 2: Economics was originally an aspect of moral philosophy, right, it
Speaker 2: was part of that discipline. But you know, Smith and
Speaker 2: as people move it out, And this is why liberal
Speaker 2: economists find the anger about inflation so uncomprehensible. They see
Speaker 2: it in purely statistical terms and go like, look, the
Speaker 2: economy is great. Why is everyone mad? And you know,
Speaker 2: I could get into hear a bunch of arguments about
Speaker 2: whether or not this is actually true. I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: going to return to my sort of argument about like, well, yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: even if you believe all of the economic indicators are
Speaker 2: great for says people like I'm trans for me, the
Speaker 2: economy is it has an unemployment rate of like nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty six US great depression. So you know, there are
Speaker 2: a lot of people for whom the economic outlook is
Speaker 2: not good. People for whom, you know, even the wage
Speaker 2: increases that they got in this period still leave them
Speaker 2: in sort of hideous and crippling poverty. And none of
Speaker 2: that shit matters because the statistics that these people are
Speaker 2: trying to use to try to get everyone to calm
Speaker 2: down are not operating in the inside of the moral economy.
Speaker 2: They're operating outside of it because they're from a tradition
Speaker 2: that is specifically about not working inside the moral economy.
Speaker 2: And the people that are interacting with are in the
Speaker 2: moral economy. But why is it like this, right? Why
Speaker 2: why do we have a moral economy that functions this
Speaker 2: way in the case of the peasants and you know,
Speaker 2: the working people of the seventeen hundreds across Europe, and
Speaker 2: you know, this just goes on through the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: too right. We can trace the moral economy to a
Speaker 2: very very specific set of conditions and traditions and expectations
Speaker 2: rooted in how people traditionally bop bread. But what are
Speaker 2: the conditions of the modern American moral economy? To understand that,
Speaker 2: we need to turn to the concept of price itself.
Speaker 2: But first, do you know what guarantees low price? Actually,
Speaker 2: I probably should all say the word guarantee. That is
Speaker 2: probably staggeringly illegible. You know what probably has low prices?
Speaker 2: It's the products and services that support this podcast. We
Speaker 2: are back, So let us now turn to price. The
Speaker 2: political economist Shimsheng Bickler and Jonathan Needson argue that price
Speaker 2: is the unit of what orders capitalist society. You know,
Speaker 2: price is like the fundamental units of political economy. It's
Speaker 2: it's the thing that orders and structures the entire society.
Speaker 2: If you want to know more about this, read their
Speaker 2: book Capital as Power. It's quite good. I am mentioning
Speaker 2: them because I'm about to misuse their argument completely in
Speaker 2: tandem with a quote from Marx that I am also
Speaker 2: about to misuse. And I am going to do this
Speaker 2: to make a different point. So I agree with Bickler
Speaker 2: and needs in that price is the unit that orders
Speaker 2: capitalist society. But what I'm interested in is price is
Speaker 2: what's called a social hieroglyphic. Now, social hieroglyphic is a
Speaker 2: term that's a one off term that Marx used wants
Speaker 2: to talk about how price like mystifies at ature value whatever.
Speaker 2: I don't care about that. I care about it because
Speaker 2: there's something very interesting about price itself, and there's something
Speaker 2: interesting about the notion of a hieroglyph. Now Marx is
Speaker 2: using hieroglyph in the term of like it's something you
Speaker 2: have to be decoded, right, because he's writing in the
Speaker 2: eighteen hundreds. This is you know, everyone's obsessed with hieroglyphs.
Speaker 2: I am using hieroglyphs because hieroglyphs are also a method
Speaker 2: of encoding complex information into a single character. Right, Price
Speaker 2: as a social hieroglyph is important because price is the
Speaker 2: mechanism through which we understand and often through which we
Speaker 2: fail to understand the world. Our entire lives in the
Speaker 2: eyes of the people who rule this world, our entire
Speaker 2: lives are captured in a single number. Everything you do
Speaker 2: at work is ultimately just a price on a corporate spreadsheet.
Speaker 2: The entirety of the labor process of producing a good,
Speaker 2: every hour worked, every drop of sweat, every tier, every
Speaker 2: broken body, and shattered city and trade union is lined
Speaker 2: up in front of a firing squad, appears in the
Speaker 2: end as a simple number. Price. To express it another way,
Speaker 2: heals Daniel conn and the painted Bird from their song
Speaker 2: the Butcher's share. Let's take a walk around the old bazaar,
Speaker 2: where every little thing has treffled far, every pair of
Speaker 2: pants and grain of rice contains this poorer story in
Speaker 2: its price. A story of the power people wield, a
Speaker 2: story about factories and fields, a story of which you'll
Speaker 2: never have to be aware, just as long as the
Speaker 2: butcher gets his share. Price, this single number is how
Speaker 2: we understand the world, and it causes us to treat
Speaker 2: price and thus inflation, as a matter of morality and
Speaker 2: not economic rationality. Because price is the way that our
Speaker 2: society causes us to interact with people. It's the way
Speaker 2: we interact with objects. It is the thing that structures
Speaker 2: the way we all behave and understand the world. But
Speaker 2: price has another function. It is the gatekeeper of capitalist society.
Speaker 2: Because price and a man with a gun is what's
Speaker 2: standing between you and the ability to live your life
Speaker 2: outrage of the moral economics of price increases are similar,
Speaker 2: but not identical, to the impulses behind looting. Everything that
Speaker 2: you ever need and have been unable to get is
Speaker 2: when you walk into a grocery store, just sitting there
Speaker 2: right in front of you, but between you and it
Speaker 2: is a number and a man with a gun, and
Speaker 2: the man with a gun fucking hates you. So the
Speaker 2: moment you're free, you just take it. Price in the
Speaker 2: entire economic system behind it is organized very specifically, so
Speaker 2: you don't do this. E. P. Thompson argued that the
Speaker 2: moral economy was pre political. The movements that it produced
Speaker 2: could be extremely well organized, but they fundamentally were not
Speaker 2: the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty, we for a brief moment saw the
Speaker 2: outlines of that movement. The uprising was brutally crushed in
Speaker 2: its place. We saw the emersions of pre political concerns
Speaker 2: about price right. We saw once again a massive panic
Speaker 2: about inflation. And this is not to say that you know,
Speaker 2: inflation didn't hurt people. It did. It was in large
Speaker 2: extent of fiasco. But look at the politics for a
Speaker 2: moment that this has produced. Right, what the media understands
Speaker 2: is economic anxiety, and what I think we can now
Speaker 2: better understand as the moral economy that is a result
Speaker 2: of the fact that our entire economic system is structured
Speaker 2: by price, and that we encode all of the information
Speaker 2: in our life into prices that we sell ourselves for,
Speaker 2: and that we in turn are sold things for those
Speaker 2: prices going up. The product of it was Trump, right,
Speaker 2: and there's I think a reason why these sort of
Speaker 2: pre economic explanations are preferred to the answers and you know,
Speaker 2: to the actions that people saw in twenty twenty four
Speaker 2: years later. Portland, one of the centers of the uprising,
Speaker 2: now has almost every grocery store at the exit of
Speaker 2: it is armed guards with guns. And these guards are
Speaker 2: there to maintain the price system. They're there because, for
Speaker 2: a very brief moment, people started thinking something dangerous. They
Speaker 2: started thinking, what if this didn't have a price, it
Speaker 2: could happen.
Speaker 3: Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
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Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.