The Sideshow on “creative destruction”:
This is pretty much the kind of thing I think of when folks start talking about how the Invisible Hand is going to sort things out for us in the latest upheaval. I think of ordinary people with plans and hopes for their lives and their families, suddenly tossed into the meat-grinder of “competition”. I think of dreams lost, jobs and products disappearing from the landscape, shops closing, whole communities turned into ghost towns. I look at this and wonder who can possibly be so abstracted, so divorced from human society, that they can talk about “market adjustments” as if they have some meaning above and beyond those splintered lives, as if they are not agents of wholesale tragedy. What is an economy for, I wonder, if not to preserve the chances of ordinary people like us to secure our futures, to practice our crafts, to reach for our dreams?