Now I know why Abe’s always talking about this guy:
“Instead of the peasant that shows up to the market to sell a certain amount of corn, here you have a wholesaler with a huge warehouse where he stores all the corn he can. If the prices are too low, he can always with drawn certain amounts from the market, put them in the warehouse, and artificially make the prices go up. When the prices go up, he then sells the rest of the corn at these high prices and he makes a lot of money. But, of course, he is manipulating demand and supply. He is not being governed by these anonymous forces. He is not being subject to self-organization; he is organizing everything in a planned cunning way. And so, because economists use the word “market” to describe both, that is one of the main confusions I see in contemporary thought.
We need another word to describe these organizations that are large enough to manipulate markets. A word has been suggested by historian Fernand Braudel and it is a very simple one: “anti-market.” Why? Because they manipulate markets. And so today, in the United States, there is a very strong political movement, mostly by the right wing, and Newt Gingrich is perhaps the most well known politician in this regards, who are trying, as they say, shrink the size of the government, let market forces have more room to operate. But, of course, translated into the terms we?ve just introduced, what they really want to do is let anti-market forces run wild. They don?t really want small producers and small manufacturers and bakers and printers and mom-and-pop shops to have more room to manoeuver and make money. They want national and international corporations to have more room to manoeuver. They want to shrink government so that there are less regulations to keep international and national corporations from doing what they want.