Strategic Yogurt production - explained, sort of...

Socialists are learned fools. The difficulties of mathematic tend to scare them out of fields of science and mathematics, and as a branch of the social sciences, economics is best done with a solid mathematical basis. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to find a 59 year old economics instructor who finally comes to the realization that markets can work, and that the social component is made up of something more than the passion play of “the bosses” and “the workers.” Compound that with the fact that people who work by stocks, and the walls of the Marxist edifice keeping reality out starts to leak rather quickly.

The left uses academia as a way of planting its’ ideas deep into the ground of civilization, and rarely accepts the breadth of ideas or the evenhandedness that characterize good research. Nonetheless, observing people in the process of working and running business is unavoidable. From the IHT:

Danielle Scache tries to avoid using the term "capitalism" in her economics class because it has negative connotations in France.

Instead, she teaches her high school students about the market economy, a slightly less controversial term she started using last year after a two-month internship at the dairy giant Danone. That was an experience that did away with more than one of her own prejudices, she said.

"I was surprised to see that people actually enjoyed working in a company," said Scache, who is 59. "Some of them were more enthusiastic than many teachers I know."

[…]

In a 22-country survey published in January, France was the only nation disagreeing with the premise that the best system is "the free-market economy." In the poll, conducted by the University of Maryland, only 36 percent of French respondents agreed, compared with 65 percent in Germany, 66 percent in Britain, 71 percent in the United States and 74 percent in China.

The findings suggest that French reluctance to introduce flexibility into the labor market - the embattled new law makes it easier to fire young workers - goes beyond the reform fatigue and nostalgia for the post-World War II welfare state evident in some other European countries. As Finance Minister Thierry Breton put it last week: "There is a significant lack of economic culture in our country."

Then there’s the indoctrination which is meant to inoculate a student against reality:

And then there are the textbooks. One, published by Nathan and widely used by final-year students, has this to say on p. 137: "One must analyze the salary as purchasing power that you could not cut without sparking a deflationary spiral and thus higher unemployment." Another popular textbook, published by La Découverte, asks on p. 164: "Are there still enough jobs for everyone?" It then suggests that the state subsidize jobs in the public sector: "We can seriously envisage this because our economy allows us already to support a large number of unemployed people."

The truth of this form of economics is even simpler. If you can't make an economy function with concocted theories of that sort, you end up having to rewire nature somehow and accept the inherent flaws and inefficiencies that actually keep everyone poorer. The public is thus punished to prove a weak idea, and made dependant on it to make it indelible. What starts as a desire to please them make a slave out of them.

Thus protectionists, in the words of one economist, "want to do to their own country during peacetime what the country's enemies would wish to do to it during wartime--that is, close its borders to imports."

How this works in a transnational-union-cum-nation, I just don't know. Especially when it comes to harmonising labour practices and "domestic" ownership.

If the intent is to create jobs of stop the bleeding of trade and employment, it also seems like a low performing excercise in pandering and nationalist corporatism. It also eerily reeks of Nazism which remandered industries and constructed an immense welfare state, controlling everything in society that it could.

Economist Walter Williams has explained on many occasions just how flawed any legal measure can be in changing the way an economy functions:

The idea that minimum wage legislation is an anti-poverty tool is simply sheer nonsense. Were it an anti-poverty weapon, we might save loads of foreign aid expenditures simply by advising legislators in the world's poorest countries, such as Haiti, Bangladesh and Ethiopia, to legislate higher minimum wages.

Basically the only effective thing a government can do to positively influence the position of people in an economy is not cause harm to the forces that cause hiring to occur, or the forces that permit salaries to float. Intervention makes them only seem to stop them from floating upward and outsize the cost of living to earnings. That gap is the poverty issue in a nutshell, and no legislative campaign of leftist style good intentions can change that.