The Consumers' Manifesto

Preamble

We, the consumers of the world, are an oppressed group. The political systems of all countries are dominated by special interest groups. In these systems, we, the pre-eminent general interest group, whose membership includes almost everyone on the planet, are unduly neglected. Our meek voice has hitherto been drowned out by the cacophony of special interest group pleading. Only a handful of unpopular free-market economists have dared to consistently stand up for our interests.   

Today, all that ends. Today, we stand up and present our demands to the politicians of the world. Today, we present this manifesto.

The Two Things We Want

We consumers want two main things: more choice and more purchasing-power. When it comes time to spend our hard-earned money, we want the widest array of goods and services of differing types and quality levels to be available, and we want the money that we earn to be able to buy as many of these goods and services of a given quality as possible.   

The Free-Market

The free-market system is the pre-eminent means for increasing our choices and our purchasing-power. It is a system where capitalists, entrepreneurs, and employees are optimally incentivized to cater to our wants. These producers must co-operate or compete with one another in order to receive our hard-earned money. If they want our money, they must provide us with the products that we want at a price we are willing to pay. They must cater to our changeable whims and individual idiosyncrasies. They must serve us better than their competitors can.

Our innumerable choices to patronize or not patronize a certain business, to buy or not buy a particular product, to consume now or to save and consume more later; these choices guide producers, via monetary incentives, to arrange the societal structure of production in such a way as to best cater to our demonstrated preferences. This system, this free-market, is truly the consumer’s best friend.

Government Interference

The free-market is the realm of voluntary interaction and association between producers and consumers. Government is an institution that inflicts, by definition, aggressive, violent coercion (or the threat thereof) on people. Government officials and politicians claim that this coercion is used to achieve lofty ‘social objectives’ and to provide ‘public goods’; but regardless of the justification, coercive government interference in society necessarily impairs the free-market, our best friend, to a certain extent.

When deciding whether to put up with government interference in a certain area, our voice has for too long been neglected. The loud voices of producer interests, egalitarians, militarists, environmentalists, nosy moralists, and many others, have dominated the discussion, to our great detriment. The result has been a political bias in favor of putting up with lots of consumer-harming government interferences in the free-market. Today, we consumers will right this wrong, and push to undo the most egregious of such government interferences. We will enumerate and discuss these interferences now.

Our Specific Demands:

To Undo The Following Policies:

1. Tariff Barriers

We consumers of the world oppose all tariff barriers and favor worldwide free-trade. We refuse to have our choices limited and the forces of free-market competition attenuated by trade barriers. Generally, we don’t care what country a producer is from; we just want to buy the product that best suits our needs at the lowest price. For those rare few of us who do care, they are of course free to factor that into their decision-making and to be willing to pay more to get a product from a particular country. But to coercively impose this state of affairs on all of us, limiting both our choices and our purchasing-power, is totally unacceptable to us.

2. Monetary Inflation

We consumers demand a stop to the reckless printing of money! Governments destroyed the gold standard monetary system and forced us to use their monopolistic fiat paper monies instead. Now, the governments’ central banks and the fractional reserve banks that they privilege and oversee constantly cause more and more of these fiat monetary units to come into existence. This is a direct assault on the purchasing power of the money that we earn. The more units of money that are produced, other things equal, the less each individual unit of money is worth on the market.

Without the government-sponsored monetary inflation, the purchasing-power of the monetary units that we earn would probably go up over time! This is because the more goods producers are able to produce and put on the market, other things equal, the more purchasing-power each monetary unit has to have in order to clear the markets for all these goods. Generally, free-market producers get more efficient at producing goods over time, and hence produce and try to sell more goods on the market. This natural phenomenon, absent monetary inflation, would result in the purchasing power of our monetary units getting gradually higher over time, as it did, for example, in the US in the late 19^th century under the gold standard.

But those scoundrels controlling the modern monetary systems, through monetary inflation, deny us this beneficent natural phenomenon, instead printing so much money that the phenomena is reversed and purchasing power of each monetary unit is gradually reduced over time! They even have the audacity to tell us that they have an inflation ‘target’ of about a 2% rise in prices per year! Anything less would allegedly put us at risk of ‘catastrophic deflation’, ie. the purchasing-power of the consumers’ monetary units actually going up over time.

They make up, to justify their skullduggery, a ludicrous story of increases in purchasing power causing us consumers to postpone our purchases indefinitely in order to wait for further price drops; thus causing the economy to slump. They ignore the fact that no such thing has ever happened in the electronics and computer industries, where, despite the best efforts of the money printers, prices for given products and technologies have been falling over the years. They also neglect to mention that, even if people did increase their demand to hold money in a rising purchasing power environment, this demand would soon stabilize around an equilibrium point for that environment. There would not, contrary to their fairy tales, be some ridiculous, self-fulfilling, endless speculative spiral of money hoarding; that’s not how free markets work.        

No, the monetary authorities are simply siphoning resources away from the consumers in order to benefit themselves and their friends, despite their protestations to the contrary. We demand that this insidious robbery by stealth stop immediately!

3. Licensing Requirements

We consumers oppose all mandatory, government-imposed licensing requirements; we favor free-entry into every industry. The government claims that their licensing regime protects us consumers from low quality or dangerous goods and services. What it really does is make it harder and more costly for producers to enter the industry, thus reducing competition and increasing the prices we must pay. They also limit our choices to only those goods and services deemed ‘adequate’ by the government. 

We consumers are perfectly able to sort out our own protection from dangerous goods and services ourselves. We would simply put value on the opinion of third-party, private certification, inspection, auditing, and information providers when it comes to purchasing goods and services. In order to protect their reputation for expertise and impartiality, these competing organizations would provide us with good, not overly restrictive advice on what products are safe and effective and which to stay away from.

In other words, we want the information industry to be structured by our friend, the free-market system, not by a monopolistic government. We demand that the government get their licensing restrictions out of our way!

4. Socialized Industries  

When the government socializes, or nationalizes, an industry, it prevents the forces of our friend, the free-market, from operating in that industry. Instead, we get a single, monopolistic provider, funded by coercively-levied taxation rather than voluntary purchases. Rationing and arbitrary allocation of goods and services, relative blindness to the demands of us consumers, abysmal customer service, aversion to innovation, and higher incentive-killing, resource-robbing taxation bills are always the result. This state of affairs is terrible for us consumers, especially when compares to what it would be if the industry were left to the free-market.

We have heard enough excuses about socialized industries being necessary to ‘help the poor’. Firstly, if the government really wanted to help the poor, they would just give them money, not socialize the industry and make it inefficient. Secondly, we consumers are perfectly capable of helping the poor ourselves. Philanthropy and charity are kinds of consumption themselves. Government philanthropy is just as inefficient as any other government-provided service. Private philanthropy, where private charities must cater to the philanthropic wants of the charitable consumers, is a much more effective way of helping the poor, assuming that is a goal that we consumers value.

We demand that all socialized industries (with the possible exceptions of law and defense) be returned to the free-market!

5. Heavy Taxation

 We consumers object to the heavy taxation levied on us and on producers by the government. Taxes levied on personal and corporate income dilute the monetary incentives that we can offer to the producers who can best satisfy our desires. They also artificially reduce the formation of private capital; the investment of which would have contributed to making the economy more productive and thus better suited to satisfying our desires. Sales taxes either result in the goods and services we buy being made more expensive; or contribute to making it artificially more difficult for producers to make a decent return from their efforts to serve us.

These heavy taxes are a great encumbrance to us and hence we demand that they be significantly reduced. There are plenty of government interventions currently being undertaken that shouldn’t be anyway; undoing these will also take a lot of pressure off of the government budget and hence enable our desired tax cuts.

6. Capital Controls and Immigration Barriers:

The economy is the most productive, and hence we consumers are best served, when land, labor, and capital inputs are allowed to freely combine in the optimal ways. Land inputs are immobile; but capital investments and labor supplies are mobile unless artificially restricted by the government. Capital and labor should be as free as possible to combine with one another and with appropriate land sites, and this means no capital controls or immigration barriers.

We have heard enough special pleading from the privileged labor groups of rich countries, trying to use the government to lock capital investment in their country and trying to keep foreign laborers out of it. We, the consumers of the world, demand that the global economy work to provide us with the most benefits and purchasing power possible, which means allowing free flows of labor and capital to their most optimal locations. We also demand the freedom to live where we choose to live, unhampered by arbitrary borders and immigration restrictions.      

7. Public Land

We demand that the governments of the world disgorge and open the vast lands, currently known as ‘public’ or ‘Crown’ lands, to private ownership. This will bring these lands into the free-market system, which means to bring the private owners of these lands, if they want to make money from their land, under our sway. This will be a welcome contrast to their current ‘public land’ status; where our desires are barely taken into account when decisions are being made concerning these lands by the relevant government officials.

A Call To Action

These are our demands. We, the consumers of the world, the masters of the global free-market (such as it currently is), will no longer remain silent. For too long we have allowed ourselves to be divided by national origin, by socio-economic status, by gender, and by the thousands of special interest groupings that we have been members of. Today we unite and give voice to our demands! Today we form a powerful force that will strike fear into the hearts of all politicians and special interest chisellers that seek to harm us! Today, united, we will prove to be an unstoppable force! United and firm, we will prevail at last!