The Big Three
States generally choose from three economic systems:
- Market (Market Economy)
- Central planning (Planned Economy)
- Corporatism (Negotiation Economy)
The first two being the most prominent. Corporatism being a rarity in the modern era and rarely tried throughout history.
Usually, it’s not a pure form of either of the first two. It’s a mixture. Somewhere on a line with no government intervention at all at the right and complete-economy central planning at the left.
In general, these are the three options that modern states have at their disposal. They are the “Big Three”.
All three have benefits and all three have drawbacks. Some clearly more than others.
The market approach is the one most familiar to those of you that would be reading this. It’s the form with minimal government intervention, no central planning, price signals, innovation, no controls, et cetera. Generally a free market is when there is no government intervention and it is a competitive market when there is minimal planning for competition by the government. Pure free market is somewhat of a libertarian-fetish, whereas competitive markets are anti-monopolistic and regulatory but to a minimum amount necessary to promote fair competition.
Central planning is the opposite: they have central planners that direct the economy, full price controls, ownership of industry by government, and related functions.
Some people, especially on the Right, seem to worship the market as if it were a god. That it alone would just fix every problem we have if we just made it more free. I don’t take such an optimistic view. Central planning is the worst option of the three, but a pure free market (or competition-based market) isn’t a cure either. It leads to centralizers and an improper power cycle in the nation. It’s better than central planning, certainly, but it also lacks any types of safeguards to prevent against what will eventually destroy it.
An easy, acceptable breakdown image for the Planned v. Market economy is below:
The above is a basic visual showing the different placements given the two most prominent economic systems.
Corporatism is a different beast entirely. Most don’t even consider this an economic system, but it is clearly very distinct of planned or market so I believe it deserves its own spot.
Think of it like a combination of the pieces of a human body. They break down each piece, unite them, and then force them to negotiate for the whole. Corporatism is a political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, on the basis of their common interests.
Corporatism is often tied to fascism or incorrectly regarded as “corporatocracy” (which it is not).
In a previous article, I wrote:
Corporatism is still practiced to this day in places like Hong Kong with their functional constituencies. It is not fascism-dependent, nor is it “control by corporations” as we think of modern corporations. It is based on guilds and interest groups. Historically, corporatism is tied with the political system of fascism because they used a corporatist economic system where the interest groups negotiated amongst themselves, while the state had the final say. But this state domination is not required in corporatism, as Hong Kong shows. In many ways, a modified variant of corporatism would be far superior to that of capitalism, as Hong Kong in its prime had demonstrated. It does not necessarily have to come side-by-side with tyranny or evil corporations.
From the wiki:
The term is derived from the Latin corpus, or “human body”. The hypothesis that society will reach a peak of harmonious functioning when each of its divisions efficiently performs its designated function, such as a body’s organs individually contributing its general health and functionality, lies at the center of corporatist theory.
And:
Corporatism does not refer to a political system dominated by large business interests, even though the later are commonly referred to as “corporations” in modern American legal and pop cultural parlance; instead, the correct term for this theoretical system would be corporatocracy.
Corporatism, in a nutshell, is the inclusion of these guilds that then have negotiating power with the others. The idea is that each guild would have equalized power, so no corporate interest would be higher than the others. And the interest of the whole people, per their inclusion and activism within their guild, would be effectively represented.
It’s not a bad idea in theory. In practice, it was problematic because of Fascism. Fascism gave the “final say” during the negotiation (or disputes) to the government. So, in effect, it was a guild-negotiation session, where the state had the final (and oftentimes first) say.
It does not have to function like this, however. The structure of corporatism in places like Hong Kong is far more interesting. They do not have a rule by one or dictatorship, so how corporatism works is entirely different. The guilds are given proportionality based on the “functional constituency” and then they vote given these lines. Disputes are then settled more-so by democratic voting instead of authoritarian state control. It’s not hard to imagine a full system based like this, instead of the smaller-system presented by Hong Kong, given their great example.
It’s not flawless by any means, but it’s an interesting incursion into an alternative to either central planning or the free market approach.
The bad part about corporatism is generally that we don’t know what it would do. We don’t have many examples to draw from that weren’t dictatorial, and so not super relevant in study to non-tyrannical systems. Additionally, it would not be fully efficient if negotiations had to be done on small-scale issues that are better suited to the market (for obvious reasons).
Personally, I am not an die-hard fan of either of these economic systems.
I like the idea of a mixed system using all three segmented appropriately. Because of the name of this website, let’s call the segments “dominions”.
We could have one dominion that is the “free market” dominion, which is where nearly all businesses lie. Then we could have a corporatist dominion, which is where major, large corporations would reside. The “public square” type of institutions that cause us so many problems today. Finally, we’d have a final centrally planned dominion, where problem businesses would reside.
It’d be relatively easy to segment businesses using these three categories. All small-medium businesses in the first. Most large businesses in the second. Problem large businesses in the third.
This way, we could account for the benefits of the free market, while giving us some leverage to deal with the absolute negatives of the free market (such as centralization and power disparity of large businesses and the isolated class). Small businesses would be free to innovate and operate without interference. Large corporations would be beholden to interest groups, voting, and negotiations instead of free rein to do whatever they want. Meanwhile problem entities, like Google, could be completely broken down and sold off as component parts to reduce their monopolistic influence and control using the final dominion.
IE: Consider it a mixed system using all three of the Big Three. Segmented in dominions based on their respective status in the nation. This would give us the massive innovation, efficiency, and freedom of the free market choice, with the corporatist negotiating/arbitration power to thwart centralizers in major corporations through voting. Finally, it’d also give us the ability to break-down and destroy problematic institutions, using the final dominion.
The republic is a mixed system of rule by one, rule by few, and rule by many frameworks. My idea is to do a similar setup but with a mixed system between the Big Three economic systems.
This is an under-discussed subject, but an important one. I don’t see a way for a free market to sustain itself long-term given historic trends. I don’t see a way to make central planning less terrible. Nor do I see corporatism as a cure in and of itself. So, I don’t really align with any of the options. Every option is significantly lacking, so no matter the approach we take going forward, I do believe we have to abandon the Big Three in the quest for something better.
Read Next:
The Problem Of Reductionism On The Right
When Everything Surrounding Us Is Nothing But Lies
Happily Residing In The Lower Economic Classes
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(Might have a very different IP now, because Tor, and glad you don’t block it.)
Out of all the markets, I still prefer the free market over all the others.
Of course it’s not as fair to the incompetent people, but all I can tell them is “just git gud”.
I do think that those that genuinely can’t work should get support, but that will have to made out of money from their own family, not tax payers that don’t even know the person they’re supporting every month.
Browsing on the Onion web and the Fediverse really makes me realize how important free markets are.
Of course no money is involved in all of that, but you do have the choice between many instances on the same network with their own short and easy to understand rules, so you can choose the one that fits you most, just like in a free market.
In comparison, the regular social media consists of a limited amount of platforms each with kilometers long terms of service/use, privacy policies, codes of conduct with each banning half of the internet because of that while screaming either how much they “care about your privacy”, how much they “care about free speech”, how much they “resist censorship”, and/or how many active users they have, which is closer to central planning.
Spoiler alert: none of the regular social media protect your privacy, none of them are free speech, none of them are censorship resistant, but at least the active user count is kind of close to the truth.
If my website ever blocks you because of Tor or other privacy software, please find a way to send me a message or otherwise let me know so I can work on developing a workaround. I want to always stay open to privacy-friendly alternatives.
And agreed. Between the competitive markets and central planning it really is a no-brainer. Just looking at social media, or now here in the U.S. the Biden vaccine mandates, really should be the only example anyone needs. Even that is ignoring the mountains of evidence from the past hundreds of years of failed central planner states. It’s sad that it’s a debate still at all, but here we are.
From what I’ve seen is that some countries have already given up on mandatory vaccines (Russia, Romania, El Salvador), some planning to give up on it (UK), some are very carefully hinting on (maybe?) giving up on it while still being stuck between “stop the vaccinations” by the people vs “gonna jab ’em all” by the globalists (Japan, India, Mexico), and some are doubling down on it all (US, Australia, Canada, France).
As for the privacy software part, I think as long as you have full control over your own website, it’s not going to block on its own.
However, I do advise that you host all resources you might be linking to by yourself as much as possible.
I see lots of requests going to “wp.com”, mostly pictures.
And 1 request that’s getting blocked because of Cloudflare, which is the Javascript file coming from “static.mailerlite.com”.
Seen so many websites that would load, but be half broken because they’re using Font Awesome and getting it from a Cloudflared CDN rather than hosting the required files by themselves for example.
Or websites where only the HTML would load while CSS and JS won’t because those are all CDN’d through a host that’s on Cloudflare.
Appreciate the heads up. I will be looking into doing so. I’m not great with the tech side of things, but I always try to find ways to make it more secure/resilient to censorship.
I’m loving your work on the cyclical nature of governmental collapses. Have you noticed or considered how the monopolisation and then the debasement of the money supply influences this process.
If you had a decentralised, incorruptible form of money, you could theoretically break the cycle all together.
Hey Luke, glad to have you reading and thanks for the kind comment.
As for your question, absolutely. The centralization (monopolization) of the money supply/banking/related industries are a key factor in the cyclical nature of collapse. They need the control of money to eventually trigger some issues that would warrant further centralization (in their own interest). Money is one of the principle “arenas” that I talk about getting centralizing during the cycle. That one, and the other arenas, need to be protected to stop the cycle from progressing. Not just theoretically, but also in practice.
I don’t necessarily think a truly “incorruptible” form of money is truly possible per se, but I do agree that money cannot be centralized in the interest of a few without risking perma-centralization movement on the cycle due to the stranglehold on a key societal functioning tool. Decentralization, or preferably ‘centralization by stakeholders’ (so there is no wiggle-room for centralization as in a decentralized environment), is my current preferred alternative.
There are a couple good books on the subject. The Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson is one that immediately comes to mind. He focused on money/inflation side of things if you’re interested in diving into some ideas there.
Some of the “urban republics” of Italy and Germany during the Medieval and Renaissance eras had guild dominated governance. But the guilds were not co-equal with each other, and many economic interests were unrepresented. Also, some had rural hinterlands that were held in a dependent relationship. Venice and Genoa had actual overseas empires in the eastern Mediterranean. Than there was the Hanseatic League; an alliance of trading houses and city states along parts of the North Sea and Baltic Sea shorelines that actually fought a war against the kingdom of Denmark. Poul Andersen based his SF series about an interstellar “Polesotechnic League” on this historical example.