The Market Builds the Tanker. Political Power Sinks It.
Franz Oppenheimer’s The State draws a fundamental distinction between two ways human beings may obtain what they want.
The first is the “economic means”: production and voluntary exchange. I make something you value; you make something I value; each of us becomes better off through cooperation. This is the foundation of the market-mediated society.
The second is the “political means”: acquiring wealth and advantage through coercion, seizure and domination. Instead of producing something another person voluntarily accepts, political power compels submission. This is the foundation of the politically mediated society.
Both societies now occupy the same physical world, but they operate according to opposite principles. The market-mediated society consists of innumerable voluntary relationships running across political borders. The politically mediated society divides those same people into territorial camps and commands them to struggle for dominance.
The Iran–U.S.–Israel war makes the distinction almost painfully visible.
A commercial tanker embodies an enormous system of peaceful cooperation. It incorporates steel, engines, electronics, navigation technology, insurance, credit and specialized labor supplied by people scattered across many countries. It exists to carry a valuable commodity from where it is available to where people want it.
Nobody must conquer anyone for that transaction to occur. The buyer wants the oil. The seller wants the money. The shipowner wants the freight revenue. The crew wants its wages. Their interests are not identical, but prices and contracts allow them to cooperate.
Then the politically mediated society enters.
Its question is not: What can Iran, Israel and America produce together?
Its question is: Whose political will shall prevail, and how much destruction will be required to establish that fact?
Tankers costing hundreds of millions, or fleets and commercial networks worth billions, are destroyed or disabled. Refineries, ports, ships and energy infrastructure become military targets. Labor, steel, electronics and scientific talent are diverted into weapons designed either to destroy productive capital or prevent its destruction.
Shipping insurance rises. Trade routes close. Energy becomes more expensive. Product shortages appear. Inflation remains elevated. Interest rates rise or remain higher than they otherwise would. Investment that might have produced homes, factories, medicines or better transportation is redirected toward replacing what has been destroyed.
Nothing corresponding is created.
The market builds the tanker. Political power sinks it. The market is then blamed for the resulting shortage.
The customary defense of political power is that political potentates sometimes protect society from external enemies. There is truth in the narrow proposition: once an armed enemy exists, defense may be necessary.
But it leaves out the peculiar role political potentates play in producing the very danger that supposedly makes them indispensable.
Governments are remarkably careful always to identify, cultivate, magnify, or manufacture, an external enemy. Every state describes its own military expansion as defensive and the other state’s expansion as aggressive. Every new weapon is presented as a reluctant answer to the adversary’s weapons. Every restriction of liberty is temporary. Every enlargement of political authority is necessitated by an emergency.
One political authority threatens another. The second expands to meet the threat. The first then cites that expansion as proof that its original fears were justified. The process supplies its own evidence and becomes self-perpetuating.
Political power continuously reproduces the circumstances offered as proof that only political power can save us.
This is why the familiar claim that “the state protects society” must be examined much more closely. From whom is it protecting us? Frequently, from another state or from armed movements attempting to become states. At best, one political authority prevents another political authority from imposing itself upon us. That may be necessary within the existing system, but it hardly vindicates the system.
One can point this out ad infinitum and ad nauseam. One can argue that the deepest danger is not merely the foreign potentate but political power itself.
Wagner’s Ring Cycle can be read in precisely this way. The Ring promises mastery. Each new possessor imagines that the catastrophe results from the wrong person possessing it. If only the Ring could be placed in wiser, stronger or more virtuous hands, its power might finally be used for good.
But the Ring corrupts the relationship of everyone to everyone else. The central question is therefore not who deserves to possess it. The question is whether the desire to possess it is itself the source of the catastrophe.
Our political debates rarely reach that question. They concern only which ruler should hold the Ring.
Should America dominate Iran, or Iran successfully resist America? Should Israel achieve regional supremacy, or should a rival coalition contain it? Which alliance should control the strait? Which side possesses the greater historical grievance? How many weapons will be necessary to secure the desired political outcome?
The market-mediated society appears only as something to be taxed, mobilized, interrupted or sacrificed during the contest.
Suggest that humanity should progressively replace territorial domination with contract, arbitration, insurance, distributed ownership, free exchange and voluntary association, and the contemporary response is likely to be dismissive:
“Yes, people said quaint things about markets and limited government back in the 1980s, but nobody takes that seriously anymore.”
That dismissal reveals how completely the politically mediated society has enclosed our imagination. Its premises are accepted before discussion begins. Political domination is treated as permanent, realistic and mature. Peaceful exchange is treated as an antiquated ideology even though peaceful exchange produces nearly everything sustaining modern life, while the struggle for domination destroys it.
The two systems are therefore not merely running in parallel. The politically mediated society lives upon the productive surplus of the market-mediated society. It taxes its income, commands its factories, borrows against its future production, depreciates its money and destroys its accumulated capital.
The market produces the abundance that permits political power to wage war. Political power then consumes that abundance in a contest over who shall exercise political power.
Oppenheimer’s urgent question remains almost entirely unasked. It is not which political power ought to dominate. It is why human cooperation must continue to be organized around political domination at all.
