The Most Efficient Distribution of Resources

So people tell me, they say, "The free market is the most efficient means of distributing limited resources." And they say it with a straight face. They don't seem to be so inconceivably stupid as to be incapable of the use of even the most basic of tools. Hell, they even seem to have the right number of fingers. So what, I ask you, what unreasoningly evil definition of efficiency is this?

By what definition of efficiency is a 5-10% unemployment rate when the economy is going well a good thing? And try to remember, if you want to answer this, that an infinitely mobile workforce is nothing more than an economists wet dream, that disappears the moment he wakes up to find a sticky mess all over his calculator.

While we're at it, how, exactly, is it more efficient for 10% of the world's population to be consuming 90% of its food resources? Doesn't any of this sound even remotely wasteful to you people?

Still, enough with the statistics. Let's look at a specific example. An example from everybody's favourite monolithic global corporation, Microsoft. So here's a story I read just the other day.

Back in the early '90s, everyone thought that real-time 3D rendering was impossible. Then three companies come up with a way at pretty much the same time. Almost immediately, the Microsoft Acquisition, Assimilation and Expansion Vultures (TM) descend upon these companies, and after examining their wares, they buy one of the companies.

Fair enough.

The technology they bought goes by the name of DirectX, and if you've played a modern PC game, you've probably used it.

So what happened to the other two? Well, after Microsoft bought DirectX, they started giving away free licenses for it. Given that this was really their only revenue stream, the other companies would have found it difficult enough to compete. Still not a sure enough bet for Microsoft, though.

One of the other technologies worked on nearly every major platform available at the time. DirectX only worked on Win95. Not even DOS or Win 3.1, just Win95. Maybe they could still make a living. Except Microsoft announced that they would soon be making DirectX available for all those other platforms. Both those other companies went out of business.

Guess what? DirectX still only works on Win95 and up.

Now I'd like to tell you that this is about how evil Microsoft is, because I really don't like them. But, let's face it, what did they actually do wrong? Nothing much. Told a bit of a fib, which may or may not have made a difference. Hell, they may have actually intended to port DirectX to those other platforms at the time. No, they only did what the free market allowed them too - swing their weight around like the huge, ungainly, elephantine colossus that they are, and if a few ants get crushed in the process, they'd hardly even notice. And it's hardly a matter of vital importance exactly which way of making computer games pretty becomes dominant, except to the people who lost jobs over it.

But was this the most efficient use of the available resources? Well, we had three technologies, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and all in early stages of their development. Microsoft, as the technology industries undemocratically chosen divine arbiter of standards chose one.

Given that some of the features offered by the competitors have yet to be replicated, the answer is clearly no, it wasn't the best use of the resources.

But planned economies are a horrible failure, right? Muldoonism, Communist Russia - horrible failures.

Well of course they bloody were. Muldoon was a raving lunatic. If you have your economy planned by a lunatic, it's obviously not going to go well. And Russia was a pretty unpleasant place to live before the communists took over, and for most people it's not a hell of a lot better now. Political freedom never fed anyone's children. The communists were at least quite good at feeding that 99.9% of the population they didn't execute.

Meanwhile the well-planned economy in Scandinavia, while New Zealand, that doyen of New Right idealism has been floundering approximately since at least '87. And we should probably have seen that coming. Kids today think there's no alternative to laissez faire economics because they're just too young to remember anything else. Anything except the largely mythical horror stories the New Right have told them.

(Though most of the stories about Muldoon seem to be pretty much true. But that's Muldoon.)

Well, kids, there are alternatives. Unfortunately, the politicians just find it easier to keep feeding you the same old bollocks.

But c'mon, you call this efficient?