The Invisible Fist: A new way to do the same thing

In the last two centuries, a significant part of the world has undergone a transition towards less repressive governance. Notably, there is a strong correlation between a successful market economy and a less repressive government.

Really? How do you establish that?

This could lead one to draw the conclusion that a freer and more successful economy gives rise to a freer people. However, this freedom is largely illusory. A successful market economy creates an Invisible Fist that rewards those who maintain the status quo and punishes deviants. With the status quo guaranteed by the invisible fist, the iron fist simply becomes unnecessary.

The basic mechanism of the Invisible Fist is fairly simple. Markets are extraordinary at allocating resources efficiently and maximizing production (even Mr. Marx conceded this).

Would you mind showing you have read some Marx by pointing out where this statement supposedly occurs?

One of these resources is human capital. Thus, in order to get the full benefits of capitalism, individuals must place themselves into a certain market-established niche. To reject this niche, the individual has to risk giving up the high income that market economies provide.

This is nonsense. The whole point about the nature of the bourgeois economy, as seen by both its adherents and its critics, is its hospitality to change.

However, the Invisible Fist's power extends further. The success of the capitalist economy leads to significant increases in living costs. Thus, the market economy does not merely give an opportunity that the individual is free to accept or reject. Rather, through cost increases, it also makes it more difficult to survive without accepting one's niche. Therefore, rejecting one's place leads to an impoverishing punch in the face by the Invisible Fist.

This too. Neither secular price rises without capitalism nor price stability in market economies is unknown, and whatever the theoretical relationships are they cannot be successfully cimplified this way.

An illustration: The Invisible Fist in the legal profession

We can see the Invisible Fist at work in the legal profession. The efficiency of the market creates a large amount of high-paying, and perhaps miserable, legal jobs. This in turn causes an increase in law school tuition, forcing law students to take on more debt. The Invisible Fist discourages law students from breaking the mold because doing so would take away the guarantee of the high income needed to recoup their costs.

Also nonsense. Every one of these supposed steps in logic contains an error. American capitalism was quite successful between 1900 and 1970, without any significant increase in the real wages of salaried lawyers, even the associates in elite firms. Debt levels are not related to law school tuition levels alone: they are also related to which students are admitted and choose to attend high-priced law schools. Debt financing of legal education has its own history, which is not captured by your account. There are much better ways to pay back debt than by working at large law firms. Etc.

The Invisible Fist coerces Law Schools as well. The market has allocated them into the niche of producing the human capital for large law firms. If they chose to go a different route, they would need to lower tuition. However, the high tuition has increased professor salaries. Thus, opting out of the niche would dramatically reduce their ability to recruit and retain talented faculty.

Wrong again. All these are conclusory statements, offered without evidence and either radically over-simplifying or directly missating the nature of the relations described.

Corroboration for the existence and role of the Invisible Fist: Communism and Fascism

The Invisible Fist explanation is corroborated by two interesting phenomena: the tendency of communist countries to be authoritarian and the tendency of collapsing market economies to embrace fascism. At first glance, it does not seem inevitable that a communist government is incompatible with political freedoms. However, from the Soviet Union to Cambodia, this seems to generally be the case, and it is quite logical. Society desires stability. With the Invisible Fist of the market gone, the iron fist must return.

That's not the history of either the Soviet Union or Cambodia. Was there a noticeably less repressive government in Russia before state socialism? Is there a noticeably unrepressive government there now? Which is "Communist": Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, or Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge's mortal enemies, the Vietnamese? Do you really think that Cuba is a more repressive state now than it was under Fulgencio Batista? Or than Nicaragua was under Anastasio Somoza? Where is the repression in Kerala, which has been ruled for two generations by Communists?

A similar process is seen in the rise of European fascism during the Great Depression and the resurgence of European Ultranationalists in the wake of the recent recession. When the market economy falters, the Invisible Fist is weakened and iron fists become an appealing option to a society that does not want change.

When non-market economies falter, social instability rises too. You might want to consider the logical consequences of that readily-demonstrated fact.

Conclusion

People like freedom, but they hate change more, and these two concepts are realistically inseparable.

Two propositions that are undemonstrated, and probably wrong.

This is a conclusion only in the sense that it's conclusory. No idea has been actually developed: if one wasn't convinced already after the first graf, nothing said later made any difference.

This essay needs hard, careful editing. What will be left after the subtraction of erroneous or misleading material will be disarticulated bones, pretty much, which will need to be rebuilt in a new frame.