on the frustration of markets

In the USA, there’s a trillion or much more floating back-n-forth in the so-called underground economy, not including criminal stuff, but the stuff of surviving that’s too sloppy or too small to book and to enforce fees and taxes.

This blog – http://stealthofnations.blogspot.com/ – great title – tracks deals made on the ground and the often brutal boots that governments use to squash undocumented untaxed markets. Yes, brutal.

In all nations, not everyone agrees to fund the social wheel, but more than that, not all nations deliver a social weal that their citizens can or will support. Why help those who run a government when that government fails? Or when that government merely siphons wealth to a favorite few or an entrenched elite?

The Soviets lost more than half their people by failing to convince them to support the system. Busy every day, surviving in a vast black market of food and rents and pastime and trinkets, when the USSR collapsed before 1989, many of its citizens didn’t notice. Over decades then and still today, a large segment of vending and trading in Russia remains outside the formal economy, popular moonshine included.

Were all governments able to corral off-book dealing in such a way that people agree, I think we’d also rein corruption of governments too.

Folks need to get by. What can control that?