Offers You Can’t Refuse

A renter gets a notice from their landlord. Rent is going up. What do they do?

They could complain, cut other expenses, move further from work, pull their kid from one school and push them into another, squeeze another working adult into the house—or they could pay it.

They pay it.

Across town, someone else spends twenty seven hours a week taking care of a disabled sibling. They make meals, help with bathing, keep track of medications, drive to appointments and make sure that their loved one is safe.

Nobody pays them at all.

These look like opposing economic problems—one thing costs too much, the other too little—but they share a cause.

Price is determined, in part, by the ability to withhold.

The market is not my favorite system, but I respect it and will give credit when due. It works quite well when everyone who is affected is invited and all parties can reasonably decline a potential deal.

If apples get too expensive, I can buy oranges. If one carpenter wants to charge twice the going rate, I can call around for competing quotes. Our ability to walk away moderates one another and settles on a reasonably consensual price.

When necessities are involved, however, it is a different story.

You can technically refuse to pay rent, but you do need to live somewhere. You are welcome to refuse emergency medical treatment, but when you’re bleeding badly enough you tend to stop considering it much of a choice. You can refuse to pay for child care, but the kid won’t stop needing it.

When one side can withhold a necessity that the other side cannot go without, prices can become downright predatory.

Prison phone calls are an example. An prisoner can’t choose another phone company and most families do not have the wealth and social status required to take their business to a competing prison. Before the FCC intervened, they might have paid over eleven dollars for a fifteen minute conversation. Now the same call costs a tenth as much—calculated as service cost to provider per minute, adjusted by economy of scale, plus whatever the FCC thinks is a ‘reasonable’ kickback for providers and prisons.

The telephone service didn’t suddenly become easier to produce. What changed was the leverage the provider is allowed to exert over the customer. The market was tamed by the state.

Necessity can pull prices the other way, too. Suppose your mom can’t safely get herself out of bed tomorrow morning. You could announce that your rate for helping her out is $35 an hour, but if no one agrees to pay you this, what are you going to do?

“Sorry mom, the market has spoken.”

Not likely. Unless she’s done something uniquely horrible, you’ll just go help her out.

And while you are distracted by the logistic nightmare that this may become, a curious thing happens. An absolutely necessary service receives a market value of zero.

Real talk. AARP estimates that 59 million Americans provided 49.5 billion hours of care to adult family members, neighbors and friends in 2024.

So it’s not like the market produces mostly okay, but occasionally totally insane prices at random. It may just not be built to handle most necessities.

Which is okay! The market doesn’t have to be our everything.

After all, as a voting system it heavily preferences the wealthy, who as a matter of course have their basic needs met. These people are not exactly in the best position to see and understand all of the suffering and deprivation that our world could go without.

Which is not at all to say that we need more state intervention. Far from it, please. A well functioning system should not require a galaxy of exceptions to its basic structure to be imposed upon its users by force.

Hear me out—rules are like band-aids. If I see someone with a few, I don’t feel any particular reason to distrust them. But a few hundred? Now I have questions.

And anyway, how many fucking bandaids do we have to put on this thing before we find out it’s a mummy?

This from the Due Process Institute:

The federal criminal system has grown so much that no one currently understands its full scope. To illustrate the breadth of the problem, the House Judiciary Committee’s Over-Criminalization Task Force asked the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in 2013 to update its count of federal criminal offenses—but according to the chairman of the task force, “CRS’ initial response to our request was that they lack the manpower and resources to accomplish this task.”

So our government’s official bandaid count is literally unfathomable. The core of the game has room for improvement, that’s all I’m saying.

And, make no mistake, the core of the game at this moment is “let the market decide.”

Yet the market clearly cannot handle these necessity situations.

Why?

We often discuss prices as though the reveal how much society values things. This seems to make intuitive sense, but consider two examples:

The leader of a company controlling access to a necessity can say, “pay me or go without.”

A daughter caring for her father usually can’t bring herself to say the same thing thing.

The first person’s capacity to withhold is enormous, while the second’s is almost nonexistent. The prices move accordingly.

It is leverage that is being measured here, not trust.

I advocate a philosophy that is sometimes called collective allocation, but to be real we humans have been collectively allocating since the dawn of society.

Families pooled resources, tribes managed commons, religious groups cared for their members and those in need, guilds organized trades. Extended families distributed work, food, property and care.

These systems could be remarkably good at making sure necessary things happened without waiting for someone to make them profitable, but they could also be dreadfully unfair.

Patriarchy is a highly effective solution to society’s childcare problem—you simply decide in advance that the women will take on whatever burdens it entails, and then go have a beer with your buds.

Racial and caste systems can make necessary labor remarkably inexpensive—just establish some aesthetic signals so you know who you can safely fuck over and bam, you’ve got yourself the White House.

So, simply “letting the community decide” isn’t really much of a solution either. Of which community do we speak? Which members, when, and how? Who can join? Who can leave? Who will be the first to take on some inevitable sacrifice?

The onset of large-scale market relations provided an escape from some of the ill effects of the old order. The economy doesn’t care who are, just how much value you can extract. Now that it has risen to a position of supreme power, just get on its good side and it’ll give you the world.

You no longer need to be a certain kind of person to get what you want. If you have the money, you pay it—and most of the time you end up with something like what you were told you would get.

That’s real freedom. Nice one, markets! You did well in this case.

And yet, maybe when you did this you took away more than a big chunk of some old hierarchies’ power. You may have also taken our capacity to consciously decide our collective future.

But what if we don’t have to choose between inherited obligation and individual purchasing power?

Ten families need childcare. Instead of each individually competing for whatever care they can afford, they make the problem visible together:

‘How many hours do we need?’

‘Who can provide them?

‘What would caregivers need?’

‘What resources can we collectively draw upon?’

‘What are we willing to give up to make this a priority?’

Maybe ten families is enough. Maybe not.

Maybe the childcare they really want requires fifty families sharing the cost of maintaining this collective need. Or five hundred.

At some point, maybe a town is the right size. I don’t know the right scale.

But check this out: I don’t have to know. We can figure it out together.

We can organize collectively to seek out the scale at which the people affected by a need can negotiate with a vastly improved level of information and leverage than they could ever possess individually.

In Jiu Jitsu, when you want to break a limb you isolate it. When your limb is in need of support because someone is trying to break it, you don’t thrash it around or tell it that this is all it’s own fault—you team it up with the rest of your body to get it out of trouble.

Different problems have their own scales at which the leverage could work this way. I don’t need my whole neighborhood involved when I decide what to put in my sandwich but a group of households around that size might be able to negotiate childcare quite sufficiently. Healthcare likely requires a larger, more diverse pool of resources, as does land stewardship and disaster response.

The ultimate disasters—mass extinction and climate change—clearly need even more perspectives, resources, and leverage if we are going to realistically address them.

But, and this is important, all that leverage ought to be held collectively.

So, instead of planning to create one giant collective budget, the superior strategy may be to create self-organizing groups that are capable of combining into larger groups when a problem exceeds their capacity—and also capable of letting decisions ratchet down the scale when the coordination of a larger group isn’t necessary.

We can build a fractal economy.

Thanks for reading. Some questions for you:

What necessary work in your life is currently undervalued because someone will do it anyway?

What necessity costs too much because you can’t realistically refuse it?

How many people would need to coordinate before the balance of power changed?

How can I help?