i want to deconstruct the logic on this scurvy-generating policy of slapping import taxes on american orange juice (how many indigenous kids are you going to send to the hospital over this?), and then rationalizing it by saying you can buy orange juice from mexico or brazil instead. this naive application of market theory is going to argue that orange juice imported from mexico or brazil will remain lower in cost because it's not being taxed, while orange juice from the united states will price itself out of the market. this will harm american producers, who will no longer be able to compete in the canadian market.

is that what's going to happen?

well, that's not what i learned in school about markets or how markets work.

rather, what i learned about markets in school is that the orange juice industry is an oligopoly (bananas are a monopoly. have you ever seen the price of bananas vary from store to store by more than a cent? the banana industry is so controlled, it's like an organized crime syndicate. the upside is that inflation is low. the only commodity that's experienced less inflation than bananas is marijuana. shrinkflation aside, it's still $10/gram, right?) and that orange juice producers inside the oligopoly will consequently cooperate to set prices in a way that is consistent. what that means is that a modern, evidence-based, non-naive, non-ideological analysis of how the orange juice industry actually works in the real world (really existing market theory) would rather predict that if you put an import tax on american orange juice then manufacturers of orange juice from brazil or mexico would react by cooperating with american producers and increase their prices proportionally to maintain price consistency. mexican orange juice producers would not seek to compete with american orange juice producers, as that would not be in their self-interest, which is to maintain high prices to maximize profits for investors. in an oligopoly, competition is destructive and harmful and to be avoided at all costs, as a primary corporate objective.

oligopolies can be upset by the introduction of new manufacturers seeking to enter the market by undercutting the oligopoly, but it's hard to see where that's going to happen, unless we start growing oranges in greenhouses in southern ontario and the okanagan valley, which is not the worst idea i've ever heard. that may force the oligopoly to compete, until the new manufacturer can enter the oligopoly, or be targeted by it for destruction, dismantling or hostile takeover.

the result is that this attempt to minimize inflation by choosing commodities with replacements is naive and a poor understanding of how markets actually function in the real world. the import taxes, as regressive consumption taxes, will simply be inflationary across the board in the commodities being targeted. they will not harm american producers, they will just lead to inflation in the targeted commodities. further, this deconstruction of the orange juice oligopoly would apply to most other commodities being imported and most other industries, which are oligopolies or cartels in the real world, and which don't want to compete with each other, but want to avoid competing with each other. that's why we have huge government departments trying to force companies to compete with each other to salvage the facade of the make believe ideology of market economics - they don't want to compete, they realize competing is dumb. markets that have competition are called unstable; that's a definition. an unstable market is defined as a market that has competitive firms. all unstable markets tend to oligopolies as stable outcomes, which you can derive using differential equations, by using game theory (the nash equilibrium) or by just taking as an analogy to blackbody radiation or any other steady-state equation. markets tend towards equilibrium between producers and consumers; they don't tend towards competition, but towards the abolition of competition. then, the government has to step in and kick them in the ass and yell at them "start fucking competing.".

if we had real anarchy in the colloquial sense, the real end of government, the first thing that would happen is that this naive government creation we call the market economy would completely evaporate, and be replaced by feudal cartels and landowners colluding with each other to reduce everyone around them to slavery, leaving the workers and slaves and serfs and migrants to organize to try to survive. from that origin point, the workers could start building the kinds of societies that anarchists in the technical sense have long imagined and desired, by starting from the bottom up in collectives and communes, intended to size control from the oligopolies and feudal lords and cartels. markets cannot exist without governments to define, oversee and ultimately regulate them, as nobody would agree to these contrived and often childish rules that are in nobody's self-interest without an organized system of violence and control threatening them to behave via a monopoly on violence. no government means no markets.

that's what i learned in school, anyways.