It’s January, it’s wet and cold, the holidays are over and the next working year stretches bleakly out before you. “I could give it all up and become a diving instructor in the Maldives”, you say to yourself. Just then, your inbox flashes. It’s RFI 7. A set of detailed follow up questions on the mad rush of material you submitted before Christmas. As you carefully parse each of the sub-parts of the many sub-questions, your mind wanders. “I could be diffusing land mines in Sierra Leone. Or studying the history of musical instruments in late medieval France…”

Despair not. You are here to save the world from destroying itself. One RFI at a time.

Zoom out and take the two hundred year view for a moment. Seen through the lens of political economy, the period following the industrial revolution was an epic struggle between two rival forces: the power of the market and the power of the state. Different countries, at different times, experimented with handing over the reigns of power to one or other of these rival forces. The laissez-faire free market capitalism of the late 19^th century created both rapid technological and industrial progress but it had also created a crisis. Karl Marx’s claim that the capitalist system contained the seeds of its own destruction seemed to many to be both economically inevitable, and observationally accurate.

Marx was right that unconstrained markets lead to an inexorable accumulation of corporate power, leading to economic exploitation, and ultimately revolution. The architects of communist revolutions believed the solution lay in state power. What economists describe as the command economy: activity directed by the state and serving its interests, not the interests of private capitalists. But wherever this was tried, power that was claimed in the name of “The People” was consolidated and exploited in service of whichever mad dictator was able to seize it.

“We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. The German Nazis and Russian Communists pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of power is power.”

George Orwell’s 1984.

Both markets and states, left to their own devices, seek to gain, consolidate and exploit power. One might also say religions do the same (and we certainly also tried that for a millennium or so between the Romans and the Enlightenment – didn’t work out great either).

Yet in the end, capitalism has not, as Marx predicted, destroyed itself. And across large parts of Europe, freedom and democracy has been reclaimed from totalitarian state power.

Humanity seems to have found something of solution to the (seemingly) insoluble problem that economic power always concentrates. That solution lies in balancing the opposing forces of markets and states. By building strong institutions that constrain and mediate the power of markets and the power of the state.

How do you build and maintain institutions strong enough to withstand the desire of both markets and states to consolidate economic power? Easy. You need the best lawyers and economists money can buy. Seriously, that is what you need. Not all heroes wear capes.

Good regulation is the answer. It might seem a mundane form for human salvation to take. But it is regulation that occupies the centre ground between market power and state power, balancing and moderating both forces. It sets the limits on both sides: the rules for what firms are allowed to do in the economy, but (equally important) also the rules for what states are allowed to do in the economy. There is a reason that the political defenders of the European project describe it in the noblest terms – as a project that safeguards the peace, freedom and prosperity of its citizens – when its real day-to-day activities are almost all related to building and running a web of regulatory institutions.

Without this careful regulatory balancing act – mediating between corporate and state power – the economy destroys itself. I always think an economy is rather like a nuclear power station. A massive, almost limitless, source of clean energy. But left uncontrolled in anyone’s hands it is prone to meltdown and humanity-ending catastrophe. Market regulation provides the control rods that keep the reactor within safe limits. And that regulation needs careful maintenance, checks and balances, regular monitoring, failsafe systems. Regulatory lawyers and their economist friends are the engineers who run that system and keep it functioning in tip top condition. Without it, the whole thing goes into meltdown.

The purpose of this woefully limited history lesson is to say no more than this: we are all the good guys. Market power is bad. State power is bad. Both must be constrained. Constraining is good, it is the act of balancing between these two great powers that protects our way of life. We should remember that everyone, on both sides, who is engaged in the balancing act is serving a noble cause. Whether you are private practice lawyer advising a giant dominant corporate, or a sceptical economist working in a competition authority. What matters is that the system operates with integrity, independence and is based on the best evidence and argument available on both sides. Allow either side of that balancing act to get away with whatever they want and the system starts to tip out of balance.

It’s 2023 and you are doing great work, keep at it kids.