Many of us seek products and services from sellers with goods of the best quality and relatively lower prices. Sellers seek the highest prices for selling the least amount of goods. Sellers compete for customers but would much rather be the only seller in the marketplace or market space. Furthermore, consumers want more for themselves and less for other consumers.
This depiction of market behavior is normal and may seem chaotic to some who view the marketplace through a socialist lens. With all the recent talk about reining in artificial intelligence (AI), taming AI, and limiting its uses, it sounds like the hubris of socializing artificial intelligence products and services.
However, an AI-driven economy cannot be socialized by a single entity, despite all the noise about AI restrictions, limitations, and tighter rules and regulations sent down from the top elites. We all use artificial intelligence in daily activities, ranging from work and leisure to side hustles, if you have one. With the glitz and glamour of technology, particularly artificial intelligence, the point that is missed is this: AI products and services enable firms to meet demands, assist entrepreneurs to create value, and enhance the exchange processes we all take part in daily.
Zack Dugow, who wrote “How to Defend Yourself against All-Powerful Monopolies That Control Your Business” for Forbes, made an important observation but did not take it to its logical conclusion. Dugow said, “If you have a heavy reliance on one of these monopolies [artificially driven software or social media/web page tools], you need to be able to pivot your business quickly and have your backup plan readily available to you. What service providers can you switch to?”
Should AI technology and AI startups eliminate monopolistic behavior between firms and consumers and rid the market space of the unrealistic notion of any socialization of AI technology? Everything has a price and a cost, which is why socialism was debunked some time ago.
However, what about artificial intelligence? Can it be socialized in the market space? You can socialize some things, but artificial intelligence cannot generally be owned and operated by a single entity or widely restricted from public usage. Someone must own the productive resources, sell services, and upgrade and maintain the hardware and software.
Opening market spaces for AI seems reasonable; however, will the elites plan to socialize AI services and products, close up the industry, and eliminate AI buyer options? When prices, inputs, and outputs are calculated, it becomes an unfeasible proposition that AI services, products, and industries be socialized. Fortunately, more and more AI service startups are available for buyers. Again, people use AI-enabled services and products to a large degree for many day-to-day activities. AI startups are on the rise, and they are listening to the market space, despite the socialist view that permeates throughout the media pushing toward more regulations and clamping down on open competition. Nevertheless, even in an AI-driven economy, socialism still cannot work.
No company has yet been granted exclusive ownership privileges of AI products and services. Not yet! Currently, there are over thirteen thousand (and rising) private startups of AI services and products in the United States alone, according to eWeek. Will artificial products and services remain decentralized? AI is a tool and enabler of exchanges between customers and firms. The advent of AI technologies can ward off monopolist behavior in a free market because, with an innovative approach to a consumer product or service, any company may be able to prove themselves worthy in the face of Goliath. Contrary to popular opinion, firms that use AI to enhance customer satisfaction and increase productivity open more doors for regular folks to start up their own business, which gives buyers more options in the marketplace. It also allows customers to enjoy the many features and benefits of products and services that add value to their daily lives. Some need to see this point. In other words, those who want to centralize AI services and products to one seller and raise the barriers to industry entry are saying out loud that they want more for themselves and less for you (and me).
That means no firm should have the exclusive privilege of being the only provider of AI services. Right? So many industries started as decentralized firms and are now privileged providers. Question: Who sets the prices of AI services, packages, and models? While your local utility provider, in many cases, is granted the privilege of being the only supplier of utilities, Amazon, on the other hand, has not received the same privilege. Amazon has a strong position in the market, but we know of competitors out there we can visit if we would like to. The difference between privileged providers and Amazon is that Amazon is subject to market competition. Therefore, they must listen to customers and pay attention to price increases, warehouse logistics, and customer service improvements.
If AI products and services remain decentralized, it will allow the market spaces to regulate the prices and costs for using AI services as opposed to if AI services are centralized under one firm or an elite few, similar to airline companies. When consumers and entrepreneurs see the rising costs of AI-enabled platforms, it reduces the incentives to use that technology, but it also allows new entrants to come into the market space and attempt to deliver a better product at a marginally better price. To disregard this market movement is the intent of socialism in general.
Furthermore, a handful of AI service providers eventually reduces the quality of this handful of providers (there are many instances of this decline in quality and rising price when a provider is granted a monopoly privilege). However, a natural monopoly might be reasonably valued. Technology of any kind, operating in a free market, should be the mechanism by which people who desire to enter an industry can do so with their skills and investment and make their attempts at competing—even if they are unprofitable, they were able to enter the fray.
What is often misunderstood about monopoly and prices is explained by Murray Rothbard:
There is no direct control over price because price is a mutual phenomenon. On the other hand, each person has absolute control over his own action and therefore over the price which he will attempt to charge for any particular good. Any man can set any price that he wants for any quantity of a good that he sells; the question is whether he can find any buyers at that price.
In a free market, no one is granted monopoly privilege—a privileged market position is earned by providing the best quality and price that consumers are willing to buy. On the other hand, forced or restricted choice is a form of socialism, or at least interventionism. At this time, it seems the capital markets are deciding where to invest, which is apparent in the rising number of firms producing more products and services so that businesses can meet public demand. If, however, all capital for AI investment funnels to one entity, it would be a disaster insofar as an economic calculation.
The idea of socialism does not hold up to its tenets considering AI’s technological advances made in recent years from the rising number of firms, especially advances in AI for entrepreneurs and consumers alike. A socialist vision of the world is very compelling, but reality tells us something different. The basic premise is that someone has to produce, someone has to consume, and there is a price calculation for both to exist. In the reality of socialistic visions, when subjected to market space examination, this premise tends to break down.
In many cases, the producer and consumer are the same people at different times. Production must take time, and with knowledge of prices, producers know the quantity of goods to produce at any given time. Even if one can socialize the production of luxury items, homes, and vehicles, how does one produce the capital required to make those items? Even with all needed inputs, AI cannot engage in the economic calculation needed to make a socialist economy work.
About the Author
Raushan Gross is an Associate Professor of Business Management at Pfeiffer University. His works include Basic Entrepreneurship, Management and Strategy, The Inspiring Life and Beneficial Impact of Entrepreneurs, In Pursuit of an Entrepreneurial Culture, and Emerging Institutions of Entrepreneurship. His research interests include topics ranging from entrepreneurship, free markets, economies, markets and competition, and the role of technology in market coordination. Article cross-posted from Mises.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
