Courtier Industries...
Geek with a .45 - good screed on what happens to companies that start to suck at the gummint teat. They lose their ability to serve the free market, and become courtiers. Customers can then only get what the gummint decides they need.
A consumer in a free and fair market will demand the best value it can get from a producer to satisfy its own needs, which is known best and most intimately to that consumer.
Command economies shove themselves squarely in between the producer and consumer, entirely disrupting and usurping that relationship.
In an American context, although the end result is the same, the issue is far less "command by fiat", and far more "command by virtue of having much more gold than the consumers, from whom it was taken."As a direct consequence, the producers are seduced away from their end consumers. Rather than creating anything of actual sustainable value that their consumers actually want, producers instead become courtier industries of useless foppes whose only business plan is to curry the favor of the king.
From the producer's perspective, it makes perfect sense: it's much easier to please one rich entity willing to give away a mountain of treasure than it is to determine what the needs of myriad, sharp eyed and tight fisted are and how to meet them.
It is the consumers who get the shaft: they are forced to make do with copies of what the rich man ordered, or nothing at all. The consumers and are thus forced to buy ill fitting, substandard things at gunpoint.
