Greece and Wisconsin: Two case studies in capital's 'divide and conquer' strategy

Pitting unions and poorer countries against each other has worked out well for political elites

Scott Walker
(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Scarcity is a real thing. There's only so much wood or gasoline or laptops or health care to go around, so we cooked up markets to figure out who should get how much of what. But within the real limits imposed by scarcity, there's also artificial scarcity: want imposed by distribution rather than the raw lack of something.

When it's imposed artificially, scarcity can be a power play. Enforce it long and hard enough, and it begins to seem like inescapable reality — the way things just are. At which point, everyone suffering from scarcity becomes convinced they have to fight with each other over the scraps, rather than band together to take on whomever is inflicting the scarcity in the first place.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.