This moment of global inequality demands incompetent subjects. The status quo and ever-intensifying versions of it require incompetent consumers who will learn to want technological solutions to their political problems. Are you starving even though there is food? Here is an app to connect you with the charity that is filling that hole in our ragged social safety net. Are global profits being extracted by the financial class while driving down wages and quality of work, even for people with expensive college educations? Here is a website where you can purchase a credential that might help you get a new job, one where you will likely be in the same position again in eighteen months. Your structural incompetence generates ever more sophisticated consumption goods, goods that reinforce status games of who is deserving and who is not.

Your structural incompetence generates ever more sophisticated consumption goods, goods that reinforce status games of who is deserving and who is not. Did you use the app to get a job or to become an entrepreneur? Do you use social media like a customer or producer? Are you surveilled by the state like poor people or do you surveil yourself like the middle class? These gradations of difference are meaningless if the question is which consumption status group has power over their political incompetence. All of them are incompetent; they only differ in how they can afford to lie to themselves about it.

The poorer half of humanity needs cheap housing, cheap health care, and cheap education, accessible to everybody, with high quality and high aesthetic standards. The fundamental problem for human society in the next century is the mismatch between the three new waves of technology and the three basic needs of poor people. The gap between technology and needs is wide and growing wider. If technology continues along its present course, ignoring the needs of the poor and showering benefits upon the rich, the poor will sooner or later rebel against the tyranny of technology and turn to irrational and violent remedies. In the future, as in the past, the revolt of the poor is likely to impoverish rich and poor together.

The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent.

Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand. To put it another way, the partisans of intervention assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but also assume that these same individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box. They are further assuming that the mass of supposedly incompetent consumers are competent to choose not only those who will rule over themselves, but also over the competent individuals in society. Yet such absurd and contradictory assumptions lie at the root of every program for “democratic” intervention in the affairs of the people.12

Such is the foolishness of wanting to be competent in a political economy that can only sell you ways to feel competent, but does not offer sufficient ways to enact competency.

[...] our technology and our economic system seem to produce the present bad situation: millions of people feel themselves poor and powerless; millions feel that music is something to be made only by experts.