What the key cutter is for

A man cuts keys at a narrow stall off a busy road in Riyadh. Someone locked out of a flat, or tired of sharing one key between four people, brings him a problem, and he solves it in a few minutes for less than the problem was costing them.

That is the whole transaction, and it is a quiet kind of public service. Nobody would call it that. But the customer walks away with something they value above what they handed over, which is the only reason they handed it over. Value appears where there was none. Multiply that by every stall and shop on the road and you have a large part of how a neighbourhood gets looked after.

There is a second part. The stall makes a little money, and some of that money, through fees and taxes, ends up paying for the road the customers arrived on and the streetlights above it. Trade feeds the community twice: once in the exchange, and again in what the exchange pays for.

This is why most places have chosen to let people buy and sell freely. Not because markets are noble, but because, kept in balance, they do this double job.

The balance slips in two familiar ways. A seller grows big enough to take more from each customer than he gives back, because there is nowhere else to go. And the same size buys him ways around paying his part of the road.

When that happens, people blame the market. But the man at the stall is still doing exactly what a market is for. What broke is the arrangement around it, the rules meant to keep the big seller honest. That is a different thing to fix.