I posted something last evening that seemed to bring free market trolls and hobgoblins swarming out of the woodwork. Why?? Belief in this particularly absurd aspect of cheap-labor conservatism has a few inviolable prerequisites: A sketchy, limited knowledge of history, a lop-sided perspective of economic causes and effects, an inability to think abstractly, minimal comprehension of nuance plus a wide-eyed, child-like faith in utterly theoretical precepts. Are people STILL so stubbornly ignorant? I would have thought that the serial failure of free market fallacies in Real World applications might have at least occasioned SOME healthy skepticism.
I was wrong.
Apparently, the economic refugees swarming into this country from Mexico are all confused about the benefits of unchained capitalism afforded them via the North American Free Trade Agreement. You know, benefits like beggars' wages and no workplace safety and child labor. Who'da thunk it?
The chill, frosty heart of what we call conservatism is simply backward-think. Its prime ingredients are ignorance, intolerance and greed; its goal is the continued entrenchment of a minority class of ruling elites over a vast majority of servant/slaves who do all the work and pay all taxes necessary to sustain the system. That's the nuts and bolts of it, gang, and anything else you may encounter along the way is trimmings and trappings designed to keep you from noticing its utterly inimical nature. Conservatism is the enforcement of inequality, the exploitation of superficial and ultimately inconsequential differences between people. It is also, therefore, incompatible with prosperity, progress and, most especially, democracy. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." These are the opening words of the body of the Declaration of Independence; Conservatives may pay them profuse lip service, but they DO NOT believe them. It is the single fundamental flaw which renders their entire belief system aberrant...and, as such, can NEVER be over-emphasized.
Right now you can stop reading this and go to the website of the cuckoo Cato Institute, a coin-operated rightwad think tank funded by Verizon and Merrill Lynch, as I recall. On their home page, in the upper right-hand corner, you'll see some hogwash about 'less government' and 'free markets.' No, Virginia, there's no such thing as a free market anywhere on this planet. They exist only as an integral part of the contrived cheap-labor conservative mythology and they have approximately the same level of reality as unicorns. Or maybe a little less. My guiding light these days, Professor Noam Chomsky, says this: "We first have to separate ideology from practice, because to talk about a free market at this point is something of a joke. Outside of ideologues, the academy and the press, no one thinks that capitalism is a viable system, and nobody has thought that for sixty or seventy years--if ever."
What we've got here is smoke and mirrors, folks. It's camouflage and purest misdirection, intended to distract you from noticing that enforced inequality I mentioned. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This is information which only comes as news to starry-eyed headcases; the rest of us knew it all along. The thing is, they're taught back in cheap-labor elementary school that their beloved marketplace is a transcendent and almost God-like place which is self-balancing, self-sustaining and wholly removed from outside influences. It is natural, eternal and immutable. It's central tenet is ruthless acquisition, its single prerequisite is relentless competition and its judgement is irrevocable. While this remains an entertaining theory--and quite a lovely rightwing bedtime story--it is, so far, ENTIRELY unproven.
Debunking it is a snap. This glorious market of theirs CANNOT exist without numerous underpinnings...to which they're blithely oblivious. For instance, the concept of ownership, most notably, property rights; if you don't own land, you can't sell it. Also contract rights. How about a court system to enforce them? We can add currency, and securities along with other negotiable instruments, plus a banking system to safely handle these items. Oh, yeah...and corporations. You know, those great big piles or organized wealth which syndicate risk and privatize profit. All of this was created out of thin air by laws, customs and institutions enacted and agreed upon before the concept of capitalism ever reared its ugly head...some of it CENTURIES before.
So, you see, this omniscient and eternal market DID, in fact, have a beginning; it didn't always exist. Not only that, but we can pin it down its beginning to some 200 years ago or so, as one of the main forces propelling the Industrial Revolution. Neither was it the inevitable, organic phenomenon which cheap-labor conservatives worship so devoutly. It was FORCED upon the hapless population.
In his book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (The New Prerss, 1998), author John Gray--a conservative who's pretty delusional himself--says this: "Mid-nineteenth century England was the subject of a far-reaching experiment in social engineering. Its objective was to free economic life from social and political control and it did so by constructing a new institution, the free market, and by breaking up the more socially-rooted markets that had existed in England for centuries. The free market created a new type of economy in which prices of all goods, including labor, changed without regard to their effects on society. In the past, economic life had been constrained by the need to maintain social cohesion. It was conducted in social markets--markets that were embedded in society and subject to many kinds of regulation and restraint. The goal of the experiment that was attempted in mid-Victorian England was to demolish these social markets and replace them by deregulated markets that operated independently of social needs. The rupture in England's economic life produced by the creation of the free market has been called the Great Transformation." (That's The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, published in 1944. --AOM)
The contention that financial considerations rule our every act and thus can be separated from all other areas of human interaction simply doesn't hold water: Social Darwinism is baloney...and offensive baloney at that. Elements of self-interest most certainly DO exist in human nature; ego is real. But so is sharing and helping and other forms of cooperation. And we can't EVER forget altruism--Mother Theresa, anyone? To say that man is first and foremost an economic creature insults the totality of the human species. (Feel free to get angry.) Furthermore, measuring progress and success by wealth alone is venal vulgarity. In that, the right are consummate specialists...so it is unsurprising that they automatically believe everyone else to be similarly motivated.
Government created this marketplace because it created the infrastructure that makes it possible. Government, therefore, has implicit authority over it. Better than that, it has *ex*plicit authority, by dint of that splendid Declaration of Independence I quoted earlier: "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Also, "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government." So there.
To my mind, though, the worst hypocrisy is that the cheap-labor conservatives don't buy into any of this free-market balderdash themselves. When backed into a corner and forced to submit to those 'self-balancing' forces themselves, they cry like wet babies. Remember the savings & loan collapse during the presidency of Ronald Ray-Gun? (You know, the one involving a shady young Neil Bush...) You ought to remember it; your tax dollars paid for the bailout. And speaking of Bad Actor, here's Prof. Noam again: "The Reagan administration was the most anti-market administration in modern American history. They virtually doubled barriers to imports in order to try to save US industry. If they had opened up markets in the 1980's, superior Japanese products would have flooded the automotive industry, steel, semiconductors. The main industrial base of the US would have been wiped out. So the Reagan administration just barred imports. What's more, it poured public funds into industry." See? No free market for Ronnie!
In March of 2002, even as he talked about being a "free-trading nation," President Loser announced tarrifs on steel imported from the European Union. THAT doesn't sound much like flying monkey free-market policy to me! Neither does the fact that in May of that same year, he signed a Farm Bill subsidizing US agri-business to the tune of $190 billion over the next decade.
Free markets?!? Don't believe the hype...
Plenty more on tap. Very soon, I'm going to expose all the perils and pitfalls of privatization, a cornerstone of their neoliberal swindle.
Originally posted at Conceptual guerilla's Strategy & Tactics