Deservedly, or at least deservedly enough, liberalism has lost status among the trend-setting set, a victim of its tangents and excesses.
Unhappily, its replacements are no more impressive. There is a petulant leftism and a snide conservatism, especially a fast-growing, well-financed network of free market purists.
It is fast-growing in part because it is well-financed by large corporations, especially mining and oil companies with an interest in weaker environmental laws.
But the economic liberatarians also thrive because they have been energized by an idea, the idea that government is the source of most problems, and that the solution lies in replacing government programs with “market-oriented” policies.
More Top Picks Best Resistance Band Sets For Postpartum Recovery
It is an appealing and romantic idea, no less so because it is a total fraud.
Fraudulence does not equal personal dishonesty. The scholars and researchers at the network of think tanks such as Chicago’s Heartland Institute are self-deluded, not insincere.
The reason it is a fraud is not because markets don’t work (they do) or because government excesses are not real (they are) or because some specific free-market proposals aren’t good ideas. They are.
Defying the modern world is no disgrace. The modern world can be awful. Escaping it makes perfect sense, and for an American, how better to escape than through the delusion that it is possible to recreate some Jeffersonian pastoral society in which each individual or household is a self-sufficient unit?
Alas, there are cars and trucks, so roads must be paved, bridges and tunnels bolstered, rules imposed to keep the air breatheable. Actually, there are too many cars and trucks, which explains why Sacramento, Cal., has a new mass transit system and why North Carolina’s Research Triangle is considering one.
There are planes which must be kept from bumping into each other, parks which must be maintained because most people live far removed from nature, schools to train the skilled workers which a technological economy requires. That economy has created wealth (much of it thanks to government subsidies), and through wealth it has created leisure and learning, and therefore a demand for libraries, museums and research grants.
There are medical advances (also federally subsidized) so doctors must be licensed and drugs regulated. The medical advances keep people alive long enough to need pensions. There are corporations, whose shareholders have to be protected.
One could go on. Whoever breakfasted this morning on fruit juice, cereal or eggs depended on government for the availibility, economy and hygienity of breakfast. A large, highly technical, complex society requires interdependence, or government as it is sometimes known. It is not an option.
Nor is there anything new here. Interdependence, via government, has been a necessary component of American prosperity from Alexander Hamilton’s “internal improvements” to the Defense Department’s Internet. In fact, no prosperous country ever got that way via the pure free market. If something never happened, perhaps that’s because it can’t.
Like most frauds, free-market purism masks a reality. Behind the facade is a political agenda, an acceptable agenda that ought to drop its mask. In brief, the ideology of the purists holds that the best way-maybe the only way-to operate a successful capitalist economy is by maximum feasible inequality.
The key word there is “feasible.” With a few exceptions, these are not villains who want to grind the common people into the dirt. On the contrary, they think the common people can prosper only by being satisifed with their present small share of the pie, or even a smaller one, because that’s the only way to make the pie bigger.
The workable economy, then, requires lots of low-wage jobs and low taxes, especially for the upper-income earners who make investments. And if those low taxes mean there isn’t much money to support parks, buses, state universities and other public services, well, that’s a price which must be paid.
It isn’t hard to see why they clothe this outlook in misleading libertarian philosophy. Undisguised, it’s a tough sell.
But it’s a legitimate argument, which is more than can be said for unadulterated free-marketism. That’s just an infantile illusion.