PODCAST: Hexapodia V: Freeing Us from the Market; Wi�� Mike Konczal, Noah Smith & Brad DeLong

 

Mike Konczal: Freedom From the Market: America���s FIght to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand <https://books.google.com/books?id=0aDLDwAAQBAJ>

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Konczal says that it is only today that ���glib libertarians��� purveying ���fantasies��� are trying to make us forget ���that free programs and keeping things free from the market are as American as apple pie������ One of the best passages in the book is where he notes the connection between the Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign and human freedom: ���Service sector workers demanding a $15 minimum wage and a union��� have already won huge victories [with] ideas about how low-wage, precarious work is a form of unfreedom���. The Rev. William Barber noted that ���it took 400 years from slavery to now to get from zero to $7.25 [an hour]. We can���t wait another 400 years��� to get to $15��� Ultimately, if all you can say in response to the ills of society is ���the market giveth,  the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market������ you have very little to say indeed. Konczal quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes���s fear and alarm that his fellow justices on the Lochner Supreme Court were, in their ���willingness to use a very specific understanding of economics to override law, writ[ing] a preferential understanding of economics into the constitution itself������ in a fundamentally illegitimate and societally-disruptive way. But a better maxim is: ���The market was made for man, not man for the market���.

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Enthusiastically Reading: Mike Konczal: Freedom From the Market 

<https://www.icloud.com/pages/0qngUKWzJT3-FHnxHh2HH_M8w> <https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/delongtoday-konczal-freedom-from-the-market-2021-02-18.pdf>

<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ih_qxIByRCpwlu76BTjTOF_jP9XI5haw/view?usp=sharing> 

DeLongTODAY 4182 words 35:11 2021-02-19: