Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

“Markets are not just the natural and spontaneous consequence of government inaction,” its 2018 manifesto explained. Remember: the economic right’s great confidence trick in the 1980s was to redesign and reengineer the economy to privilege the rich and business—and then to insist that a market economy is like a precious unchangeable piece of nature, neither designed nor engineered. Markets are products of design—for good or ill….For instance, when we design markets that do not price the costs that a firm imposes on others—for example through pollution, or in finance…—then we get far more of things that we don’t want (like global warming and financial catastrophes). Environmental or financial regulation of this sort is not “anti-market”; on the contrary, it is essential to a properly constituted market where firms can’t make excess profits by pushing off costs onto others. “Countries like Canada, Denmark and Sweden,” says Will Wilkinson, Niskanen’s head of policy, “have become more robustly capitalist over the past several decades. They needed to be better capitalists to afford their socialism.” What he calls “free-market ‘socialism’ ”—note that he puts socialism in quotation marks—may seem like an oxymoron, but in fact it’s acknowledgment of the range of vigorous real-world nonbinary hybrids.