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September 28, 2023 - January 10, 2024
A key part of the manufacturers’ propaganda campaign was the myth of the Tripod of Freedom, the claim that America was founded on three basic, interdependent principles: representative democracy, political freedom, and free enterprise.
Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas cites Atlas Shrugged as a major influence on his thinking. So does former longtime Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan, who described Rand’s work as a “moral defense of capitalism.”15
Americans in the early twentieth century were largely suspicious of “Big Business” and saw the government as their ally.18 By the later decades of the century, this had flipped: many Americans now admired business leaders as “entrepreneurs” and “job creators” and believed it made more sense to count on the “magic of the marketplace” to solve problems than to engage government.
But efficiency is a tool, not an end.
The Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the environmental movement all responded to market failures.
They were acknowledging that “The Market” doesn’t exist outside of society but is part of society and, like society’s other parts, must be subject to law and regulation.
That’s why we don’t maim kids in coal mines anymore, and why it’s now time to shut down coal mines altogether so future kids aren’t clinging to survival in a world made close to uninhabitable by carbon pollution.
Markets are good for many things, but they are not magic. Just look around. Income inequality, the opioid crisis, the lack of affordable housing, retirees who can’t afford to retire, the climate crisis: markets created problems that our market-based system has failed to solve. The only proven remedy is governance.
The culprit is market fundamentalist ideology, which denies capitalism’s failures and refuses to endorse the best tool we have to address those failures, which is democratic government.
A group of individuals and institutions worked to make people believe they had to choose between “The Market” and “The State,” between unconstrained capitalism and Soviet-style centralized planning. But there are all kinds of alternatives, and one important one is to see governments and markets as complementary, not as opposing camps.
Market fundamentalism perpetuates a mistake in categories, conflating capitalism, which is an economic system, with democracy, which is a political system. We think that the properly framed choice is not capitalism versus tyranny; it is democracy versus tyranny, and well-regulated capitalism versus poorly regulated capitalism.
This was an aha! moment for me.
A young man born in America in 1899 would have been safer at age fifteen going to fight in World War I than going to work on the railroads.
Many things we now take for granted—the eight-hour workday, the right to be paid overtime, the five-day work week—were products of this time, the result of pressure brought to bear by unionized workers and their supporters in the progressive movement.
Blending the classic conservatism of Edmund Burke with contemporary social Darwinism, Butler believed liberty and equality were incompatible, and where they conflicted liberty must prevail.
NAM’s spokesmen never even made it to that level of analysis; they simply asserted that men were created unequal, and therefore our economic system necessarily had to reflect that.
The competition between the rights of business and the needs of workers would never be a level playing field.
Western rail lines greatly accelerated the destruction of ecosystems and the slaughter of Indigenous peoples.
Railroad magnates’ actions also contributed to financial panics when their overvalued stocks collapsed.
“the right of the majority to interfere with the liberties of a minority.”
Over the next two decades, NAM advanced the proposition that government was inefficient and badly run, but the private sector was efficient and well run.
convince “the American people that the American enterprise system produces the greatest good for all people without destroying individual freedom.”
NAM didn’t want central planning discussed at all.
NAM’s argument needed one more element: the slippery slope. Even modest interventions in the marketplace (they argued) would ultimately lead to total government takeover of the economy.
It may be true that morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me … but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, APRIL 27, 1965
if Washington, Madison, and Hamilton advocated for and implemented a visible government hand in economic life, what could be more American than that?
socialism … in theory might exist full-fledged under a democracy.”
The heart of Keynesianism—and of a good deal of mid-century economic thinking—was to sort out the appropriate role of government in addressing business cycles, monopolies, and market failure.
Thanks to Mises, campaigns that in the 1930s had been exposed as unprincipled propaganda now could be reconstructed as a credible intellectual program.
To suggest that either Bismarck’s or Roosevelt’s reforms were a step toward unfreedom is like claiming that road signs, stop lights, and speed limits are steps toward the elimination of driving.
Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other.”
The right-wing totalitarianism against which Americans were still fighting in the spring of 1945 is equated with left-wing socialism, which is in turn equated with central planning.
there is a world of possibility between Soviet communism and laissez-faire capitalism.
As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have noted, “One thing big money typically lacks is credibility, which is why those who deploy it work so hard to cover their tracks.”
For their laissez-faire argument to be effective, business conservatives needed to find a way to counter its incompatibility with the teachings of Jesus.
Capitalism needed want and fear. What else would drive people to toil, and would keep workers showing up to dangerous, precarious, low-wage jobs?
Making the poor dependent on socialized welfare transferred gratitude, loyalty, and obligation from church to state.
In his August 1943 letter to Pew, Fifield encapsulated: “freedom from want and fear [are] unworthy objectives for our nation.”20
They sought a just and workable balance. Fifield and his supporters refused to allow that such a balance could exist.
“religion brings material reward.”62 This, Brown noted dryly, was a “questionable gospel.”63 Matthew (6:24) instructs that no one can serve two masters—God and Mammon—but Fifield and his friends seemed to be trying.
A 1956 analysis found that in 1947, about 20 percent of Hollywood films addressed American social problems; by 1953, only 8 percent did.
A later analysis found that films depicting “big business as villainous or of the rich as a moral threat decreased from 20 and 50 percent, respectively, to less than 5 percent during the fifties.”51
By 1952, businesses were spending more than $100 million per year on “free-enterprise” messages.
Sloan wanted to sell a crystalline vision of capitalist theology. If the facts didn’t match, too bad for facts.
Put another way, their ambition was for Americans to understand freedom in singularly economic terms.
“That men in general should work better when they are ill fed than when they are well fed, when they are disheartened than when they are in good spirits, when they are frequently sick than when they are generally in good health, seems not very probable.”65
This became known as the Consumer Welfare Standard, although the term is misleading, since prices are not the only thing that matters to consumers, and the term appears nowhere in any antitrust statute.
“A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege.”
Nothing in unregulated capitalism is a level playing field.
“the law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.”
It is the claim that government is not a force for creativity or innovation, only the market is.
