Dec 132009
On election day 2008, Barak Obama and I shared the dubious distinction of being labeled “socialist” by critics. I don’t know if it bothered the President (particularly since he won), but I didn’t so much mind because I was sure that the Bubba in the beater pick up truck who yelled the “insult” at me as he drove past where I held my campaign sign had no idea what a socialist was or what was so bad about them. I figured he — like most Americans — was a product of the socialization agenda at work in American public schools and the propaganda machine at work in the public discourse (well, not so much discourse as recourse to punditry). He’d been taught to believe that socialism was wrong and that covered everything that free-market promoters labeled as such.
When you ask these uber-capitalist advocates what’s so wrong with government intervention, they insist that the market knows best and that government interference does nothing but undermine innovation and growth. Left to its own devices, they claim, the market will find level and provide the most benefits available to the majority at the best cost. The government should not be involved in commercial exchanges and should remain neutral on price setting and sector development, they maintain. It sounds reasonable to believe that consumers and producers acting in their own best interests will reach a mutually acceptable balance, but theory is theory and in reality it’s bullshit — much like how in the abstract, the four way stop is an efficient traffic design.
In any economic system, the government plays a vital and defining role in making the system work. It is necessary, and no economy can function without a coercive political arm behind it, despite the claims of the free-market boosters. Their expectation that private exchanges provide the foundation of an effective system itself relies on a government to enforce it. I am not the first to note that without a legal system to compel compliance with contracts, private exchanges are only worth what the individual contractors have the power to obtain personally. If you contract with someone for a product — new overalls, say — and they renege on supplying that item, without recourse to the law, you can only collect said Ozark tuxedo through threats, intimidation, negotiation, or force. In a system where might makes right, large powerful parties dominate and the political system tends toward the oligarchical, or at least something other than substantive democracy. In any case, the free market system — where everyone has the freedom to contract and exchange as will — needs a government with coercive power to enforce the very terms on which private exchanges rely.
On a larger scale, how is one consumer to take on the Acme Corporation and have any semblance of equality under the system? It doesn’t happen. A group of consumers, however, has the numbers to balance the power and achieve their common ends. Similarly, employees may combine their demands to equalize the strength of their bargaining position. Additionally, sometimes smaller companies do this as well, in order to compete with big box stores. It often happens, however, that in trying to gain the upper hand — to ensure their own economic ends, as is their purpose in a free-market capitalist system — parties involved sometimes <gasp> act illegally or in extra-legal ways that give them an unfair advantage (like hiring thugs to harass strikers on a picket line in order to resolve a labor dispute). When this occurs, the market is circumvented and the only way to right it is to employ the power of government. Thus, in the real world, governmental intervention is often necessary to protect the market.
What’s more, sometimes a “neutral” government isn’t really neutral on economic issues after all. The government may choose not to take sides in a dispute between polluters and environmentalists, but that generally ensures more trash. The government hasn’t been able to make Exxon pay the full costs of cleanup for the Valdez spill yet; there’s no way the Sierra Club could do it. Meanwhile, the fishing industry suffers. Also, as Anatole France noted sarcastically, the law equally prohibits the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges, but of course, the rich don’t need to sleep under bridges to escape cold winds and driving rains. The only purpose of that law is to further harm the poor — and for no economic benefit to the rich. In this way, a government that pretends not to favor one side over the other actually ensures the advantage go to the wealthier party. Governmental neutrality, then, tends to reinforce the advantages of the system and favor the rich.
Over the course of our history, our ancestors came to the conclusion that governmental intervention was a good thing, so as to protect us from the failures of the market in practice. They came to understand that a neutral government wasn’t completely neutral and that the best interests of the whole of the citizenry were only protected when the State intervened through regulation and financial controls. That history, however, is glossed over in history books, in order to comply with the demands of free-market advocates and their devotees. As long as they maintain control over public school textbooks, the history of the economic struggles in America will remained skewed and education, economic propaganda. Thus, public school historiography promotes the fallacy that a free-market is desirable and beneficial to our citizenry and that the government should stay out. People can believe then that the government is neutral and that this is a good thing. If only the history backed up the historiography.
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