Is it Markets, or is it Class?
Dean Baker makes the important point that while conservatives talk free markets, they act persistently in the interests of a particular class. This is undeniably so, and Dean has many excellent examples to illustrate. It is strange that he thinks I'm unaware of it, however. The grand theme of The Wrecking Crew is that conservatives don't want small government; they want captured government, government run in the service of industry. In particular, their faithlessness to free-market theory is also a theme that runs throughout my discussion of Jack Abramoff's apartheid-backed thinktank, the International Freedom Foundation, which shifted its arguments all about (it was anti-communist, it was libertarian, it was whatever) but consistently labored in the service of money.
For another example, see my remarks on the Paula Gordon show last month. Note the nice tie that I am wearing in the photograph.
David Harvey, in his very important book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, puts the question something like this: Has the great right turn been a utopian project, or has it been a class project? Do conservatives (known in Europe as "neoliberals") really mean to lead us into some kind of free-market paradise, or do all their pretty pretty theories just provide cover for a massive redistribution of wealth back to the group that believes it should rightfully hold it? Obviously the answer is the latter. Almost whenever conservatives have had to choose between free-market theory and doing favors for their primary constituents, they opt for the favors. With the results that we see before us: A return to nineteenth-century patterns of wealth-distribution.
You might think the stout resistance by the right-wing caucus in the House to the administration's Wall Street bailout plan furnishes an example of the opposite--of clear-eyed young believers choosing free-market principle over profit. That's certainly what those idealistic free-marketeers would like you to think, anyway. But it just ain't so, as I point out in today's Wall Street Journal. Their own plan would be much worse than the Administration's, plus it actively wars against market pricing mechanisms, and it does even more massive favors for the business class (they want to repeal Humphrey-Hawkins, for chrissake).
Even though we know all this, it is still not enough to blow off free-market theory just because its followers haven't really been faithful to it. Whether our lawmakers truly heed the parables of Hayek any more than they do the teachings of Jesus, it is on and around the theories of the Chicago School that the battles will continue to be fought. This is the official ideology of our ruling elite, and pointing out that this elite sometimes drops the ideology when it suits their grosser needs merely prods those elites to call for some ever-purer application of the ideology. The doctrine itself has to be confronted and discredited--an operation it is currently performing upon itself.
Besides, making fun of free-market theory as theory is a blast.
There's the theory of a free-market and there's the theory practiced: Unlimited economic power for some with the necessary consequence of economic powerlessness for others.
The political consequence could be called fascism, a state in which large corporations become extensions of government and government authority becomes centralized in a few power brokers.
October 8, 2008 11:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Certainly class warfare is part of what makes "conservatives" want to control government, but if that is their primary purpose, why are Republicans so bad at governance.
October 8, 2008 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
They have no interest in doing governance well.
As written, seldom practiced, conservatism preaches the merits of an invisible federal government with very little power. Of course it is against human nature that those in government would or could ever abide by this precept. Perhaps their inability to govern well is the result of this on-going internal conflict.
October 8, 2008 12:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Having just watched the Congress sell out the people's interests in favor of Wall Street and the campaign financing it provides, I'm almost ready to join Judge Janice Rogers Brown's anti-Progressive Era Crusade.
The people "voted" against the bailout by as much as 100-1. If Senators were still elected by state legislators who are close to the people and up for election regularly, those Washington senators would have heard from their electors, and the result would likely have been different.
And, then, we have the Federal Reserve -- established for the sole purpose of maintaining the power of government and the eastern banking establishment.
Government can't help itself; it is voracious.
October 8, 2008 3:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
N.B. The principal function of a central bank (our FRB) is to support the war making power of the government of its home nation by printing money, as necessary.
October 8, 2008 8:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hayek, Friedman and The Chicago School. All I can say is 'in a perfect world we might be able to reach utopia'. And of course this world isn't perfect nor will it ever be so. But 'conventional economic wisdom' is that if the economy is left to its own devices that it will run more effectively and we will all benefit. More and more in the last 30 years that 'wisdom' has been applied to the economy. So I ask have we all benefitted? Of course not because, like I said earlier, the world isn't perfect.
In any society if all the laws were repealed and the people were allowed to police themselves would there be less crime and that society would run more efficiently? Not a chance. That society would break down and chaos would ensure. So we are asked to believe that people who run economies are different in their nature then people in the larger society as a whole? They are the same. And if you remove all the laws and regulations chaos will occur. All we had to do was remove some of the regulations to find out that 'truth'.
And this economic school of thought devalues and debases anything that is good in humanity. We are told that our level of freedom is based on what we have. The more stuff you can buy the freer, and by extension the happier, you are. It reduces human worth to just another item on the spreadsheet used to calculate the corporate bottom line. But over the years we have heard about "trickle down economics", "the ownership society", been preached to about "the virtues of free market capitalism" and how we should worship at it because it will solve all of a societies ills. In the year 2007 more income was redistributed upwards compared to any of the last 100 year except 1928. And we all recalled what happened in 1929. Or have we forgot already?
So now I am hoping to hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth of from the Chicago School, the political conservatives and their plutocratic friends when regulations are firmly put back in place now that we have been shown AGAIN that Laissez Faire economics doesn't work. The invisible hand is a myth just like pots of gold being at the end of rainbows...
October 8, 2008 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . people who run economies . . . .
Don't you mean "[governments who run economies"?
People participate in the marketplace; they don't run it. Only a government -- and always corrupted by powerful interests -- can do that.
October 8, 2008 4:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, I'm curious. What is a 'government?' Other than a collection of people, some elected and some not, what is its identity?
October 8, 2008 6:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
i>A government is "the organization, that is the governing authority of a political unit," [1] "the ruling power in a political society," [2] and the apparatus through which a governing body functions and exercises authority.
Not too bad a definition, eh?
October 8, 2008 8:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Too easy, Ellen. "Governments who run economies" is interchangable with apparatuses who (which) run economies? The latter is more to the point. Pretty easy to change a device - certainly easier than changing the people who run it.
October 9, 2008 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Then again, pretty weird to think of an apparatus/device as being "voracious."
October 9, 2008 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Its class warfare, and as Warren Buffet said; his class is winning.
Bush isn't stupid or crazy, he knows what he's doing, he just doesn't care about how those outside his social class suffer the consequences of his actions as he pushes his ideology.
Bush, if left alone, would give us a Feudalistic/Serfdom system
October 8, 2008 3:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
All you have to do to see the ideological bankruptcy is to look at the relative stringency of rules controlling the mobility of capital and those controlling the mobility of labor. Of course it's class.
I think the rich who fund the class war did a good job by latching onto economists as their representatives, because economists so often deal with obvious counterfactuals without batting an eye. Most of them are perfectly happy claiming that utility should be measured only in money (and that a dollar is worth exactly as much to Bill Gates as to a disabled parent on food stamps). And perfectly happy -- see the old "assume a can opener" joke -- to act as if any distributional effects of the policies they advocate are mere technicalities that we don't have to worry about because they can be alleviated by and by.
October 9, 2008 3:12 PM | Reply | Permalink