Difference between revisions of "Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand"
From Critiques Of Libertarianism
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| + | From the introduction: | ||
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| + | Over the centuries, Americans have articulated five broad, overlapping arguments for why freedom requires keeping us free from the market. | ||
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| + | The first is the most straightforward: the distribution of goods in a market economy doesn’t match what we need to live free lives. Health, education, and time are part of the necessary baseline for exercising our freedom, and as such it is necessary that all of us have access to them in roughly equal measure. These goods should not be distributed on the basis of who can afford to pay for them. | ||
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| + | The second argument is that the market is an unreliable provider of these essential goods. Sometimes companies just don’t produce enough compared with what society needs. People demand free public colleges because it is clear that private higher education institutions would rather increase their prestige instead of provide mass education. Insurance companies want to preemptively discriminate against those who would most benefit from insurance. Simply subsidizing private businesses to do this work can easily end up in them capturing those resources rather than providing what is needed. Public programs instead do the opposite here, reducing costs and ensuring people get what they need. In addition, while any individual market for a good can fail to deliver what society needs, the problem is compounded when you look at how all those markets, put together, can fail during recessions and depressions. The problem of insufficient demand creates long periods of high unemployment and depressed output for no reason other than the failure of the market to coordinate all its activities. An important reason people have demanded protections from the marketplace is to offset the devastation caused by the business cycle, pain no individual causes themselves or can prevent on their own. Markets that can collapse in such ways are not suitable for the core elements of our freedom. | ||
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| + | A third argument is that freedom requires being free from arbitrary power and domination by the will of others. Americans have concluded that if others can interfere with your life in a wanton and capricious manner, you are not free. The marketplace is a site of profound domination and arbitrary power. This is obvious in the labor contract. In the abstract worldview of economics, workers simply sell their labor and bosses buy it, the same way one might sell and buy a pack of gum. But the workplace has always been one of the most important political battlefields for the definition of freedom. Workers put themselves under what the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson describes as the “private government” of bosses in the workplace, and these relationships, like any kind of government power, can be predatory and exploitative. While workers may have the choice to leave, many don’t, either because of the lack of viable options in the larger economic environment or the terms of their contracts themselves. Bosses will always have an advantage because, under market dependency, workers need to work in order to survive, in order to have the resources to continue living. | ||
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| + | Abusive, arbitrary power extends from the labor contract to markets in general. Consider how Enron manipulated energy prices, or pharmaceutical investors have taken over rare, life-saving drugs and raised their prices beyond what ordinary people can afford. Consider families that have their equity in their home stripped through a deceptive financial product, an injustice that especially hits families of color. The philosopher Debra Satz describes these kinds of exchanges as “noxious markets.” Markets like these can create harmful outcomes for individuals themselves or for society as a whole. They are characterized by instances where one side can take advantage of asymmetric knowledge, agency, power, or the vulnerabilities of a participant. People have always fought to suppress these kinds of markets in order to preserve their freedom. | ||
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| + | The fourth argument is that the expansion of markets to all of society turns all things into commodities, and leaves no rewards for things that don’t function as commodities. As the political economist Karl Polanyi described in his book The Great Transformation, things like land, labor, and money aren’t actual commodities. Instead each functions as a “fictitious commodity.” Land isn’t produced by anyone; it was already there. Money isn’t made from one’s efforts but comes from banks and states as a mechanism for accounting. As Polanyi writes, “Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized.” Society resists the commodification of all of these elements. Throughout the 1800s, a century before Polanyi, Americans made arguments when it came to land and working hours and money, understanding something was being stripped from their freedom when they were all determined solely by the marketplace. | ||
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| + | Sustaining human life requires resources that the market can’t guarantee. Those who can’t work, either because they are old, young, or disabled, still need to survive. A society based entirely around the market will not be able to reproduce itself in a healthy manner, because all societies rely on an infrastructure of care to replenish themselves. People aren’t batteries that can be recharged in a factory. They are human beings who need care, love, and protection in order to function. Society needs resources to raise and care for children, work that doesn’t claim any income from society. This care work of social reproduction is precisely a thing the market doesn’t pay for; it can only borrow against, until the deficit it runs starts to strain all of us. | ||
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| + | The last reason people have given for why freedom requires the suppression of the market is that, contrary to the idea of negative freedom, the marketplace is a political project, a form of government that projects state power. Once you think about how a modern, capitalist economy operates, the idea of negative freedom doesn’t carry any weight. Just as we debate whether or not the actions of the government will help or hinder freedom, the execution of the marketplace by the government needs to be democratically debated as well. There is no neutral way to have a market, and all choices matter, especially when it comes to how free we are. This was understood before the late 1800s, where the line between the economy and government wasn’t drawn as sharply through law. The idea of economic freedom as an absolute right to contract had to be invented. | ||
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| + | Money and property are the terms under which we manage relationships among people. Those relationships are backed by the state, which ultimately enforces all contracts. Consider, for example, owning a house. You own your home because you can prevent other people from living in it or using it without your permission. It’s not a vertical relationship between you and the physical structure—your house remains blissfully unaware of any legal contracts you have over it. Instead, it’s a horizontal relationship between people. If you were to sleep on the front porch of someone’s house, they could call the police to remove you. This is even more true in a modern economy, where the state structures capital and wealth claims so that they can easily be moved across time and space. From shares in a corporation to intellectual property, much of what constitutes wealth in our era doesn’t reflect relationships to actual objects, but instead represents claims over profits and incomes, claims the government will ultimately administer. Once we see property in this sense, we understand that there’s no way we can define it as anything other than a form of regulating interference among people. | ||
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