What is up with the strange right-wing view that free markets are natural? It is the idea that economics can be separated from everything else. Economics is its own thing that just happens. Government and other meddling people just have to get out of the way. Just let the magic happen. The belief is in negative freedom. That freedom is simply a state of a lack of overt oppression. It originates from the Roman liberty which was defined as simply not being a slave. You could be starving to death with no opportunities to better your life, but as long as you werent a slave then you were free and you had the privilege to starve to death as a free man. Oh joy! This ideal of a free market is centered on competition, somewhere between a utopian meritocracy and a ruthless social darwinism. Competition is all that is required.Freedom and innovation supposedly always follows from this. I dont follow this logic. Anyway, what makes competition so special? Pirates compete. Drug gangs compete. Gladiators compete. Heck, even slave owners compete. I wouldnt call those things free markets. There is more to freedom than just lack of unfreedom. Shouldnt free markets be judged by their fruits? Are the locked-up Chinese laborers who are part of the global market actually free? Of course not, then how are the smart phones they make a part of a free market? Obviously, they arent. There are few things worse than the rhetoric of freedom being used to justify unfreedom. It makes one despair for humanity.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 02:10:27 +0000
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