Last week, I suggested that to balance the budget, the government should reverse tax cuts that gave people like Bill Gates $80 million or eliminate corporate welfare instead of gutting Medicare and social security.

Perhaps my tone was a little too forceful, but based on some e-mails I received one may have thought that I advised killing live babies on national TV: I’m a ‘bigot,’ a ‘fiscal rapist’ and a ‘robber.’

Why? Because reversing Bush’s tax cuts would be toying with the sacred cow of economists everywhere – the ‘free market.’

The hysterical responses reveal the need to defend at all costs the fiction they portray as fact.

The idea that we have a ‘free market’ is nonsense. The apocryphal idea of its reality is doubtless the most dangerous illusion our society confronts, since it may lead the entire species to self-destruction.

Thanks to the ‘free market,’ we live in a Hobbesian world of war against ourselves, treating fellow citizens as enemies and competitors. It is what enables people to call those who receive Social Security, Pell grants, unemployment or disability ‘fiscal rapists.’

Truth: the free market is as grounded in reality as are the tooth fairy, unicorns and Santa Claus. It is an invention of the rich used to justify the unprecedented exploitation of land, people and resources.

Rather than explaining to us the consequences of a social system predicated on greed and against community, economists created the fig leaf of the ‘free market’ to justify this behavior as rational, objective and sensible. Its defenders claim that the ‘free market’ is universal and unchanging, that its characteristics are the same everywhere. It is outside of history.

It’s all untrue. What free marketers espouse as ‘The Market’ is really nothing more than time-sensitive confluence of institutions and politics, individuals and groups. The market doesn’t exist somewhere outside of racism, sexism, environmental devastation or slavery. In many cases, the ‘free market’ has been the justification for every one of those practices!

The claim it makes to impartiality serves the ideological function making the system seem unchanging and natural, by making it appear above politics.

Since its creation, the ‘free market’ has subjugated women to men. First by treating them as property, then by relegating them to the ‘private sphere’ of unpaid labor (is the fair market value for staying home and raising a child really $0?), and today institutional sexism forbids them from ever catching up to men.

Defenders of the ‘free market’ today also use the term to ignore our legacy of white supremacy. The ‘free market’ cannot allow for reparations, they say, but it can thoughtlessly dismiss history. It can refuse to see how apartheid, often cloaked as ‘free market economics,’ runs a direct line to today’s racial disparities in personal wealth, life expectancies, home ownership and education.

The ‘free market’ is directly responsible for unprecedented environmental devastation. The ‘free market’s’ advocates falsely suggest that we can take and take, plundering the world without consequence even as polluters themselves refuse to clean up their own messes (The EPA’s real job is to redistribute the costs of corporate environmental destruction on to taxpayers).

War has been a timeless instrument used by advocates of the ‘free market’ to control resources. American foreign policy can be summarized as one war after another fought to bring the ‘free market’ to places that otherwise would never have chosen it, murdering millions and millions of people in the process. Though the attack on Iraq offers a clear example (search ‘executive order 13303′), it is merely one taken from a long list.

Two things legitimate the fiction of the ‘market’: the power to speak and the power to kill. Without control over the instruments of imagination – the media – and the instruments of death – the military – big business could not run the world.

That’s because the ‘free market’ is extraordinarily unpopular. The function of the corporate media is to convince us of the opposite. If the New York Times or CNN couldn’t sell to us that wars are about freedom, that racism and sexism where archaic relics of the past or that our economic system wasn’t exploitative, we may work to change it; that’s a real threat.

Far from natural and timeless, the ‘free market’ is a series of political and economic choices to concentrate wealth and power. It is a creation of political action by the wealthiest few that can be overturned only through organized action by the 6 billion people who suffer its consequences.

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