Last week Tara Sinclair and Art Carden responded to an earlier column of mine by defending the ‘profoundly benevolent’ effects of the ‘free market’ on ‘civilized society.’ In the column to which they responded, I wrote that the ‘free market’ is “an invention of the rich used to justify the unprecedented exploitation of land, people and resources.”
Without citing any evidence, they dispute each of my claims – that the ‘free market’ does not trample human rights, that it does not worsen environmental conditions and that it does not increase inequality.
And in doing so, they prove my case – that claims about the benevolence of the ‘free market’ are grounded in neither history, nor reality nor evidence. Carden and Sinclair rely on the unrealized promises and unfulfilled hopes of the ‘free market’ while ignoring the devastating consequences of policies they claim bring benevolence and prosperity.
At every step of their argument, Sinclair and Carden demonstrate a willful blindness to those who have felt the boot of the ‘free market’ come down on their throats most severely. This blindness shows when they argue that, “in today’s market economies, the difference between the super-rich and the poor is the difference between who drives a Dodge Viper and who drives an ’87 Chevy.”
Before making such preposterous claims, they should examine the lives of those who have truly seen the ‘free market’ operate – the people of Argentina or Russia or Brazil or Indonesia or South Korea or Thailand or Poland or the millions of others who saw their lives wrecked and economies destroyed thanks to the ‘free market’ reforms of IMF ‘shock therapy.’
Just as a 10-year old wants to believe in Santa, the delusion of the free market needs these convenient fictions to sustain itself. As the effects of the free market strike closer to home (see recent discussions about NAFTA and outsourcing), the propaganda must operate with greater intensity to preserve the fiction.
This truism lies behind Sinclair and Carden’s claim that “someone born into poverty in the U.S. stands a very good chance of moving up in the world.” Yet last December that left-wing rag, Business Week, published an article arguing that this claim is false. In it, we read that America is “stratifying along class lines” and that, “the number of people who stayed stuck in the same income bracket – be it at the bottom or at the top – over the course of a decade actually increased in the 1990s.”
Perhaps the most dishonest claim that Sinclair and Carden make is that “everyone benefits from free markets.”
Again, what’s clearly lost on the writers is that the ‘free market’ is a rhetorical construct; it’s a conflation of political decisions masquerading as apolitical ones that cannot stand on their own merits. They willfully ignore that the language of the ‘free market’ has been used for centuries to justify slavery, theft and patriarchy.
‘Everyone’ does not benefit from ‘free markets.’ In fact, politics concealed behind the rhetorical fiction of ‘free markets’ has benefited a tiny sliver of the world’s population – capitalist white European men – at the expense of everyone and everything else.
Is it politics, not the fiction of the ‘free market,’ that determines that some work – work that earns wages – is ‘productive,’ while classifying as ‘non-productive’ the work that sustains society.
Do they really believe that the ‘free market’ lies behind the completely arbitrary designation that considers day-care providers or soldiers ‘productive’ while categorizing stay-at-home parents as ‘unproductive?’
Do Carden and Sinclair really think that the ‘free market’ is what marks the United States as one of only six countries on earth to deny mothers paid maternity leave?
Is it the ‘free market’ or politics that makes most women ‘dependents’ according to the US tax code, subjecting much of what they earn to a higher level of taxation than would otherwise be the case?
Is it really the ‘free market’ that sustains this patriarchal tax code that, along with a devastating wage gap, often creates conditions in which it makes more economic sense for women to stay home and work without compensation rather than return to the workforce?
The truth is that women are doubly used by the ‘free market’: they provide the unpaid labor that allows ‘productive’ workers to survive on less pay; at the same time, when labor is needed, women’s role as a reserve army of cheap labor comes to the fore.
Under both circumstances, women are subjugated by a vampire-like system whose sole function is to exploit.