Robert Reich’s Essay about the Myth of the Free Market — Represents a Timely Dose of Truth about the Economic Basics — that America’s Plutocrats Do Not Want You to Know

19 September 2013

When you don’t recognize the conceptual prison that you are in, the doorway out is impossible to find

The socioeconomic Elite’s plutocratic hold on wealth and political power in the United States depends on the One Percent’s ability to brainwash ordinary Americans — into thinking that Plutocracy’s subversion of democratic mechanisms is the equivalent of God’s will.

Attempting to break the hold of this nonsense, former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, recently wrote the single best short analysis of American economic delusion that I have seen in some time:

One of the most deceptive ideas continuously sounded by the Right . . . is that the “free market” is natural and inevitable, existing outside and beyond government.

So whatever inequality or insecurity it generates is beyond our control. And whatever ways we might seek to reduce inequality or insecurity — to make the economy work for us — are unwarranted constraints on the market’s freedom, and will inevitably go wrong.

In reality, the “free market” is a bunch of rules about

(1) what can be owned and traded . . .

(2) on what terms . . .

(3) under what conditions . . .

(4) what’s private and what’s public . . .

(5) how to pay for what . . .

And so on.

These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations.

Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them.

The freedom that the ability to think critically gives you

The first step in critical thinking is questioning one’s assumptions in the light of objectively evaluated facts and experience.

Most people refuse to do this because their self-constructed or too easily accepted myths insulate them from Reality’s seemingly random pummelings. It is easier to be simple minded, sure, and wrong — than to stand on ambiguity, effortful analysis, and accurately modeled probable correctness.

America’s economic and political Elite want the rest of us to believe that they are where they are via the beneficent workings of the “free market”. What they don’t tell us is that these workings have been manipulated to put and keep them in their elite positions.

That’s Reich’s point.

Ordinary people could, theoretically, just as easily remake economic and political rules to create a more equitable economy. I say “theoretically” because the main thing wrong with the United States today is that the Plutocracy’s money has bought our allegedly democratic mechanisms and, with the Supreme Court’s intellectually illegitimate assistance, won’t let go.

Fortunately, the first step in making oneself free is to recognize the nature of the conceptual prison that we have complacently put ourselves in.

Once we stop buying the economic elite’s pap about the just workings of the mythical free market, we understand that we need not remain serfs to its illusory will.

The moral? — The first step in attaining freedom is the ability to think critically

America’s socioeconomic elites are good at concealing their malevolence toward ordinary people under the guise of illusions about God and free markets.

Where Republicans overtly trumpet the vacuous concept of the free market, elite Democrats are hypocritically quick to accept it, when their personal interests are at stake. Hence, the plutocrat-supporting policies of both the Clinton and Obama administrations.

When the rest of us stop accepting “free market” bogosity, we will have made an initial step toward achieving a defensibly fairer society.

PeteFree.com

Robert Reich’s Essay about the Myth of the Free Market — Represents a Timely Dose of Truth about the Economic Basics — that America’s Plutocrats Do Not Want You to Know