Stop Falling for the Either/Or Crap!

...Or so some people would have you believe....

It doesn’t make good sense to trust every aspect of life to government – any kind of government. Communism only turns into another kind of oligarchy, with party leaders on top taking the place of landed gentry and everyone else relegated to a peasant/worker class with few important rights. --But neither does it make good sense to trust every aspect of life to unregulated market forces. There are essentials in life, both biological and social, much too important to be left to unrestrained market forces. The only kind of economic “system” that makes sense is a mixed economy, with roles both for entrepreneurial markets, regulated where necessary, and government-run public institutions.

 

Note that I do not use the term “free market” for the ubiquitous either/or false dilemma so often posed. Why? Because what is meant by “free” when applied to market forces just is lack of regulation. We are asked to allow business to be as free as the wind, and if it whirls itself into a tornado or whips up a tsunami and destroys human lives in its path, well, we are told, that’s the price of “freedom.” No. I say no. That is the price of self-deception on the part of Americans who have bought into a dangerous theoretical fiction unleashed on the world by Milton Friedmann and confusing and destroying communities for decades.

 

Economists are theoreticians. I find it bitterly ironic that so many people who consider themselves “conservative” will reject evolution because it is a “only a theory” and then turn around and embrace an economic theory which has far less evidence for itself. And yet the untrammeled theoretical “free market” has become an article of faith for American conservatives, a plank almost religious (to judge by the fervor with which it is held), and certainly a litmus test for politicians, so that if a candidate voices the slightest support for any kind of regulation, that candidate is branded “socialist” or even “communist,” and conservatives run in fear, believing their “freedom” is in danger.

 

Bullshit! If all aspects of health, education, and banking were to be treated exclusively as unregulated businesses, with clinics, hospitals, schools, and investment groups run solely for profit and without any boundaries on their greed, the rights of American citizens to speak and organize and vote would count for very little. You don’t trust “government,” but you trust “corporations”? Really? With your life?

 

Would you do away with public libraries, public schools, public boards of health, and replace all of them with for-profit businesses, available only to paid subscribers, like cable TV? Would you close the government mint and throw American citizens on the stormy, uncertain seas of myriad “crypto-currencies” (digital “currencies” 100% dependent on huge, monster computers, with their huge, monster fans running 24/7 somewhere off in the countryside), an untested monetary abstraction that few even pretend to understand? 

 

A simpler example: A certain faction of our country seeks to “privatize” (i.e., sell to profit-seekers) the United States Postal Service, replacing it with anyone in the market who wanted to start up a company but would have no mandate to serve the entire country. Profitable areas could be cherry-picked, the rest underserved or not served at all. 

And note carefully here that “privatization” means more than letting business instead of government run something: it means selling off carefully constructed public goods that have been built and maintained for years with money from public taxes – not to those who paid the taxes for years (often generations) but to a private, profit-seeking organization or organizations. [Note: The United States Postal Service was government-funded until 1970. Since then, like county conservation district offices, it has had to pay its own way in the country, competing against private companies who do not have to serve every community.] Historic public good sold at fire sale prices? How can that be for the benefit of the public? How does that increase the “freedom” of citizens?

 

Those who would blind you with the false dilemma “socialism vs. freedom” rely on your not seeing that unrestricted “freedom” for corporate “persons” means seriously diminished real freedom for real persons, i.e., human beings. No one can own the air, and it cannot be restricted to a bounded place, so why should a corporation be allowed to poison it in order to make profits, and how does sacrificing environmental and human health to market forces increase our freedom? It does not. That is only one example.

I don't even want to say there are many shades of grey between black and white, and the idea of heads or tails on a coin is plain silly. It makes more sense and is truer to life to think of alternatives to either/or as a rainbow of possibilities.

The "road" of the future does not exist until we build it -- and in my imagination it is not one big superhighway but an interconnected network. Again, possibilities....

 

False dilemmas - Homework: Think about it.