(1:32 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Market Fundamentalism

I have an announcement: I am tired of hearing about how government intervention in the economy is always bad. I am tired of hearing about how an unfettered market would somehow lift everyone in the world out of poverty, and about how direct attempts to help poor people actually cause greater poverty. I am tired of hearing how simplistic my economic ideas are from people who hold the views I just listed. I am tired of free-market utopianism.

To review, let's take a look at how this fits into my tentative definition of fundamentalism from a few months ago. The primary antagonism in society is between the economy and the state. On the side of the state is constraint and stasis, whereas on the side of the economy is freedom and growth (of wealth). The way to remove this antagonism? Get rid of the state, or pare it down to the barest essentials. This is another way of making the economy take up the functions that were formerly the state's responsibility (and in this way, market fundamentalism is similar to communism's attempt to eliminate the antagonism between worker and owner by making the workers directly the owners). The market knows best, and everything will work more efficiently and basically be better.

Let's put this in the context of the war on terror, however: what states tend to be more friendly to terrorists? Of course, certain fully functioning states do help finance terrorists, but their real safe havens are areas with no real governmental controls (and in fact, the states that support terrorists tend to be weak states that we have to prop up artificially -- if not for American support, for instance, the Saudi government would not be able to maintain control of the country). Arms trade, drug trade, sex trade are all allowed to go on unfettered in a "deregulated" environment. To rip off Zizek further, Afghanistan under the Taliban is the "truth" of the religious right today -- they clearly seek a government that does nothing but enforce moral (religious) values and that lets the economy operate as it will. One might argue that the worst inner-city areas in our nation also represent a good picture of what a completely deregulated economy would look like.

So the reason I'm tired of hearing these ideas is that they're lies, unless of course we look at them from a certain angle. Life really would be "better" by some standards under a completely deregulated economy, for those who are able to assemble enough money and power to rule over everyone else with arbitrary force. The next time you hear the term "free market solutions," then, you might imagine Dick Cheney as the dictator of Oregon or John Ashcroft as the Grand Duke of New York City. As a crazy homeless guy from the Godspeed You Black Emperor! album Slow Riot for Zero New Kanada says, "This is a Third World country."

Is it strange that Paul Krugman could be paraphrased as saying something very similar to that?

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