Myths Of Our Economy: Free Markets Belong In A Democracy (repost)
The idea that our environmental and employment related problems can be solved within the free market economy is quite ridiculous. How often have you heard sentences like "during times of high unemployment and economic problems we don't have the luxury to entertain environmental concerns". Because the economy comes first, right?.
source: Picpedia
Wrong again. If there can be done anything about our major problems, we would first have to win back our democracy from the markets. Instead the two are often used in sentences as if they naturally go together; the idea of free people making free choices in a free democratic society and a free market is subconsciously anchored in our brains. How often are we told that we "control" what survives in the marketplace by "voting with our wallets"? If you don't like it, don't buy it. That's such a load of crap. In a democracy the rule should be: one person, one vote. The "free market" variation on this rule says: one dollar, one vote. I hope you can immediately see the problem here. In politics this translates into: more money means more speech.
Whenever some environmental organization proposes something to do what is needed to preserve the earth for future generations, they are sent on their way because "the markets wouldn't respond well". Newsreaders will say things like "this proposal is politically unrealistic because the markets won't like it." In our days only a lunatic would even suggest that democracy should rule over the markets, and not the other way around. The very notion that the people or the government should have anything to say against what the markets have deemed right and necessary, will earn you looks as if you were a bloody Communist who should be put against the wall and granted a quick merciful death.
And we buy it, no pun intended. We keep electing politicians who promise more economical growth, and lower unemployment rates, because we have come to believe that those are the basis from which all other problems can be solved. If the economy grows, we grow too and more people will have jobs. It irks me to no end that this is what people actually believe to be true. Let me show you an alternative way of doing things, an example from not so long ago.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s America suffered the greatest economic recession in history. Banks collapsed the economy by first rapidly inflating the money supply, causing "The Roaring Twenties", that ended on "Black Tuesday" with the "Wall Street Crash of 1929". A period of enormous economic growth and rapid expansion and industrialization came to an abrupt end. Millions lost their jobs and houses and there was an enormous environmental problem because the mechanization of farming caused top-soil to be eroded in record time.
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
America has survived this black page in its history thanks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his "New Deal". What FDR did was revolutionary enough for him to be called "a traitor to his class" by rich industrialists and bankers. He was of course also threatened by the increasing popularity of socialist and communist movements, but his policy was clear: the markets had failed, and other solutions were needed. He said that unemployment simply needs to be solved because people need money, but most of all a sense of purpose in life. And he said to the multinationals and bankers that they will pay for it. And they did. The rich financed this bold rescue-plan through a progressive tax-system.
FDR created millions of jobs, solving the problem of soil-erosion among others. These were government created jobs, not by the market. The jobs were payed for by the government by significantly raising taxes for the richest among us, the bankers and multinationals: tax rates went up to 90% for the highest incomes in those days. And America saw the fastest and biggest growth ever. All those employees who helped rebuild the economy and restore the damaged environment not only had an income, but a real sense of belonging to something bigger, contributing to a larger common goal of shared growth. Nowadays that would be called communism or socialism and discarded out of hand as a crazy idea. Many would scream: "Taxation is theft!" Well, just remember that this crazy idea ushered in America's best times, with a rapidly growing and well-off middle class, and income levels that held pace with rising profits and production. This all ended in the late 1970s and 1980s with the neoliberalism that reigns worldwide to this day; since then real incomes for regular employees haven't budged, while the richest at the very top became insanely wealthy of the backs of those regular employees.
Capitalism cannot give everybody a job: the market needs a certain percentage of those willing and able to work, to be unemployed. So even if solving our problems would need every able body and mind to participate, the free market economy would not allow it. If we democratically decide something needs to be done about pollution or the playgrounds for our children, the market wouldn't like it because there's no profit, no economic growth to be gained, so we don't do it. And so we deprive ourself of real democratic power and the betterment of mankind because we bow to the whims of a market that's ultimately controlled by a very small percentage of the population. A free market and a working democracy are opposites. Or do you still believe it matters much if the Democrats or the Republicans rule? Yes, Trump had to be removed because he's a fascist and yes, the political right is closer to fascism than the political left, but on the whole they both serve the interests of the top 1% of the top 1%, so in essence they're both anti-democratic, even the Democrats...
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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