the US doesn’t have a free market, nor has it ever. It has always had a managed market whose rules are rewritten by the powerful and disguised as freedom
https://x.com/SizweLo/status/2050171410836832279
The American political establishment will yell at you about how the free market built their nation. By “free market” they mean an economic system without government intervention.
At the same time, the same people will, with a straight face and zero shame, openly exercise the most extreme form of government intervention.
An American politician named Thom Tillis argued just yesterday in Fortune magazine that government intervention is a threat to prosperity, just a day after his party put forward a bill to interfere with the market by banning competition from Chinese electric vehicles.
By banning these cars, the US government is essentially deciding for the consumer that “domestic industry” is more important than affordability or innovation, which goes against the fundamental Economics 101 dogma of the “rational consumer in a free market”.
To strengthen his point, Senator Tillis writes emphatically that “We won’t beat China by becoming China”. Yet, the bill his party put forward is exactly the kind of “state-directed outcome” he pontificates against.
They’ve been doing this hypocrisy for a while too. Since the 1920s, American big business, via the National Association of Manufacturers, worked hard to link “economic freedom”, which is just code for the right of businesses to operate without regulation, to political and spiritual freedom. They said that if you regulate a business, you are on a slippery slope toward losing your right to vote and your religious liberty.
This is where market fundamentalism, which is the belief that markets are always right and are superior to any government action came from, after they rebranded Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” and completely ignored how Smith believed that government was necessary for infrastructure and most importantly, preventing monopolies.
They started boldly proclaiming that the “hand” only works when the government is completely absent.
None of this was organic thought, either, and by the 1980s it had become a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar campaign involving funding university departments, rewriting school textbooks and popular media like Little House on the Prairie and General Electric Theater hosted by neoliberal puppet and US president Ronald Reagan to normalise the idea that “government is the problem.”
When you look at the US’s ban on Chinese cars and then read Tillis’ op-ed, you quickly see how these politicians use the“free market” language to prevent price controls on drugs or housing regulations, but the same principles are ignored when the corporations are faced with real competition.
As Erik M. Conway discusses his new book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, the “free market” isn't a physical reality like gravity; it’s just a policy choice. When the powerful say they want a “free market”, they are just advocating for a market where their power is the only force, with public subsidies for themselves, but no help for consumers or room competitors.
In short, the US doesn’t have a free market, nor has it ever. It has always had a managed market whose rules are rewritten by the powerful and disguised as freedom. The ban on Chinese cars is just the latest example of this.
posted by Satish Sharma at
04:54
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