Have You Accepted the Free Market as Your Personal Savior?
Hello, friend. I'm knocking on your door today to ask whether you have accepted the free market as your personal savior. If you haven't, I'm here to share the good news.
I am, obviously, riffing on the latest talking point from the nationalist conservatives, who have formed a new think tank based on the complaint that American politics is dominated by "free-market fundamentalism." Please try not to laugh.
It's not just that this is a ridiculous straw man—advocates of the free market have spent our entire lives being ignored by politicians. It's the fact that this is a sneering way of implying that confidence in markets is a form of dangerous dogmatism. It is an attempt to portray free-market economics as some kind of fanatical leap of faith, rather than a body of knowledge grounded in observation of the remarkable achievements of capitalism over the centuries, not to mention the failure of every other system.
It's an attempt to accuse somebody else of dogmatism, while they are the ones shutting off their minds from the evidence.
Read the rest at The Bulwark.