Mike Konczal: Freedom From the Market: America’s FIght to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand <https://books.google.com/books?id=0aDLDwAAQBAJ> Konczal says that it is only today that “glib libertarians” purveying “fantasies” are trying to make us forget “that free programs and keeping things free from the market are as American as apple pie…” One of the best passages in the book is where he notes the connection between the Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign and human freedom: “Service sector workers demanding a $15 minimum wage and a union… have already won huge victories [with] ideas about how low-wage, precarious work is a form of unfreedom…. The Rev. William Barber noted that ‘it took 400 years from slavery to now to get from zero to $7.25 [an hour]. We can’t wait another 400 years’ to get to $15… Ultimately, if all you can say in response to the ills of society is “the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market…” you have very little to say indeed. Konczal quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes’s fear and alarm that his fellow justices on the Lochner Supreme Court were, in their “willingness to use a very specific understanding of economics to override law, writ[ing] a preferential understanding of economics into the constitution itself…” in a fundamentally illegitimate and societally-disruptive way. But a better maxim is: “The market was made for man, not man for the market”.
The “market” is an abstraction. I’d tweak “made for man,” with “made by man.” Law is just the regulation of human interaction. The Mafia performs certain market functions, but no one would want the Mafia’s rules to govern all of human interaction (although for centuries it seemingly did). The worst “concept” that Conservatives have been able to peddle is that government is the problem. In reality, in a democracy, government is always the solution, because it is through a legitimate democratic process that the rules are made. Conservatives bellyache because they don’t want anyone but themselves to participate in making the rules. Communism and Libertarianism are just opposite sides of the same coin: one side puts too much power in the State and one puts too much power in individual property rights. Both end up being anti-democratic.
The “market” is an abstraction. I’d tweak “made for man,” with “made by man.” Law is just the regulation of human interaction. The Mafia performs certain market functions, but no one would want the Mafia’s rules to govern all of human interaction (although for centuries it seemingly did). The worst “concept” that Conservatives have been able to peddle is that government is the problem. In reality, in a democracy, government is always the solution, because it is through a legitimate democratic process that the rules are made. Conservatives bellyache because they don’t want anyone but themselves to participate in making the rules. Communism and Libertarianism are just opposite sides of the same coin: one side puts too much power in the State and one puts too much power in individual property rights. Both end up being anti-democratic.