Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (18 page)

Democrats—especially Al Gore and John Edwards—have tried to construct a progressive populism around economic issues alone. They failed and we can see why. They didn’t take into account identity and culture. They didn’t take into account strict father morality. They didn’t take into account the liberal elite social stereotype and the liberal elite political PC stereotype. And they didn’t take into account the role of personal freedom and systemic causation.

Let us begin with the obvious: Money has a lot to do with freedom. Wealth can provide freedom from want—from hunger, homelessness, many illnesses and dangers. It can buy access to education and health care. It can buy houses and cars. It can buy political influence. It can allow you to live where you want and how you want, within limits. Correspondingly, a lack of money can impinge mightily on your freedom.

Conservatives who speak of economic freedom are usually concerned with making and keeping money—that is, with the freedom to acquire and maintain further freedoms (the ones that money can buy). The government is, in Grover Norquist’s term, “the beast”—to be shrunk to be small enough to drown in a bathtub. Their gripe against government is that government takes away their money (through taxes), gives it to other people (through social programs), gets in the way of making it (through regulations and laws), and wastes it (through inefficiency). In doing so, they see government as taking away not only their freedom but also their freedom to acquire and maintain other freedoms. They also believe that private wealth creates more wealth through investment and that government taxation and regulation inhibits the creation of more wealth and thus more freedom. The only legitimate role for government is to protect their
freedom—their lives and property (the military, the police, and the criminal justice system)—and to provide order in their everyday lives (through law enforcement and institutions that promote social order, like churches).

Strict morality gives shape and provides moral fervor to such views. Since the discipline to be moral provides the discipline to be prosperous, only those with sufficient moral discipline deserve prosperity. Conservatives assume that the free market is the natural mechanism linking discipline to prosperity, that it allows everyone who is sufficiently disciplined to pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps. Those who haven’t just aren’t disciplined enough and don’t deserve anything they don’t earn.

Progressives, because empathy animates their worldview, tend to be concerned about those who don’t have enough money—the hungry, the homeless, the impoverished, those without good jobs, or education, or skills. Because of their sense of responsibility, progressives want to help. They see it as the responsibility of the government to create programs to help those in need, to create good jobs, to increase wages for jobs that exist, and to provide education and health care. They understand the importance of the common wealth, that a shared infrastructure, built by redistributing resources, is essential to the individual pursuit of prosperity.

Conservatives counter that such programs don’t help, they hurt. Giving people things they haven’t earned takes away their incentive to be disciplined and hence makes them dependent and less capable of acting morally. The best way to create jobs, they counter, is to cut taxes for the wealthy and for corporations, thus giving them more money to spend and to invest in businesses that create jobs. Another way is to eliminate government regulation, consumer lawsuits, unions, and pensions that get in the way of corporations making profits—and hence being able to create more jobs.

Progressives counter that the wealthy tend to keep their money or invest abroad, and that the jobs created aren’t good
jobs with good pay and benefits, that they aren’t jobs that expand freedom.

At present, conservatives have been dominating the public discourse and winning enough elections to control the strings of government.

Conservatives have gotten their economic ideas more and more into the public mind and into the workings of public policy. They have succeeded through their vast network of think tanks and their message machine of thousands of conservative media outlets, as well as training institutions, media agents, and spokespeople. Through all this, conservatives have propagated what I call the “economic liberty myth.”

The myth takes for granted an important metaphor: Corporations are persons. This legal metaphor assigns to corporations many of the rights and responsibilities of persons—the right of free speech, the responsibility to pay taxes, the ability to sue and be sued in a civil suit. This metaphor places corporations firmly in the private, not the public, sphere.

In the economic liberty myth, corporations, via the corporations are persons metaphor, are seen as deserving of freedom and liberty, and subject, like people, to the oppression of government—rather than being part of the oppression of government. Adherents of the economic liberty myth talk about individual initiative, responsibility, and freedom, but their policies apply overwhelmingly less to individual people than to individual corporations and the people who own and run them.

Mythology matters. Myths reside in our brains, defining heroes and villains, moral and immoral actions, and what makes sense. Here is the myth that governs conservative economic thought:

• It’s individual initiative, individual responsibility, and individual freedom that have made America great.
  

• Economic freedom is free access to and free participation in free markets.
  

• Free markets are both natural and moral: If everyone pursues his or her own profit, the profit of all will be maximized as a law of nature. (The reason is simple: Free markets are competitive, and competition maximizes efficiency, minimizes waste, minimizes costs, and maximizes benefits for all.)
  

• The free market is the natural mechanism of a thriving economy, and it works best without constraints that interfere with its operation—those imposed by taxes, government regulation, consumer lawsuits, unions, and corporate benefits.
  

• Government is the problem; it gets in the way of free markets and wastes taxpayers’ money.
  

• Private industry is more efficient and less wasteful than government. As much of the government as possible should be privatized.
  

• Nature is a resource for the use of human beings. Natural resources are there for our use; the failure to use them is a form of waste.
  

• You can spend your money better than the government can.
  

• Freedom requires property rights: the rights to acquire, maintain, use, and dispose of property as you see fit.
  

• Cost-benefit analysis, as used by private industry, should govern public policy.
  

• Everybody with sufficient discipline can succeed. Anyone who is poor just hasn’t had the discipline to use the free market to become prosperous and doesn’t deserve any handouts.
  

• Economic freedom is the central freedom, since it leads
  inevitably to other freedoms: free speech, free elections, civilian control of the military, civil liberties, checks and balances in government, a free press.
  

When conservatives speak of economic freedom and economic liberty, these are the kinds of ideas they have in mind—treating corporations as persons with individual, inalienable rights. In the economic mythology of the right, this metaphor is symbolized by the entrepreneur, the individual who starts a business, which might turn out to be a multibillion-dollar corporation. The entrepreneur stands for his corporation.

In this conception of freedom, there is a protagonist who is free. The protagonist—the hero of this story—is the entrepreneur, the individual who makes it. The market is like the magic sword of the fairy tales, the magical instrument working for good that enables the hero to succeed. The dragon to be slain and overcome—Grover Norquist’s “beast”—is the government. The successful entrepreneur of the story has to overcome the government at every turn: minimize or avoid taxes; pay at least a minimum wage; accommodate to, or get around, environmental, safety, and fairness regulations; negotiate with unions according to labor laws; provide health benefits and pensions for workers; defend against consumer lawsuits when his products harm customers or the public.

Our hero gives people jobs and contributes to our standard of living, but he has to fight every inch of the way to do it. It is the economic freedom of the free market, along with his discipline, that allows him to succeed and get his reward, often a substantial one. But think of how much freer he could be, how much more good he could do, and how much more profit he could make (providing him even more freedom), if he didn’t have to fight against the beast—the government that stands in his way limiting his freedom.

In strict father morality, it is wrong to give people things they have not earned, because it makes them dependent and takes away their discipline, which is necessary for them to be moral and to become prosperous via the free market. Government social programs are therefore immoral, since they give people things they don’t have, make them dependent on the government, and rob them of their discipline. The ownership society is a radical conservative utopia where all government social programs and safety nets have been eliminated and everyone has become free of dependence on government. In the place of Social Security and Medicare, there are private accounts that individuals invest with Wall Street brokers—at their own risk, since the stock market is very much a gamble.

In this utopia, every American—whether old or infirm or disabled or mentally ill—now has the incentive to develop discipline and does! All Americans develop discipline and become entrepreneurs and crafty investors. They all set up private stock portfolios that flourish because they have all become expert money managers. All Americans become homeowners, sign up for their own adequate health and retirement insurance, and own stocks, and many even own their own businesses. Everyone who wants to start a business can. The government shrinks and virtually disappears. It gets out of your way and stops spending your money. Its legitimate functions are privatized. The country prospers. This is the ownership society.

It is a myth.

Large corporations act like governments—not persons—in many ways: They are highly bureaucratic and impersonal, can be extremely wasteful, and—via tax deductions for business expenses, tax breaks, and subsidies—use vast amounts of taxpayers’ money, often in extravagant and wasteful ways. Because of patent law or the ability to buy out or drive out competitors, large corporations often consolidate their sovereignty over an industry and then, with competition highly restricted, can set high prices justified not by costs but by a desire for high profits. This is operation outside of the market, like a private government. When this happens, corporations have, essentially, the power to tax citizens, with money going to corporate profits—a form of taxation without representation.

Moreover, large corporations determine a great deal about the everyday lives of citizens—the possibilities for health care, the kind of news made available, the types of available communication systems, the kind of energy used, the type of transportation available, what food is available to eat and how safe it is. A big difference is that corporations are not accountable via elections or openness of operations to the general public.

In all these ways, large corporations do not act like persons, and the economic liberty myth should not be applying to them. But it does.

As we have already seen, America’s founders had a crucial idea: to pool the common wealth for the common good to build an infrastructure
so that everyone could have the resources to achieve his or her individual goals. A government’s job was to administer the common wealth to benefit all: to provide for a common defense, to be sure, but also to provide for roads, education, public buildings, and other forms of infrastructure that each citizen could use.

Today taxes provide the common wealth for a common infrastructure to serve individual needs and individual goals: freeways, paid for by taxpayer money; levees, holding back flood-water; the Internet, developed and administered with taxpayer money; public education at all levels; public libraries; the banking system, made dependable through taxpayer money; the court system, guaranteeing contracts; the SEC, governing the stock market. No one can start or run a business without the use of the common wealth—taxpayer money. Nobody makes it on his or her own in America. Everyone who succeeds uses some form of the common wealth used for the common good. There are no self-made men or women in America! The part of the economic liberty myth about individual initiative, individual responsibility, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is nonsense. Everyone uses the common wealth: That’s what taxes are about—providing and maintaining the common infrastructure needed to realize our individual dreams.

Notice who is
not
the hero of the economic liberty myth: the forty-five million people who work for a living but can’t even afford health care; indigent people who are too old or sick to work; the millions of middle-class workers whose wages have not gone up for thirty years while costs have risen steadily and their productivity has risen accordingly, with profits going to their companies, not to them. But there is a myth that links these Americans to the conservative hero story: Everyone can pull
himself or herself up by the bootstraps! You too, the myth says, can be that hero. And if you’re not, you have only yourself to blame.